The liberal bias – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Psychology is not ‘Woke’: Examining claims of liberal bias

You will have heard the claim many times – that psychology is hampered by a so-called ‘liberal bias’, where contemporary psychologists freely abandon their scientific obligations in order to promote left-wing solutions to social problems, drawing upon progressive political philosophies and eschewing robust scientific data (e.g., Bartels, 2023; Duarte et al., 2015; Haidt, 2016; Silander et al., 2020; Tetlock & Mitchell, 2015). Hence, it is claimed that psychologists have tied themselves in knots adhering to left-wing ‘social justice’ agendas on matters such as gender identity, sexual diversity, climate change, and structural racism (to name but a few examples). This is the claim that psychology, as a field, has gone ‘woke’. ….[READ]