On September 14, 2015 a team of professors published a paper. The paper came out after a series of exposés revealed a general unreliability in the “science of psychology.” There were a number of high-profile replication failures, a few fraud cases, and questionable research practices. People were beginning to ask whether or not psychological research and conclusions could be trusted. The team observed that the field of psychology was almost entirely liberal and that the lack of political diversity was actually leading to a lack in scientific accuracy.

The scientists who published the paper were well known and respected, many of them holding liberal sentiments themselves. Yet they believed they could show how the lack of ideological diversity was interfering with the research. And what’s more, this interference was creeping into other fields as well. The result of this creep, they worried, would not only be less reliable research but, perhaps worst of all, a lack of respect, trust, and funding for future research. Their fears are being realized as funding for the social sciences is increasingly under threat from conservatives in congress as well as the National Science Foundation—which proposed cutting its own social science budget by 11% this year. Political discussions are less and less grounded in agreed upon facts because studies can be quickly dismissed as politically motivated, which is sadly often the case.

What these scientists hoped to show is that the field of psychology has some culpability in the current state of affairs. To restore the faith of the masses, they believed psychology would need to work much harder to avoid political entanglements, to stifle ideological homogeneity, and Continue reading →