Imbalance in attitudes tilts psychologists' couch

Saturday, July 13, 2002

Does it matter when the members of a profession tilt strongly toward one end of the political spectrum?

It does, says psychologist Richard Redding, if it means that prospective clients -- for counseling or therapy, for instance -- can't find anyone who shares their values and approves of their lifestyles.

Redding is director of the program in Law and Psychology at the Villanova University School of Law. In March 2001 he published an article in American Psychologist, the flagship publication of the American Psychological Association, arguing that the underrepresentation of conservative views within psychology was potentially damaging to the profession and limited its ability to properly serve clients who didn't share the dominant liberal views.

Among the articles published in American Psychologist from 1990 through 1999 that explicitly expressed political views, he found, only one of 31 was conservative. The percentage was similar in other leading journals.

"For example," he writes, "the death penalty issue includes numerous articles opposing the death penalty, but no articles supporting it, the grassroots organizing issue includes numerous articles about liberal group organizing but no articles about conservative group organizing, and the affirmative action issue includes many article supporting affirmative action but no articles opposing it.

"Yet these are hotly debated social issues in the larger society about which there is considerable disagreement," he says (with considerable understatement).

He also notes that when the APA itself adopts policy positions, they are politically one-sided.

Research -- even if it takes no explicit political position -- may be influenced by the researchers' political views. Redding cites research on adolescent competence as an example. It tends to support on the one hand the view that adolescents should be allowed to make decisions about medical treatment (abortion, for instance) because they are "cognitively competent" to do so, while on the other hand it supports the view that adolescents who commit crimes should not be tried or punished as adults because they are "psychosocially immature."

Either of those positions could be plausible separately, but defending them both at once, as P.J. O'Rourke once said in a different context, "requires years of therapy."

The responses to the article -- this being academia, they appeared in April 2002 -- took mild exception to Redding's article, but without damaging its central thesis. One writer pointed out that "liberal" and "conservative" don't nearly exhaust the varieties of political experience, so that adding more conservative views to the mix wouldn't do enough for sociopolitical diversity. Another pointed out that most journal articles don't take political positions.

That may be true, but it doesn't address either the question of imbalance among the ones that do or the fact that researchers' political views may influence both their choice of research topics and their interpretation of their results.

Such influence isn't necessarily a problem in itself, but it becomes one if all the influence points in the same direction. And it would be equally a problem if it all pointed in the opposite direction, but in the present state of affairs that is an entirely theoretical worry.

One response, from Stephen Wester at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and David L. Vogel at Iowa State University, said that Redding didn't go nearly far enough in exploring the implications of his study for the training and supervision of psychotherapists.

Students in training, they say, have to be able "to express honestly their feelings and concerns without fear of ridicule, sanction or retribution from those in power."

If holding incorrect ideas about abortion, gun control or gay rights can get you washed out of grad school, then you don't admit to holding them, and that impairs your development as an effective counselor.

Redding cites research showing that success in therapy is often compromised "when therapists' and clients' worldviews differ too greatly."

Add to the mix textbooks -- in psychology, not political science -- that offer gratuitous critiques of Republican positions, evidence that admissions decisions in graduate school often discriminate against students who volunteer that they are conservative or Christian, classroom hostility from professors whose commitment to diversity does not extend to diversity of opinion, and it's no wonder students decide that the hassle isn't worth it and go into astrophysics or investment banking instead.

Neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on empirical truth or moral authority. A profession worthy of the name must be as open to diverse political views as it is to diversity of other kinds.