Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences@joibs

While considerable quantitative research demonstrates ideological liberalism among American professors, only qualitative work examines whether this affects undergraduate education. Using the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) dataset surveying students in their first and fourth years in college (n=7,207), we use OLS regressions to test whether students’ political beliefs are associated with reported college grades and perceived collegiate experiences. We find that while standardized test scores are the best predictors of grade point average, ideology also has impacts. Even with controls for SES, demographics, and SAT scores, liberal students report higher college grades and closer relationships with faculty, particularly at elite institutions, with findings driven by social issues like abortion. Nevertheless, conservative students consistently show higher levels of satisfaction with college courses and experiences, and higher high school grades. We discuss implications, and possible limitations.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), portrayed current undergraduate American college students (most of whom are in the generation Gen Z: 1995 - 2013) as valuing emotional well-being and the advancement of social justice goals above traditional academic values such as academic freedom and the pursuit of truth. We investigated whether this value discrepancy exists among 574 American university students by exploring the prioritization of five different academic values (academic freedom, advancing knowledge, academic rigor, social justice, and emotional well-being). We also explored how gender, generation, personality, major, and conservatism predict each academic value. Generational differences were present, with Gen Z students emphasizing emotional well-being and de-emphasising academic rigor. Males scored higher on measures of academic freedom and advancing knowledge, while lower on social justice and emotional well-being compared to females. Political conservatism was the strongest predictor for social justice scores, with increased liberal attitudes predicting higher scores on social justice. Emotional stability positively predicted advancing knowledge, while negatively predicting emotional well-being. Agreeableness positively predicted emotional well-being, while negatively predicting advancing knowledge. We ultimately argue that gender is a crucial, underestimated explanatory factor of the value orientations of American college students.

Here, I present a review of “The Value Gap: How gender, generation, personality, and politics shape the values of American university students.”

Rausch et al. describe an empirical effort to test a number of hypotheses put forward by Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) regarding the values of contemporary (Gen Z) vs. previous generations of undergraduates. My review of their work focuses primarily on the methodologies Rausch et al. employ in executing their research. Strengths of their study include: the empirical replication and extension of prior claims; a priori specification of hypotheses and the methodology to test them; and the insight that prior claims may confound gender and generational status. Weaknesses include: the use of an untested (and unknown) scale to measure their dependent variable; the unfortunate and erroneous classification of majors into “hard” science vs. social science categories; a confound between graduate student status and generational status; and the number and interdependence of the statistical tests they use to test their hypotheses. All of the methodological weaknesses I identify (with the exception of their measurement of academic values) could be strengthened through changes to their procedures and analyses. Overall, their insight that Lukianoff and Haidt’s attribution of value differences to generational status may be confounded with gender is worthy of further research.

Political tribalism has increased dramatically in recent years. We explored partisan double-standards of Democratic and Republican voters across both hypothetical and real-world scenarios. In Study 1, participants rated the perceived legitimacy of election outcomes in response to hypothetical and ambiguous results from the 2020 presidential election. In Study 2 Part 1, college students and Amazon Turk volunteers rated their support of real-world presidential policies and actions. All policies/actions were attributed to Trump or Obama though they actually occurred under both presidents. In Study 2 Part 2, participants rated how bigoted various statements were; we manipulated who the utterances were attributed to (Trump v. Bill Clinton or Trump v. Martin Luther King [MLK]). Generally, Republican ratings were more favorable when statements were attributed to Trump vs. Democratic leaders while the opposite is true of Democrats. Crucially, these biases exist when evaluating identical information. Republicans and Democrats had a very small and very large tendency, respectively, to view statements as more bigoted under Trump vs. MLK. To the degree that this study can answer the question about which side is more guilty of double-standards, our results provide tentative evidence that this occurs under Democrats more than Republicans, though this overall difference may obscure important moderators. Our data provide evidence for tribal loyalty which may have significant social and political ramifications.

The contribution of Bernstein et al reports a series of studies demonstrating partisan bias: the tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one’s political beliefs or allegiances than when it challenges those beliefs or allegiances. The write-up is clear and concise, and the studies are interesting with a number of nice empirical touches, but the novelty and quality of the data need to be considered, especially the difficulty of ruling out rational counter explanations for data ostensibly showing motivated partisan bias.

