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Chapter 8 - Research Suffers When We All Agree

How Sociopolitical Homogeneity Impairs Critical Thinking in the Academy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2019

By
Stephen J. Ceci  and
Wendy M. Williams
Edited by
Robert J. Sternberg  and
Diane F. Halpern
Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Diane F. Halpern
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College, California
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Summary

The political atmosphere on US college campuses is overwhelmingly left-leaning and liberal, with the vast majority of faculty self-identifying as socially progressive. Considerable research on cognitive biases has demonstrated the pervasive role of people’s attitudes, which act as filters during thinking and reasoning – particularly about politically-valenced topics. The prevalence of faculty from one side of the political spectrum coupled with the omnipresence of cognitive biases means that college campuses and the research done by their faculty runs the risk of favoring one side during what should, scientifically-speaking, be a process of fair and open inquiry. We discuss these phenomena and document numerous examples in which lack of genuine viewpoint diversity has spelled trouble for sound science. We advocate a more ideologically-diverse scientific workforce to better enable true diversity of thinking on key issues of our time.

Keywords

viewpoint diversitysociopolitical diversitycognitive biasesideological-commitment biasactively open-minded thinking
Type
Chapter
Information
Critical Thinking in Psychology , pp. 173 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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