ABSTRACT
As a field, social psychology is overwhelmingly populated by researchers with liberal political views. With such demographics, are the field’s research questions, methods, and conclusion doomed to be biased to favor liberal political agendas? We argue that they are not but that stronger attention to theory is required to prevent ideological biases from leaking into social psychological science. Evolutionary psychologists—who tend to hold political beliefs similar to those held by the broader social psychological community but are sometimes accused of promoting a stealth conservative agenda based on their theory-driven hypotheses—exemplify the bias, neutralizing power of good theory. We propose four changes to social psychologists’ training programs and research orientations that could lead them to similarly neutralize any biases presented by their personal politics. These include (1) increasing education in biology and anthropology, (2) increasing familiarity with the naturalistic fallacy, (3) linking isolated theories back to evolutionary theory, and (4) resolving coalitional issues that engender skepticism toward evolutionary theory.