This brief paper comments on the Bernstein et al. studies on "Tribalism in American Politics." Although the studies have some significant limitations, they provide a tantalizing window into the possibility that the state of affairs with respect to partisan bias may not be as sanguine as a recent meta-analysis suggests - that liberals and conservatives are equally biased against the other. On the contrary, until relatively recently, when researchers are now starting to challenge the received wisdom on the subject, the social and political psychology project has painted a relatively negative psychological portrait of conservatives and a positive one of liberals. By now, these portraits are well familiar to most psychologists and even much of the general public. Conservatives are more authoritarian, less intelligent, and more closed minded, among other things. Liberals are more enlightened, more flexible, and more open minded. But is this narrative correct? Could it be that liberals are more biased and less open-minded than conservatives, as the Bernstein et al. findings suggest, at least under some (perhaps even many) circumstances? The answer to this question, with its likely complexities, awaits further research.

Building on error management theory and heuristic decision making, we conducted three studies manipulating the sex of the sender and receiver of messages and asked observers to rate the sender’s sexism (Studies 1-3), pleasantness, and professionalism (Studies 2-3). We also examined concern for political correctness (CPC) and social justice attitudes (Study 1), ambivalence toward men (Study 2), and neosexism (Study 3) as moderators of respondent ratings. Across all studies, we found that when the receiver was female, the sender was rated as significantly more sexist, especially when the sender was male. Although CPC, social justice, and ambivalence toward men failed to interact with scenario conditions, neosexism levels resulted in stronger sexism ratings in the male sender-female receiver condition.

Review of Grawitch et al. (2022)

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Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, yet little work deliberately explores domains of liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals (some might call them Progressives) are particularly prone to bias about victims’ groups (e.g. women, Black people) and identify a set of beliefs that consistently predict this bias, termed Equalitarianism. Equalitarianism, we believe, stems from an aversion to inequality and a desire to protect relatively low status groups, and includes three interrelated beliefs: (1) demographic groups do not differ biologically; (2) prejudice is ubiquitous and explains existing group disparities; (3) society can, and should, make all groups equal in society. This leads to bias against information that portrays a perceived privileged group more favorably than a perceived victims’ group. Eight studies and twelve mini meta-analyses (n=3,274) support this theory. Liberalism was associated with perceiving certain groups as victims (Studies 1a-1b). In Studies 2-7 and meta-analyses, Liberals evaluated the same study as less credible when the results portrayed a privileged group (men and White people) more favorably than a victims’ group (women and Black people) than vice versa. Ruling out alternative explanations of normative reasoning, significant order effects in within-subjects designs in Study 6 and Study 7 (preregistered) suggest that Liberals believe they should not evaluate identical information differently depending on which group is portrayed more favorably, yet do so. In all studies, higher equalitarianism mediated the relationship between liberalism and lower credibility ratings when privileged groups were portrayed more favorably. Although not predicted a priori, meta-analyses also revealed Moderates to be the most balanced in their judgments. These findings do not indicate whether this bias is morally justifiable, only that it exists.

Many social science researchers are liberals and progressives. Many published research studies also happen to support liberal and progressive narratives. This is even true for published research articles which might be fairly interpreted as insulting of conservatives such as referring to them as racist or unintelligent. Is this a coincidence? In a series of impressive studies, Winegard et al. (2023) demonstrate that political bias influences liberals’ perceptions and that, in the quest for finding equality, liberals assign greater moral worth to minority groups than majority. These findings have important implications for recent revisionist history approaches within education, and potential misinformation spread among youth in schools.

Comments on Winegard et al.'s article on bias among liberals and the role of the value of equalitarianism.

