Social-psychology biases (independent, ideologies, stereotypes, state)

[Troyfan]

Study Finds Bias in Social Psychology Community

File it under the study of the obvious but it's encouraging that social psychology bias is at least being acknowledged.

“For quite some time there has been a censorious mood in the social science community,” Ceci said. “There is a bias against findings that go against the dominant bias narrative … by this I mean biases of all stripes.”

“My colleagues and I found that university human subjects committees were more likely to reject a treatment of human participants if they believed it could undermine racial, ethnic or gender assumptions than the identical treatment for obese participants,” he said. “Thus it was not the treatment itself but its implications for political interventions that mattered.”

And apparently there was an even earlier study, supported by independent replications, that social stereotypes are usually accurate! Imagine that! That what people see with their own two eyes is in fact reality and that what studiers theorize and abstractors in conjunction with like-minded followers is not!

[reneeh63]

Very weak paper mostly summed up by their statement:


The authors posit three manners in which this polarity may mar social psychology: the dispersion of faulty and demeaning views towards conservative individuals, the refusal to study topics that may run in the face of liberal ideologies of social progress and the implanting of ideology into theory.

and

Duarte and his team detail numerous aspects that may be influencing social psychology’s political polarity, including a hostile climate for and general discrimination against conservatives.


So based on the fact that there are a lot of liberals in social psych (as is probably the case in many social science fields) the authors say it MAY affect results. Well, we can guess and suppose and muse all we want. But that isn't science and it is not how the scientific method works. I really don't care if conservative scientists FEEL a certain way. I care about BEHAVIOR - and there is very little in this paper that talks about actual behavior. actually, that's the biggest flaw in social psych as a field is that it relies too heavily on asking people about ATTITUDES because that's obviously easier than setting up an experiment and measuring behavior.

[Reynard32]

I don't think that anyone will be surprised to see the same old anti-intellectuals once again railing against the work of intellectuals. Such foam and froth is only what is to be expected.

[Jeo123]

Thread is not a debate.