Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity (...) of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

This article explores situational determinants and psychological consequences of counterfactual excuse-making - denying responsibility by declaring `I couldn’t have known.’ Participants who were made accountable for a stock investment decision that resulted in an outcome caused by unforeseeable circumstances were particularly likely to generate counterfactual excuses and, as a result, to deny responsibility for the outcome of their choices and minimize their perceptions of control over the decision process. The article discusses the implications of these findings for structuring accountability reporting (...) relationships in business and, more generally, stresses the benefits of counterfactual denials of responsibility for maintaining self-esteem and a desired self-identity. (shrink)

This article links recent work on assimilative and contrastive counterfactual thinking with research on the impact of accountability on judgment and choice. Relative to participants who felt accountable solely for bottom-line performance outcomes, participants who were accountable for their decision-making process (a) had more pronounced differential reactions to clearly winning versus (winning but) nearly losing and to clearly losing versus (losing but) nearly winning; (b) were less satisfied with the quality of their decisions when they nearly lost and more satisfied (...) with the quality of their decisions when they nearly won; and (c) invested less money into investments that nearly failed and more money into investments that nearly succeeded. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that process accountability amplified assimilative counterfactual thinking, whereas outcome accountability attenuated it. The evidence underscores the power of contextual features of the decision-making environment to shape key cognitive and affective consequences of upward and downward counterfactual comparisons. (shrink)

Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. However, a core precept of Jervis's “systems thinking” is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic: The more sensitive an event is to initial conditions (e.g., butterfly effects), the harder it is to derive accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, if (...) awareness of system effects can help forecasters better calibrate their probability estimates of whether or not certain events will come to pass, systems thinkers who are pessimistic about prediction are diluting their confidence too much. The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. (shrink)

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

Intelligence analysts, like other professionals, form norms that define standards of tradecraft excellence. These norms, however, have evolved in an idiosyncratic manner that reflects the influence of prominent insiders who had keen psychological insights but little appreciation for how to translate those insights into testable hypotheses. The net result is that the prevailing tradecraft norms of best practice are only loosely grounded in the science of judgment and decision-making. The “common sense” of prestigious opinion leaders inside the intelligence community has (...) pre-empted systematic validity testing of the training techniques and judgment aids endorsed by those opinion leaders. Drawing on the scientific literature, we advance hypotheses about how current best practices could well be reducing rather than increasing the quality of analytic products. One set of hypotheses pertain to the failure of tradecraft training to recognize the most basic threat to accuracy: measurement error in the interpretation of the same data and in the communication of interpretations. Another set of hypotheses focuses on the insensitivity of tradecraft training to the risk that issuing broad-brush, one-directional warnings against bias (e.g., over-confidence) will be less likely to encourage self-critical, deliberative cognition than simple response-threshold shifting that yields the mirror-image bias (e.g., under-confidence). Given the magnitude of the consequences of better and worse intelligence analysis flowing to policy-makers, we see a compelling case for greater funding of efforts to test what actually works. (shrink)

Until social psychology devotes as much attention to construct and external validity as it does to internal validity, the field will continue to produce theories that fail to replicate in the field and cannot be used to meliorate social problems.

Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies makes a compelling case that people often misrepresent their private preferences in response to real or imagined social pressures, that the relative power of competing interest groups to punish opinion deviance and reward conformity determines the patterns and pervasiveness of preference falsification, and that preference falsifi‐cation helps explain such diverse outcomes as the persistence and sudden collapse of communism and the precarious persistence of racial preferences in the United States and of the caste system (...) in India. Although preference falsification is important and raises questions about the legitimacy of the opinions expressed in opinion polls and elections, it does not seem widespread enough to warrant the conclusion that ordinary people lack the courage necessary to make democracy work. (shrink)