Lack of political diversity and the framing of findings in personality and clinical psychology

Open Peer Commentary

Consider the following passage:

[S]tructural MRI data demonstrated that conservatives have an increased gray matter volume of the right amygdala, a brain structure involved in the processing of threatening information. This suggests that individuals embracing conservative political views might be more sensitive to signals of threat, and display avoidance regulatory strategies. (Carraro et al. 2011, p. 1)

At first blush, this summary of the literature seems couched in scientifically impartial language. Yet, a moment's reflection reveals that this passage could just as readily been worded as follows:

[S]tructural MRI data demonstrated that liberals have a decreased gray matter volume of the right amygdala, a brain structure involved in the processing of threatening information. This suggests that individuals embracing liberal political views might be less sensitive to signals of threat, and be less likely to display avoidance regulatory strategies.

Carraro et al.'s choice of conservatives' rather than liberals' personality as the explanandum may appear inconsequential. Nevertheless, the question of how to conceptualize differences in political ideology may hold largely unappreciated implications for the conduct and interpretation of research in personality and clinical psychology.

In their incisive article, Duarte et al. lay bare the troubling scientific ramifications of political uniformity for social psychology. I extend Duarte et al.'s important arguments by examining the implications of this lack of political diversity for a problem they did not explicitly address - namely, the framing of findings in two fields allied with social psychology: personality and clinical psychology (see also Groeger 2011).

Over the past several decades, researchers have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals differ in sensitivity to threat (Hibbing et al. 2014; Jost et al. 2003) and openness to experience (Carney et al. 2008), with conservatives being higher in the former and lower in the latter. The assertions of some writers to the contrary (Ferguson 2012), these differences are robust, replicable, and generalizable across diverse samples (Hibbing et al. 2014).

Although these differences are value-free, they have commonly been framed by researchers as reflecting poorly on conservatives. For example, conservatives' higher sensitivity to threat relative to liberals' has frequently been portrayed as reflecting "negativity bias" (Hibbing et al. 2014) or "motivated closed-mindedness" (Thórisdóttir & Jost 2011), and conservatives' lower levels of openness to experience relative that...