Confirmatory Drift

Social psychologists: confirmatory drift and Heterodox Academy

In 2011, Jon Haidt, speaking to an audience of 1,000 social psychologists, noted the lack of viewpoint diversity in their field. He reported that he could identify only one conservative social psychologist with any degree of field-wide recognition.

Surveys of sociologists’ professional organizations have found that 85%–96% of members responding self-identified as left of center, voted for Obama in 2012, or scored left of center on a questionnaire of political views. (Most of the remaining 4%–15% identified as centrist or moderate rather than conservative.) The trend has a long tail, but it has been accelerating. In the 1990s, liberals among social psychologists outnumbered conservatives 4-to-1. More recent surveys show that the ratio has grown to greater than 10-to-1, sometimes far greater. A tendency to hire for a conforming worldview combined with the discouraging aspects of being so decisively outnumbered ideologically suggests that, unchecked, this situation won’t get better. According to the surveys establishing this trend toward homogeneity, about 10% of faculty respondents identified as conservative, compared with just 2% of grad students and postdoctoral candidates.

Haidt, along with Philip Tetlock and four others (social psychologists José Duarte, Jarret Crawford, and Lee Jussim, and sociologist Charlotta Stern) founded an organization called Heterodox Academy, to fight this drift toward homogeneity of thought in science and academics as a whole. In 2015, they published their findings in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), along with thirty-three pieces of open peer commentary. The BBS paper explained and documented the political imbalance in social psychology, how it reduces the quality of science, and what can be done to improve the situation.

Social psychology is particularly vulnerable to the effects of political imbalance. Social psychologists are researching many of the hot-button issues dividing the political Left and Right: racism, sexism, stereotypes, and responses to power and authority. Coming from a community composed almost entirely of liberal-leaning scientists, the quality and impact of research can suffer.

The authors identified instances in which political values became “embedded into research questions in ways that make some constructs unobservable and unmeasurable, thereby invalidating attempts at hypothesis testing.” This occurred in several experiments involving attitudes on environmental issues and attempts to link ideology to unethical behavior. They also identified the risk of researchers concentrating on topics that validated their shared narrative and avoiding topics that contested that narrative, such as stereotype accuracy and the scope and direction of prejudice. Finally, they pointed to the obvious problem inherent in the legitimacy of research characterizing conservatives as dogmatic and intolerant done by a discipline that is over 10-to-1 liberal leaning.

First, the Heterodox Academy effort shows that there is a natural drift toward homogeneity and confirmatory thought. We all experience this gravitation toward people who think like we do. Scientists, overwhelmingly trained and chartered toward truthseeking, aren’t immune. As the authors of the BBS paper recognized, “Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument.” That’s how robust these biases are. We see that even judges and scientists succumb to these biases. We shouldn’t feel bad, whatever our situation, about admitting that we also need help.

Second, groups with diverse viewpoints are the best protection against confirmatory thought. Peer review, the gold standard that epitomizes the open-mindedness and hypothesis testing of the scientific method, “offers much less protection against error when the community of peers is politically homogeneous.” In other words, the opinions of group members aren’t much help if it is a group of clones. Experimental studies cited in the BBS paper found that confirmation bias led reviewers “to work extra hard to find flaws with papers whose conclusions they dislike, and to be more permissive about methodological issues when they endorse the conclusions.” The authors of the BBS paper concluded that “[n]obody has found a way to eradicate confirmation bias in individuals, but we can diversify the field to the point to where individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel out each other.”

The BBS paper, and the continuing work of Heterodox Academy, includes specific recommendations geared toward encouraging diversity and dissenting opinions. I encourage you to read the specific recommendations, which include things like a stated antidiscrimination policy (against opposing viewpoints), developing ways to encourage people with contrary viewpoints to join the group and engage in the process, and surveying to gauge the actual heterogeneity or homogeneity of opinion in the group. These are exactly the kinds of things we would do well to adopt (and, where necessary, adapt) for groups in our personal lives and in the workplace.

Even among those who are committed to truthseeking, judges and academics, we can see how strong the tendency is to seek out confirmation of our beliefs. If you have any doubt this is true for all of us, put this book down for a moment and check your Twitter feed for whom you follow. It’s a pretty safe bet that the bulk of them are ideologically aligned with you. If that’s the case, start following some people from the other side of the aisle.