The field of social psychology — the study of how people’s thoughts and behaviors are influenced by others — is shaped by the overwhelming left-leaning political bias of its members, according to a recently published study by six non-conservative psychologists and sociologists.

The six researchers have worked together since 2011 to explain how the field came to be dominated by left-leaning academics and why, they argue, the lack of political diversity hurts the integrity of social psychology.

According to the study’s spokesman and co-author, Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Social and Political Psychology at NYU-Stern School of Business, few psychologists realize how completely the field has become “a political monoculture.”

Last month, the researches posted a condensed version of the study on their group blog, Heterodox Academy. In that post, Haidt writes:

“Before the 1990s, academic psychology only LEANED left. (Emphasis in original.) Liberals and Democrats outnumbered Conservatives and Republican by 4 to 1 or less.

“But as the ‘greatest generation’ retired in the 1990s and was replaced by baby boomers, the ratio skyrocketed to something more like 12 to 1. In just 20 years.”

Haidt provided an illustration of how psychologists’ ideological sympathies shifted over time:

Image Credit: Heterdox Academy

The full study was published last month by Cambridge University Press in the journal “Behavioral and Brain Sciences.” In a commentary on the study, famed Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker concurs:

“Political bias has indeed been a distorter of psychology.”

The study says homogeneous political beliefs may “undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends” in at least three ways:

• “Liberal values and assumptions can become embedded into theory and method” and treated as objective truth. Deviation from what is considered truth, then, may be inappropriately “treated as error.”

As an example, Haidt cites a study that found right-leaning people were more likely to be unethical. Yet this study defined as unethical the decisions to (1) prioritize one’s company above unspecified harms it causes to the environment and (2) to not formally take a female colleague’s side in her sexual harassment complaint, given little information about the case.

• Researchers may concentrate on topics supporting “the liberal progress narrative” and avoid topics that challenge that narrative.
• Negative opinions of conservatives can produce a field of science “that mischaracterizes their traits and attributes.”

According to Haidt, if more social psychologists were motivated to question the design or interpretation of studies possibly biased toward liberal values, researchers:

“could be more confident in the validity of their characterizations of conservatives (and liberals).”

So, why are there so few non-liberals in social psychology?

Haidt and his co-authors examine several explanations that are typically offered in diversity discussions (including, for example, the topic of women and minorities in STEM fields).

Image Credit: Jeff Pachoud/Getty

Left-leaning academics and laymen may reject the study’s implication that the field is prejudiced against conservatives and needs to change (people enter fields in which they are interested, after all) but Haidt urges them not to chalk up the lack of conservative researchers entirely to self-selection, because:

“that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities.”

At the end of the blog post, Haidt and his co-authors suggest several responses organizations and individual researchers can make to ensure political diversity is among the “kinds of diversity being encouraged.”

Ultimately, Haidt says:

“Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving.”

Haidt and his co-authors want their field to benefit from all diverse institutions have to offer, even if it requires the sharp edge of political incompatibility to get there.