\n\n[Dr. Jonathan Haidt] 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.
\n\u00e2\u0080\u009cThis is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,\u00e2\u0080\u009d 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 \u00e2\u0080\u009ctribal-moral community\u00e2\u0080\u009d united by \u00e2\u0080\u009csacred values\u00e2\u0080\u009d that hinder research and damage their credibility -- and blind them to the hostile climate they\u00e2\u0080\u0099ve created for non-liberals.
\n\u00e2\u0080\u009cAnywhere 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,\u00e2\u0080\u009d said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. \u00e2\u0080\u009cBut 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.\u00e2\u0080\u009d
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via Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within - NYTimes.com.
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