Concerned with the “near absence of political diversity in many fields,” late last year a group of leading academics founded the Heterodox Academy. Its mission: to “increase viewpoint diversity in the academy, with a special focus on the social sciences.” These academics are not concerned with viewpoint diversity for political reasons. Rather, they recognize that “we academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs.” Consequently, the success of the mission of the Heterodox Academy “would produce better and more reliable research.” Indeed, the Heterodox Academy grows out of a collaborative effort not primarily to document political uniformity in the field of social psychology but rather to explain how this uniformity “reduces the quality of science published in social psychology” and to consider “what can be done to improve the science.” None of the six co-authors of the resulting paper, published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, considers himself a conservative.
In a post, wonderfully entitled “New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt reports on a survey of “a good sample of the mid-level and senior people (average age 51) who produce most of the research in social psychology.” The survey’s primary purpose was to understand attitudes toward evolutionary psychology, but the researchers “happened to include a very good set of measures of political identity” at the end of the survey. Although few seriously dispute that the academy leans left, the results of this survey are relatively extreme. Indeed, only eight of the psychologists surveyed (2.5 percent) considered themselves right of center, compared to 291 (89.3 percent) who considered themselves left of center. Four (1.2 percent) of the surveyed psychologists voted for Mitt Romney compared to 305 (94.7 percent) who voted for President Obama. When Haidt classified respondents based on their answers to nine policy questions, he counted exactly one as “right of center.”
Colleges and universities have leaned left for many decades, but Haidt argues in the same post that this lean in the field of psychology has grown dramatically since 1990. It is remarkable that academics, many of whom are otherwise adamant that diversity — particularly racial and ethnic diversity — is essential for learning are unconcerned about, if not proud of their political like-mindedness. But then, only the little people are vulnerable to bias.
In this context, the founding of the Heterodox Academy is a most encouraging sign.
