Quotas, Activist Scholarship, and Political Bias in Psychology
Two new papers on the future of psychological science
Social pressure to avoid sharing evidence against a particular claim undermines the confidence we can place in that claim, because it makes more likely the possibility that the (first-order) evidence that does make its way to us is a lopsided subset of the total. This has the perhaps tragic implication that we can typically be less confident of morally and politically laden issues than we can about “dry” subjects like chemistry or cell biology.
In this post, I’d like to share some excerpts from two papers that appeared recently in Perspectives on Psychological Science: one by Keith Stanovich and one by Lee Jussim. The papers have a long and fraught backstory. I propose, however, to put that to one side, and to focus instead on the general issues raised in the papers, which I think are important to the future of psychology and very much worth discussing.
Among other things, the papers address DEI statements as ideological litmus tests, whether psychology should have quotas for underrepresented groups, the problems and pitfalls of activist scholarship, and the thorny question of political bias in psychology. Whatever your views on these issues, I hope you find the excerpts interesting and thought provoking!
Stanovich on Discrimination in Psychology
We’ll start with some excerpts from Keith Stanovich’s piece.
DEI Statements as Loyalty Oaths
DEI statements… now function like ideological loyalty oaths, screening out anyone who cannot convincingly support current progressive positions regarding race and gender. As the report of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on DEI statements points out, these statements require applicants to take a specific position on social and political issues that are highly contested. As DEI statements become even more prevalent, they will become an overtly discriminating mechanism against conservative applicants (or indeed even liberal Democrats who balk at endorsing the specific terms and positions of identity politics).
Political Bias vs. Racial Bias in the Academy
Unlike the case of DEI statements which can prevent the hiring of conservative faculty, there are no overt barriers to hiring racial minorities on psychology faculties. Indeed, the implementation of affirmative action and “diversity hires” at the faculty level signal just the opposite. Overt attempts to include minorities are common across the academic landscape. If indeed an underrepresentation does exist, it is certainly due to a pipeline effect - starting long before the faculty hiring process commences. Attempts to prove bias and discrimination in research psychology thus must move the focus away from standard analyses of hiring practices.
The Disparity Fallacy
The disparity fallacy is the idea that any difference in an outcome variable that is viewed as unfavorable to a minority group must be due to discrimination. Of course, all psychologists know that discrimination is only one of many possible alternative explanations for any group difference. And they also know that eliminating alternative explanations is the way to get at the proper causal model for the disparity. Psychologists should also be prominent in explaining to the public that remedies for social problems depend upon having the right causal model.
Quotas in Psychology
No one who decries the intellectual monoculture within universities wants to see a quota system that mandates the hiring of equal percentages across the ideological spectrum. Likewise, we do not want a science built around demographic quotas. Such mandatory population matching will undermine the field and reduce its status and impact on public policy. The public will (rightly) not value a science that operates on that basis. Population quotas will end up undermining our science just like affirmative action undermines the status of high-achieving minorities in college admissions - by casting doubt on the qualifications of all minority candidates. Applying quotas to our science will likewise reduce public confidence in its conclusions and reduce trust and respect.
Note that I’ve written about sex-based quotas in psychology here.
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Jussim on Activist Scholarship and Political Bias
Next, let’s look at some excerpts from
’s piece, which deals with activist scholarship and political bias in psychology.Activism-Infused Scholarship
Activism-infused scholarship can often be detected by its flagrant disregard for truth and/or its tendency to highlight facts that actually are true only if they fit the activist narrative and to systematically ignore narrative-contesting facts.
Overlooked Evidence Challenging Claims of Pervasive White Supremacy
Asian Americans hold more college and professional degrees than any other U.S. Census demographic group and also have the highest family incomes… African immigrants’ education and income equals or exceeds that of many White people in the United States… Black women actually earn more than White women, and “high school completion and college attendance rates are uniformly higher for black women than for white men across the parental income distribution” (Chetty et al., 2020, p. 744).
How To Demonstrate Discrimination
Even when discrimination is the only source of some gap, we will never be able to know it with anything approximating scientific certainty if researchers fear studying alternative explanations. Those alternatives can only be ruled out if they are studied; if many scientists fear to study them, they will not be studied or will be understudied. If they are not studied or are understudied, they cannot be ruled out.
Political Bias in Academia
As we (Honeycutt & Jussim, (2023, p. 98) wrote: “Academia skews heavily left and the social sciences skew massively left. The skew is so extreme that, to those unfamiliar with the data, claims about the skew may sound like propaganda intended to delegitimize academia. In fact, some research has demonstrated that Americans - even those on the political right - underestimate just how massive the skew is...”
Figure 1 is a visualization that captures the state of “inclusion” and “diversity” in academia on the political dimension.
It seems unlikely to me that most Americans will view the academy as particularly inclusive if it functions, intentionally or not, to exclude the vast majority of Americans on political grounds. To be sure, self-selection/agency plays a role here, too, and perhaps the major role, but to the extent that the academy has created a hostile environment for those who dissent from far-left politics, it bears more than a little responsibility for that self-selection. Furthermore, the historical facts are that it was not always this way, meaning that there is nothing inherent to academia that produces a massive skew of far-left activists. Thus, the academy’s proclamations about inclusion, while the academy writ large functions to exclude most Americans, are likely to ring hollow and be viewed as the disingenuous propaganda of far-left activists.
Consequences of Political Bias
The current political monoculture threatens the ability of psychology to produce valid conclusions on politicized topics.
This then has the downstream consequence of undermining the credibility of psychology and other social sciences as the wider public begins to understand it. In a large national survey, for example, Marietta and Barker (2019) found that the greater the political skew that people believe characterizes academia, the less credibility is given to its scholarship.
You can read Stanovich’s paper here and Jussim’s paper here.
You can read the papers that Stanovich and Jussim were responding to here and here.
And you can read the responses to the responses here and here.
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"When Reason Goes on Holiday" delves into this topic. The author's focus is on philosophy professors and departments around WWII and how many refused to let go of their beliefs in Stalin and of Stalinism/Marxism even after many of his and it's atrocities were revealed.
In general, he poses the question of how can a group with the purpose of finding truth be so blinded by political beliefs, and makes the argument that there has been an anti-conservative bias in academia and specifically philosophy departments in this country for at least 100+ years.
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It will be soon called the lost decades because any research with uses nonsensical undefined terminology in calculations will be useless.