DIVERSITY PROBLEMS: Unquestioned Results and Academic Groupthink.

As someone venturing into academia, particularly into academic research about public policy (policy, not politics), I’ve had to come face to face with some brief facts about the environment I’m about to enter.

Self-selection into academia (and especially social science) tends to attract politically liberal people (more on that later).
Underlying worldview and values play a major role in what research questions are asked and how they are asked.
When results arise, the prevailing intuition of reviewers and discussants may create a false sense of consensus.

Case in point: a paper that was widely circulated and reported originally found that political conservatives exhibited personality traits linked to authoritarianism, less social desirability, and psychoticism. This analysis wasn’t even a central finding of the paper, but it got a lot of attention.

It turns out the opposite was true, and the authors simply didn’t realize their political scale was backward.

I love that.