There was a rather interesting piece in yesterday's New York Times entitled Social Scientist Sees Bias Within. Here's the first couple paragraphs:
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
I'd encourage you to read the rest of the article for more details and commentary. Haidt seems to define himself not as a conservative but rather as a liberal turned centrist. He examines the possible role of some sort of discrimination saying:
Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.
It gets into the whole issue of group-think, not just amongst psychologists but also in other groups on other issues as well as looking at some of the problems that may be a result of it throughout recent history.
