Anti-conservative bias and social psychology

My most popular blog post of all time was the one I did on conservative trust in the scientific community vs retraction rates.   I called it "Paranoia is just good sense if people really are out to get you" because I had a suspicion (confirmed when I ran the data) that conservatives might actually be behaving rationally when they said they trusted science less, given the ever increasing retraction rates in prominent journals.

Now, a new study shows that this distrust of the scientific community is even more well founded than I originally thought.

In a survey conducted by two self proclaimed liberals, it was found that there is heavy evidence that conservatives are being systematically discriminated against in the field of social psychology.  What unnerved the authors even more is that this was not a case where people were hiding their bias:

To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.
"The questions were pretty blatant. We didn't expect people would give those answers," said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.
He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, "I don't think it's O.K."

The study isn't available yet, so I can't say I've read the nuances.  Still, it's hard for me to believe two liberal authors would have attempted to skew the results in this direction.  Conservatives have claimed this bias exists for years (look no further than the ethics complaint lodged against Mark Regnerus for proof), and will no doubt find nothing shocking about the results.  For liberals to have to face what this means however, that's something new.  Even in the comments on this article, the vitriol is surprising, with many saying that conservatives are so out of touch that it is an ethical responsibility to keep them out of fields like social psychology.

Yikes.

It is much to my chagrin that social science gets lumped in with harder science, but since findings in this field are so often reported in the media, it makes sense to take them in to account.  We have a vicious cycle here now where some fields are dominated by one party, who then do studies that slam the other party, then accuse that party of being anti-science when they don't agree with the results.  This is crazy.  The worst thing that can happen to any scientific research is too much consensus....especially when it involves moving targets like social psychology.  With 40% of the population identifying as conservative, how can we leave those perspectives out?  Everyone, liberal and conservative, should be troubled by these findings.  Those untroubled by this should take a good look at themselves and truly ask the question "what am I so afraid of?".

Are Republicans Stupid?

One of my favorite things about blogging is it's potential to actually change the way I personally think about things.  I don't mean just through the comments section, though that is immensely helpful, but more so through the process of researching, writing, posting and following up.  A few posts on one topic, and suddenly I find myself passionate on topics that had previously been mere blips on my radar.  God bless the internet.

All that is to say, a month ago I didn't really care what people said about politics and science.  Sure, in my own blog rules, rule number 2 said I would stay non-partisan:

I will attempt to remain non-partisan. I have political opinions.  Lots of them.  But really, I'm not here to try to go after one party or another.  They both fall victim to bad data, and lots of people do it outside of politics too.  Lots of smart people have political blogs, and I like reading them...I just don't feel I'd be a good person to run one.  My point is not to change people's minds about issues, but to at least trip the warning light that they may be supporting themselves with crap. 

Even so, if someone had casually made the comment that Republicans were anti-science, I probably would have let it go.  After all, I spent most of my pre-adulthood years in a Baptist school that had plenty of Republican voting ignorants to color my view.

But.....then I did this post.
And this one.
And of course this one.

And now I don't feel those comments are quite as innocuous as I once did.

My feelings on this were backed up by this article from Forbes magazine (where this posts title came from), which I really really recommend if you have the time.

I'm not going back on my non-partisan premise, but as Mr Entine so eloquently posits, one party laying claim to "science" does nobody any good.  Science never fares well when put in the hands of politicians (does anything really?) and giving one party the moral upper hand in a subject as broad as "science" can cause damaging oversights.

To be honest, I don't know which party is more "pro-science".  The data required to prove that one way or the other would require compiling a complete list of scientific topics, ranking them in order of possible impact to both people and the world at large, ranking the conclusiveness of the data, and conducting public opinion polls broken down by party and controlled for race, class and gender.  That's an enormous amount of work, and nobody has done it.

Thus, until further research is done, I will stick with the following conclusions:

1. Politicians will exploit everything they can if they think it will get them more votes
2. Ditto for journalists (sub "readers" for "votes")
3. Saying you're "pro-science" is not the only requirement for being "pro-science"
4. Increasing the general level of knowledge around research methods, data gathering and statistical analysis is probably a good thing

Seriously though, read the Forbes article.