During the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in adolescents and young adults (AYAs) complaining of gender dysphoria. One influential if controversial explanation is that the increase reflects a socially contagious syndrome among emotionally vulnerable youth: rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). We report results from a survey of parents who contacted the website ParentsofROGDKids.com because they believed their AYA children had ROGD. Results focused on parent reports on 1,655 AYA children whose gender dysphoria began between ages 11 and 21 years, inclusive. These youths were disproportionately (75%) natal female. Natal males had later onset (by 1.9 years) than females, and they were much less likely to have taken steps towards social gender transition (65.7% for females versus 28.6% for males). Pre-existing mental health issues were common, and youths with these issues were more likely than those without them to have socially and medically transitioned. Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition. We discuss potential biases of survey responses from this sample and conclude that there is presently no reason to believe that reports of parents who support gender transition are more accurate than those who oppose transition. To resolve controversies regarding ROGD, it is desirable that future research include data provided by both pro-transition and anti-transition parents, as well as their gender dysphoric AYA children.

Author's Notes: This is a slightly revised version of a paper that was accepted then retracted at Archives of Sexual Behavior. It was retracted in response to an academic outrage mob offended at its findings, and the journal presented a dubious technicality for retracting it that, as far as we know, has never been applied to any other paper there. JOIBS’ policy is to retract papers only when they meet Committee on Publication Ethics for retraction, which involve data fraud or massive data error. This paper has not even been accused of either data fraud or data error, and JOIBS is delighted to have published it here.

The first author of this article is the mother of an ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) youth, who is writing under a pseudonym, and the second author is an expert on transgenderism, homosexuality, and behavioral genetics, having written major works on the subject, such as The Man Who Would Be Queen (Bailey, 2003). This is important to mention because we presume that the first author has intimate knowledge of the nature of the current wave of transgenderism, whereas the second author has in-depth scientific knowledge of the characteristics of transgenderism in the past. Aside from establishing the credentials of both authors, which appear to constitute an optimal combination for addressing the alternative hypotheses proposed, we mention this to frame the basic problem posed by this paper. That question is whether the transgenderism of the current wave of gender dysphoria is identical to what has been traditionally known as such in the past (Hypothesis 1) or whether it is a novel phenomenon that the present paper designates as ROGD (Hypothesis 2).

Hypothesis 1 presupposes that the recent increase in gender dysphoria is more apparent than real, and produced by a greater societal openness to atypical sexuality that has disinhibited the reporting of sexual orientations that were previously suppressed by widespread social disapproval. Hypothesis 2 instead proposes that the recent increase is instead quite real, rather than attributable to reporting biases, but that the current wave of gender dysphoria is quite different from conventional transgenderism, and stems from an entirely different set of aetiologies.

In describing Hypothesis 2, the authors consider the role of psychopathology, an often ignored predictor, in developing ROGD. The study's results strongly suggest that a sizeable proportion of individuals experienced a psychopathological condition before the onset of ROGD. In particular, anxiety and depression were quite prevalent in the sample. According to the authors, mental health issues crystallized at 10.5 years of age, preceding ROGD by more than three years. The authors also considered the contribution of social influence, concluding that having a transgendered friend increased the likelihood of social transition, which is adopting formal measures to live as the opposite gender. These results, in conjunction with the reported cooccurrence of ROGD in close friends or acquaintances of the individual experiencing ROGD, suggest emotional contagion as part of an underlying affective disorder could operate as a risk factor for the consolidation of ROGD. Hence, the article provides a novel and unique understanding of social influences and mental health issues leading to the persistence of the condition. The article's results offer future avenues concerning the role of premorbid individual attributes, including mental health issues and the nature of social interactions increasing the risk of ROGD.

The data is almost completely descriptive rather than inferentially based on theory-driven tests derived from the stated alternative hypotheses. Nevertheless, the descriptive data does seem to support Hypothesis 2 in that the profile presented for ROGD does not look very much like that of conventional gender dysphoria, especially in the seemingly large role of social media as well as the developmentally late and sudden onset of the condition. However, only suspected ROGD cases were surveyed so there is no comparison group available, such as a sampling of individuals that had been chronically gender dysphoric from an early age or individuals that were not gender dysphoric at all. To be fair, these limitations are acknowledged in the Discussion as inherent in the way the data were collected. On the other hand, it would have been helpful for the authors to report any comparable data that might be available from non-ROGD cases, although formal significance testing might not be valid due to sampling differences between these data and previous findings. Table 9 comes close to what might be helpful, but only goes as far back as 2020. We are sure Professor Bailey should have some comparable statistics from his previous studies.

