Truth and Advocacy: Reducing Bias in Policy-Related Research

Critics have suggested that psychological research is characterized by a pervasive liberal bias, and this problem may be particularly acute in research on issues related to public policy. In this article, I consider the sources of bias in basic and applied research in the evaluation, conduct, and communication of research. Techniques are suggested for counteracting bias at each of these stages.

Boosts in brain signal variability track liberal shifts in decision bias

Adopting particular decision biases allows organisms to tailor their choices to environmental demands. For example, a liberal response strategy pays off when target detection is crucial, whereas a conservative strategy is optimal for avoiding false alarms. Using conventional time-frequency analysis of human electroencephalographic (EEG) activity, we previously showed that bias setting entails adjustment of evidence accumulation in sensory regions (Kloosterman et al., 2019), but the presumed prefrontal signature of a conservative-to-liberal bias shift has remained elusive. Here, we show that a liberal bias shift is reflected in a more unconstrained neural regime (boosted entropy) in frontal regions that is suited to the detection of unpredictable events. Overall EEG variation, spectral power and event-related potentials could not explain this relationship, highlighting that moment-to-moment neural variability uniquely tracks bias shifts. Neural variability modulation through prefrontal cortex appears instrumental for permitting an organism to adapt its biases to environmental demands.

Conservative News Studies

This chapter maps several lines of academic inquiry that speak to the yet unrealized field of conservative news studies. The chapter explores how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to studying the influence of conservative media—as propaganda, as media effects, and as “deep stories”; and the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism in the United States. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. This chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a field of conservative news studies would ideally weave together and build upon.

Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media

This chapter traces the origins of the “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure appropriated by National Review writers, who successfully used it to construct a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. William F. Buckley and other National Review writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions as a gatekeeper of acceptable opinions. The chapter documents that National Review writers made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion that demanded conformity to liberal views.

Boosting Brain Signal Variability Underlies Liberal Shifts in Decision Bias

Strategically adopting decision biases allows organisms to tailor their choices to environmental demands. For example, a liberal response strategy pays off when target detection is crucial, whereas a conservative strategy is optimal for avoiding false alarms. Using conventional time-frequency analysis of human electroencephalographic (EEG) activity, we previously showed that bias setting entails adjustment of evidence accumulation in sensory regions (Kloosterman et al., 2019), but the presumed prefrontal signature of a strategic conservative-to-liberal bias shift has remained elusive. Here, we show that a liberal bias shift relies on frontal regions adopting a more unconstrained neural regime (boosted entropy) that is suited to the detection of unpredictable events. Overall EEG variation, spectral power and event-related potentials could not explain this relationship, highlighting the unique contribution of moment-to-moment neural variability to bias shifts. Neural variability modulation through prefrontal cortex appears instrumental for permitting an organism to tailor its decision bias to environmental demands.Impact statementMoment-to-moment variability is a prominent feature of neural activity. Rather than representing mere noise, this variability might enable us to flexibly adapt our decision biases to the environment.

The Psychological Roots of Humor’s Liberal Bias

This chapter integrates literature on the psychology of liberals and conservatives with the study of aesthetic preferences. It summarizes research illustrating how liberals and conservatives vary in their artistic and aesthetic tastes, and how these differences are shaped by the higher tolerance for ambiguity and need for cognition of those on the left. It then advances a key proposition: that irony is a particularly complex and ambiguous form of humor that requires a comfort with ambiguity and motivation to engage in complex cognitive tasks and hence is favored by those on the left. Also included is a consideration of the logic and spirit of improvisation, to which ambiguity is central. Finally, the chapter offers an exploration of the language, humor, and policies of President Donald Trump as a case study in cultural conservatism that is notably noncomic.

The Effects of Mixed Membership in a Deliberative Forum: The Irish Constitutional Convention of 2012–2014

The Constitutional Convention was established by the Irish government in 2012. It was tasked with making recommendations on a number of constitutional reform proposals. As a mini-public, its membership was a mix of 66 citizens (randomly selected) and 33 politicians (self-selected). Its recommendations were debated on the floor of the Irish parliament with three of them leading to constitutional referendums; other recommendations are in the process of being implemented. This article uses data gathered during and after the operation of the Convention to examine this real-world example of a mixed-membership mini-public. The focus is on how the inclusion of politicians may have impacted on the Convention’s mode of operation and/or its outcomes. We find little impact in terms of its operation (e.g. no evidence that politicians dominated the discussions). There is evidence of a slight liberal bias among the politician membership, but this had little effect on the outcomes.

Partisan Bias and Its Discontents

Baron and Jost (this issue, p. 292) present three critiques of our meta-analysis demonstrating similar levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives: (a) that the studies we examined were biased toward finding symmetrical bias among liberals and conservatives, (b) that the studies we examined do not measure partisan bias but rather rational Bayesian updating, and (c) that social psychology is not biased in favor of liberals but rather toward creating false equivalencies. We respond in turn that (a) the included studies covered a wide variety of issues at the core of contemporary political conflict and fairly compared bias by establishing conditions under which both liberals and conservatives would have similar motivations and opportunities to demonstrate bias; (b) we carefully selected studies that were least vulnerable to Bayesian counterexplanation, and most scientists and laypeople consider these studies demonstrations of bias; and (c) there is reason to be vigilant about liberal bias in social psychology, but this does not preclude concerns about other possible biases, all of which threaten good science. We close with recommendations for future research and urge researchers to move beyond broad generalizations of political differences that are insensitive to time and context.