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 According to the (yet unpublished) study: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.