Party Polarization, Political Bias, and their Implications for the Field of Social Psychology

With a presidential election year just around the corner, Democratic and Republican candidates alike are once again scrambling to secure a shot at the loftiest position of power – or at least the most visible and highly publicized – that this nation holds. Between self-described socialist Bernie Sanders’ meteoric rise giving him a serious shot at the Democratic nomination and the current most popular Republican candidate being none other than Donald freaking Trump, it seems more and more likely that this election will become a showdown between the Far Left and the Far Right – and one cannot help but reflect on what this says about the political tastes of our country as a whole. America, it seems, is gravitating further and further towards opposite ends of the political spectrum. But what consequences does such polarization hold?

Whatever else the results may be, one noticeable effect is that as our partisan and ideological identities increase in strength, so does our prejudice against the parties and ideologies that oppose us. It’s long been observed that for many kinds of identities, the stronger one identifies with a group, the more hostile one grows against that group’s perceived opponents, and the more likely one is to stereotype those opponents and evaluate them unfairly. Naturally, political identities are no exception. (Far from it, actually – several experiments conducted by Stanford University political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood suggest that in at least some situations, including trust exercises and scholarship awarding, political bias surpasses even racial bias!)

Furthermore, the stronger one identifies with a political group, the more likely they are to be politically active. Conflict between groups only serves to strengthen group identity, and the more one’s group seems to be under threat, the more viciously one will lash out against their opponent, both for the sake of both defending their own group and “winning” whatever competition has led to such conflict. This is actually in spite of each group’s policy opinions, as those polarize much slower than our identities do.

This, in short, is exactly what has happened to the American political scene. Republicans and Democrats alike have become strongly prejudiced against each other, increasingly politically active out of a desperation to get their own way – less due to any policy-influenced motivation than simply for the sake of winning. Naturally, such conditions are disastrous for a political system deliberately set up to make cooperation and compromise necessary for policy reform.

But party polarization and political bias can lead to serious issues even in fields outside of politics. Consider, for instance, the scientific community. Science thrives on viewpoint diversity because it increases scientific dissent – a mechanism that ensures the minimization of confirmation bias on issues of ideological significance. This dissent gives rise to objections against flawed methodologies that a homogenous group may have overlooked, whether accidentally or deliberately. Similarly, viewpoint diversity also prevents the creation of echo chambers (which, if left unchecked, engenders extremism and groupthink). Furthermore, diversity helps encourage creative thinking because it allows homogenous groups to pool their ideas and create innovations that neither group could have conceived of on their own. In short, viewpoint diversity leads to reliable and creative science. However, if a scientific field lacks viewpoint diversity, then this leaves that field… vulnerable.

One such field is social psychology.

Over the past twenty-five years, the political diversity of psychology in academia has dwindled drastically. Before the 1990s, academic psychology merely leaned left, with the 4:1 ratio of liberals/Democrats to conservatives/Republicans making the latter group a smaller, but still relatively noticeable, minority. Fast forward about two-and-a-half decades, and liberals & Democrats outnumber conservatives & Republicans nearly fourteen to one.

Could it be that education has an “enlightening” effect on students, converting the conservatives entering the social sciences into staunch liberals? It seems unlikely, as several studies have demonstrated that political socialization in college occurs primarily through one’s peers – not the education itself. Do conservatives simply find the social sciences more interesting than liberals do? It’s possible, but to declare such to be so would fall into the trap of naturalizing the issue – and besides, it fails to explain the sudden and dramatic shift in the liberal-to-conservative ratio. When one considers that shift in light of the increasing political polarization of our country, however, other, less comfortable possibilities begin to emerge… and, perhaps more disquieting, the evidence supports them.

In a survey of members of the SPSP, researchers Inbar and Lammers asked the following question: “Do you feel that there is a hostile climate towards your political beliefs in your field?” Not only did 82% of conservatives answer “yes” (with half of those declaring “very much”), but 72% of moderates answered in the affirmative as well. This suggests that the hostile climate in the academia of social sciences effects not only conservatives, but anyone who’s “not liberal enough”. And this hostile climate is compounded by discrimination – experimental research by Abramowitz on one occasion and Ceci on another demonstrate that research attached to hypotheses (not methods or analyses, but hypotheses) that indicate a non-liberal viewpoint is less likely to be formally approved. Not only that, but in their survey, Inbar and Lammers found that between 76% and 82% percent of liberals in social psychology were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives – in job recommendations, in reviewing papers, and in reviewing grants, among other areas. Such an environment not only stifles the prospects of any nonliberal who enters social psychology, it also jeopardizes the accuracy of theories and research concerning any issue that liberal ideology has a political stake in.

Clearly, party polarization has not left academia untouched. On the contrary, it has facilitated a system of deep political bias which only encourages the further ideological homogenization of the social sciences. So long as the issue persists – if social scientists neither train to recognize & guard against political bias nor tolerate the growth of a minority opinion sizeable enough to hold the majority accountable – then the validity of the field’s findings must inevitably be called into question. Such a conclusion may not be comfortable to hear, but even if a liberal bias in social psychology isn't necessarily as damaging as, say, a creationist bias in biology would be, flawed science is still flawed science. We owe it to both current and future generations to entertain the idea that no matter their political affiliation, anyone be wrong – for self-doubt guards against dogmatism, and dogmatism doesn't move us forward... it only leads us in circles.

This blogger could not, of course, do the source material justice in so short a post. As such, they encourage you to peruse the sources below:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/28/party-polarization-is-making-us-more-prejudiced/
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-22/partyism-now-trumps-racism
https://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/

Also, for the record, this blogger would also like to note that they identify politically as a liberal-leaning moderate.