Rational Versus Irrational Prejudices

Abstract

The Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) survey revealed potentially disturbing pockets of ideological intolerance among social psychologists. Their findings raise a mix of procedural-justice questions bearing on fair treatment of colleagues and epistemological questions bearing on the opportunity costs of research programs that were either never conceived or smothered in infancy. An appropriately self-critical disciplinary response is to conduct identity-substitution thought experiments that explore (a) how we would collectively react to differential treatment in counterfactual worlds in which minority–majority faction roles were reversed, (b) how ideological bias may have suppressed research with the potential to undermine liberal policy positions (e.g., affirmative action, income redistribution, “dove-ish” security policies), and (c) how ideological bias may have led to attaching labels to conservative policy positions that moderates and conservatives consider tendentious (e.g., system justification, symbolic racism).