ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors propose a model of how political beliefs can influence social scientists’ perceptions of empirical evidence, their interpretation of empirical findings, and thus, in part, their beliefs about social reality. They review evidence for the ideological homogeneity of the social sciences. The authors describe the direct route before turning their attention to the indirect route, which students suspect may have more influence than the direct route. Their proposed model suggests that political confirmation bias occurs when researchers’ ideological beliefs influence what topics they select to study, how they study them, and what conclusions they draw from the results. The authors deal with recommendations for limiting the impact of political beliefs on the interpretation of scientific evidence. T. F. Adorno et al. defined authoritarianism as a personality syndrome characterized by ethnocentrism, aggression, submissiveness to recognized authority figures, and political conservatism.
