Academia's Liberal Bias

"I'd rather be with someone for the wrong reasons than alone for the right ones."
--Amanda Jones (Some Kind of Wonderful)

Wanted to bookmark this piece for future use. It reviews an in-press paper that addresses liberal bias in academia. The paper (Duarte et al. 2014) focuses on social sciences and humanities--specifically in the area of social psychology.

Browsing the paper, I found a number of interesting citations that might prove useful in the future.

The authors' thesis is that growing liberal bias in the social sciences has been reducing the quality of research. Lack of political diversity undermines the validity of research through various mechanisms including groupthink and confirmation bias. These mechanisms steer researchers away from important yet politically unpalatable research topics, and and produce conclusions that mischaracterize reality.

The authors, of which the law of averages suggest that at least four of the six are liberals, appear to have checked their own biases at the door and proceded to write a well thought assessment of the state of academic inquiry in a biased context.

Their arguments and findings likely apply to all academic disciplines.

Reference

Duarte, J.L., Crawford, J.T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L. & Tetlock, P.E. 2014. Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (in press)