Psychologists have politicized their field to their own detriment. Here is Josh Sabey writing at The Federalist:
Psychologists oppose reparative therapy with religious fervor while using just as ineffective and possibly dangerous methods to treat a host of other more common issues.
On September 14, 2015 a team of professors published a paper that came out after a series of exposés revealed a general unreliability in the “science of psychology.” There were a number of high-profile replication failures, a few fraud cases, and questionable research practices. People were beginning to ask whether psychological research could be trusted. The team observed that the field of psychology was almost entirely liberal and that the lack of political diversity was leading to a lack in scientific accuracy.
The scientists who published the paper were well known and respected, many holding liberal sentiments themselves. Yet they believed they could show how the lack of ideological diversity was interfering with the research, and creeping into other fields. The result of this creep, they worried, would not only be less reliable research but a lack of respect, trust, and funding for future research.
Their fears are being realized as funding for the social sciences is increasingly under threat from conservatives in Congress as well as the National Science Foundation, which proposed cutting its own social science budget by 11 percent this year. Political discussions are less and less grounded in agreed-upon facts because studies can be quickly dismissed as politically motivated, which is sadly often the case.
These scientists hoped to show the field of psychology has some culpability in the current state of affairs. To restore the faith of the masses, they believed psychology would need to work much harder to avoid political entanglements, stifle ideological homogeneity, and remain pure to the principles of scientific investigation.
This paper was published more than three years ago. Today, the field of psychology continues to ignore its need for political diversity and moves further from the sciences towards ideology. Of course some would defend psychology’s political leaning, saying perhaps that science is always already political.
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.
