Multifaceted Problems: Liberal Bias and the Need for Scientific Rigor in Self-Critical Research

Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) conducted two surveys of a sample of Society for Personality and Social Psychology listserv members to empirically examine two questions: How many social psychologists are politically liberal, and is there evidence that liberal social psychologists are biased against their conservative colleagues and/or research taking a conservative perspective? They conclude that the field is overwhelming liberal, and that there is ample evidence of bias against both conservatives and conservatively motivated research. Biased sampling, conversational norm and question context effects, missing control conditions, and a focus on hypothesis confirmation instead of hypothesis testing, however, undermine the scientific confidence one can place in their findings. Is there liberal bias? Probably. Is the evidence scientifically sound? Not so much. The field needs to adhere to the same standards of scientific rigor when conducting self-critical research as it requires of normal science.