[Link] Admitting to Bias

It's worth noting there are a few (unlikely) alternative explanations, like:

• Studying social psychology tends to cause one's politics to drift left, because the facts in that particular field genuinely do point to the correctness of left-wing positions. (For possible examples, see here and here.) Being right-wing is correlated with being a bad social psychologist.
• Social psychologists are well-calibrated about their own behavior, so the reason they describe themselves as biased is because they are taking the outside view, thinking something like "I try to be fair, but in reality I'm probably biased".

I am convinced that it makes sense to assume there are important right-leaning research findings that aren't being publicized.

I'm less worried about Less Wrong than I am academia. If we really are committed to figuring out what's true even when it's uncomfortable, what's comfortable and uncomfortable should matter less.

Another point: Less Wrong isn't obviously a bastion of left-wing ideas, so it's possible whatever is filtering out conservatives from posting here is also filtering them out of academia.

I wonder what would happen if they unpacked 'liberal' and 'conservative' into their component parts and repolled.

I hope (but not necessarily expect) that a lot of the discrimination would come out as social scientists being 'biased' against specific positions whose advocates claim to be conservative, that make no sense from a social science perspective - and not against other conservative positions with no such implication. These could be swept up by bandwagon formation.

It might possible to find certain other disciplines where the participants would have a similar bias against liberals due to some particularly popular boneheaded positions claimed by their advocates to be liberal, and again bandwagon formation.

Or it could just be a liberal dominance of social science, complete with discrimination. A more detailed poll might help to elucidate this.

First, I am surprised that a serious study would settle for self-assessment, the least accurate of all possible polls (for example, it's hard to tell if the liberal-identified participants exaggerated their bias due to their pangs of liberal guilt or understated it, as usually happens). Second, I am even more surprised by the high degree of identification with such a broad movement, like it's all Berkeley out there. Surely many of them disagree with at least some of the ideas proclaimed by other "liberals". I guess they are not up to date on their Paul Graham studies:

there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

A interesting NYT article I saw linked to in your inside higher ed link.

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Not surprising at all.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

Right but unlike gays those nasty non-liberal minded students clearly deserve it! Amirite?

I'm sorry GLaDOS but while distortions of the map are important and probably what we should talk about it, I agree with Lammers from the OP here. We should not dismiss the human cost of this situation for the minority of students with non-liberal views.

What most impressed him about the issues raised by the study, Inbar said, is the need to think about "basic fairness."

Political bias on LessWrong as well?

We rely heavily on academia for determining what is true or isn't and academia has turned out to be biased in a certain way. I have recently grown convinced we can see examples of such bias playing out here as well. Considering politics is the mind-killer and how strange our demographics are this isn't really that surprising a realization. Similar conditions and incentives may recreate the problem here This compounds the progressive bias we inherit from academia.

Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative.

Even many of our libertarians are probably left libertarians and nearly all of our high quality right wing thinkers are somewhat eclectic, eccentric and often aren't really conservative in the small c sense of the word. Examples include machinations like Anarcho-Capitalism, Moldbuggian Progressivism-curing Rationalist Uberfact, Eugenic Aristocratic Monarchies or Multi-universe spanning TDT zombie computational theocracies (something like that! ^_~ ).

Intellectual hipsters indeed. I'm not sure such fun ideas cooked up by a handful of enthusiastic rationalists really help us offset the bias, rather than just adding their own dose of political craziness to the mix.

Standing where we do as a community, means that our bias against ideas and arguments because of their tribal affiliation will not feel like being unfair or irrational from the inside. I have little idea how to fix this or even if it is wise to fix it considering how the mysterious but probably real w-force continues to do its magic over time. It may hurt our status bad enough to stop us from "Refining the art of human rationality" (yay! ^_^) in other ways.

I would be even more interested in the answer to this question: "A 'politically conservative result' identified by an author would have a negative influence on evaluation/publication of a paper." In other words, are these researchers unfavorable to the expression or advocacy of conservative perspectives or are they unfavorable toward evidence that supports a conservative viewpoint?

In other news the group X has decided that the most reasonable set of political positions is held by the ideology Y. It just happens to be the ideology that has a ready made and politically viable arguments for more funding to be funnelled to group X.

This was covered on Prof. Massimo Pigliucci's blog (Rationally Speaking) a few days ago. He points out some of the issues with the Inbar and Lammer paper's methodology and notes that its findings should be taken with a grain of skepticism. Well worth a read, in my opinion.

Bear in mind that the labels "liberal" and "conservative" are not timeless or neutral. There is no reason to expect that there would be equal proportions of "conservatives" and "liberals" in any given intellectual movement, phyg, profession, or other group, without first asking what those labels are used to mean, and whether those meanings are in accord with, or opposed to, that group's goals or interests. It is not reasonable to proclaim that unequal representation of political labels in a group is indicative of bias on the part of that group's members — at least not without considering and rejecting other hypotheses for that inequality.

The specific views associated with these labels in the mainstream have shifted and changed around over time. In the U.S. today, the term "conservatism" is heavily associated with (among other things) opposition to secularism, science, and sexual equality. If you call yourself a "conservative", people may expect that you support creationism, school prayer, and the persecution of gays — just for instance. Thus, one would expect that fewer biologists, atheists, or gay people would call themselves "conservative" than in the general population — not because biologists, atheists, and gays are biased against conservatism, but because the word "conservative" means, in part, opposition to biology, atheism, and gays.

This is not because of something inherent about "conservatism" (which is, after all, a label and has nothing inherent about it at all). It has to do with the specific movements which have claimed that label. (Again, these labels shift — few would expect of a "progressive" today that they favored eugenics, despite that having been once a position labeled "progressive".) People may have good reasons to decline to associate themselves with a label, even if they may agree with some other views that have sometimes been labeled "conservative" in the past — and this is not bias, at least, not in the sense that we generally use that term here.

Relevant LessWrong article:

Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

Minor nitpick: "Socially Psychology" should be "Social Psychology" at the beginning.

As GLaDOS knows this is well documented already (in sources that have bias but the facts are good).