In the last few years, many countries have introduced (or are proposing to introduce) legislation on ‘conversion therapy’, prohibiting attempts to change or suppress sexual orientation and/or gender identity. This legislation covers ‘aversion therapy’, a form of torture that has already been criminalized in most progressive countries, and also ‘talk therapy’, involving things like counselling, psychoanalysis, and prayer. Focusing on this latter category of practices, I explain what is at stake in the fact that sexual orientation and gender identity have been paired for the purposes of this legislation. I use a particular law reform institute’s approach to this legislation as a case study, and review their literature review in mind to discovering whether they provided sufficient empirical justification for including gender identity in their conversion therapy legislation. I conclude that they did not, and suggest that the pairing of sexual orientation and gender identity may be purely political.

Review of Lawford-Smith (2024) by J. Michael Bailey

After positively discussing Professor Lawford-Smith's central argument, I provide some of my own comments on the term 'gender identity', contrasting it with 'sexual orientation'. I argue that, unlike 'sexual orientation', both components of the phrase 'gender identity' have significant ambiguities that make clear empirical research into the nature of 'gender identity' a non-starter. I briefly suggest some ways to resolve the problem.

Schein (1973) is a highly cited article in research on sex and gender biases. The original article concluded that people are biased against women regarding requisite management characteristics. However, the present paper replicates Schein (1973) and demonstrates that the findings were a result of an imbalanced ratio of items which exhibited mean differences between men and women targets. In addition, the use of intraclass correlations creates an illusion of large differences or similarities between targets when the actual mean rating differences are practically trivial and statistically nonsignificant. A bias against women, against men, and no bias are obtained by altering the number of male and female items, or by applying the intraclass correlation to more appropriate data. The implications of the results for the measurement of sex and gender biases are discussed. Broader concerns are raised about ideological biases which allow for conclusions and theories to propagate without empirical support.

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Previous research indicates that in college samples there is a positive correlation between psychosocial development and economic conservatism. We tested the generality of this relationship with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the United States. The result was instead consistent with an alternative hypothesis that psychosocial development is related to political extremism. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an association between psychosocial development and political orientation.

Some of the most controversial information in psychology involves genetic or evolutionary explanations for sex differences in educational-vocational outcomes (Clark et al., 2024a). We investigated whether men and women react differently to controversial information about sex differences and whether their reaction depends on who provides the information. In the experiment, college students (n=396) and U.S. middle-aged adults (n=154) reviewed a handout, purportedly provided by either a male or a female professor. The handout stated that (1) women in STEM are no longer discriminated against in hiring and publishing and (2) sex differences in educational-vocational outcomes are better explained by evolved differences between men and women in various personal attributes. We found that college women were less receptive to the information than college men were and wanted to censor it more than men did; also, in both the college student and community adult samples, women were less receptive and more censorious when the messenger was a male professor than when the messenger was a female professor. In both samples, participants who leaned to the left politically and who held stronger belief that words can cause harm reacted with more censoriousness. Our findings imply that the identity of a person presenting controversial scientific information and the receiver’s pre-existing identity and beliefs have the potential to influence how that information will be received.

An ideology currently permeating many U.S. institutions is “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). A practical derivative of CRT is “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Broadly defined, CRT/DEI are a set of beliefs espousing that U.S. and Western societies are based on “white supremacy” and that social inequalities are due to racially-designed barriers to oppress non-Whites. These views are often accompanied by a deemphasis on classically liberal values such as free speech and due process. Advocates of CRT/DEI demand that society become more egalitarian, just, and inclusive. However, many ideas and tenets of CRT/DEI are debatable and are contested by critics due to the ideas’ questionable empirical support. The purpose of this study was to examine select personality and attitudinal variables that may predict endorsement of CRT/DEI ideas that we call “radical progressive ideology” (RPI). Based on a sample of university students, three variables emerged significantly correlating with RPI: left-wing authoritarianism, anti-White attitudes, and anti-U.S. attitudes. Findings suggest that those embracing RPI may hold prejudicial views of Whites and of the U.S. as a country and may be desirous of punishing those not sharing their radical progressive ideology. Additional implications are discussed.

Review of Martin et al. (2024)

I provide commentary on the submitted paper, Do Gradebooks Lean Left?