My attention was drawn belatedly to <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html>this article</a> which chronicles Jonathan Haidt’s claims that his profession of social psychology is biased towards liberals.
Haidt notes that when an organization is found to be mostly male there is a a priori assumption of bias.
Haidt’s audience was more than 80% liberal and he asked why this should not be seen as a similar bias.
Being somewhat libertarian I nonetheless feel it necessary to defend the liberals, sort of.
One can argue that persuasion (liberal or conservative) is a consequence of one’s studies, in which case the observed imbalance was not a matter of biased selection, but rather of ideological shift resulting from education.
Actually I suspect that liberals are attracted to psychological studies which is yet a different explanation.
<p>The light that I think that Haidt’s observation throws on the profession is to discredit the notion that statistically unbalanced membership of a association implies selection bias.