Political Ideology and Social Psychologists

I have really been enjoying the discussion about Jonathan Haidt's presentation at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology about the astonishingly lack of conservatives (and really, any form of non liberal) within the ranks of academic social psychologists.  I first read about this presentation at Megan McArdle's blog in a post about the liberal slant of academia (responding to this NY Times article about Haidt's talk), and she published a follow-up post today. 

However, one thing that irked me about McArdle's discussion of the presentation / article is that she failed to acknowledge this (quoted from the article):

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.”

So while being a social psychologist obviously does not render one immune to prejudice and bias, it appears that these psychologists reacted in a relatively non-reactive, non-defensive way to having this prejudice pointed out.  I can imagine a lot of conferences where this sort of presentation, accusing the membership of some profession or organization of being discriminatory, would not go down well at all.  I thought she wasn't giving the audience enough credit for being open to these ideas.

Anyway, I especially recommend the presentation (25 minutes long).  It's thought-provoking, even if rather light on empirical evidence.  Personally, I suspect that the skew toward liberal ideology amongst social psychologists is due in large part to self-selection bias, but I think it's an issue worth thinking about.