Once again, the so-called 'extremists' were right.
A new study revealed that many professors in the social psychology
field allow their anti-conservative bias to influence things like grant
making and acceptance of papers. According to the (yet unpublished) study:
"Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given
equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of
a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages
agreed that a “conservative perspective” would negatively influence
their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a
proposal for a grant." (The final version of the paper is not yet
available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)
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.
Wow.