Although we appreciate several things about the target article by Duarte et al., including its insistence that social scientists should work to minimize the impact of their political views on research and its sensitivity to political threats to social science funding, we find their central argument unpersuasive. We have seen no good evidence that social science fields with more politically diverse workforces have higher evidentiary standards, are better able to avoid replication failures, or generally produce better research. As there are no standardized ways to measure these outcomes in the aggregate, and as reliable data on researcher politics at the disciplinary and subdisciplinary levels are scarce, there have never been – to our knowledge – any systematic attempts to examine the relationship between epistemic quality and the political composition of social-scientific communities. Duarte et al. are thus calling for major changes in policy and practice based on sheer speculation. The authors cite some evidence of the benefits of “viewpoint diversity” in collaboration, but there is a scale mismatch between these studies (of small groups) and the field-level generalizations the authors make. In point of fact, research on the history and sociology of social science suggests that scientific/intellectual movements that bundle together political commitments and programs for research – movements of the sort the authors believe to have weakened social and personality psychology – have arisen under a wide range of political conditions, as have counter-movements calling for greater objectivity. Until we know more about these and related dynamics, it would be premature to tinker with organizational machineries for knowledge production in the social sciences, however much one may worry, alongside the authors, about certain current trends.

In addition we think it is helpful to consider the Duarte et al. argument in a broader context by considering other professions that lean strongly to the left or to the right. The cleanest analogy, perhaps, is between college professors (who are disproportionately liberal Democrats) and military officers (mostly conservative Republicans; see the research of political scientist Jason Dempsey [Reference Dempsey2009]). In both cases, there seems to be a strong connection between the environment and the ideology. Universities have (with notable exceptions) been centers of political dissent for a very long time, just as the military has long been a conservative institution (again, with some exceptions). And this is true even though many university professors are well-paid, and live well, and even though the U.S. military has been described as the one of the few remaining bastions of socialism in the 21st century. Another example of a liberal-leaning profession is journalism (with its frequently cited dictum to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and again the relative liberalism of that profession has been confirmed by polls of journalists; e.g., see Weaver et al. Reference Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes and Wilhoit2003), whereas business executives represent an important, and influential, conservative group in American society. There has been some movement to balance out the liberal bias of journalism in the United States, but it is not clear what would be done to balance political representation among military officers or corporate executives.

In short, we applaud the work of Duarte et al. in exploring the statistics and implications of political attitudes among social researchers. But the psychology profession, like the military, is an all-volunteer force, and it is not clear to us that the purported benefits of righting the ideological imbalance among social psychologists (or among military officers, or corporate executives) are worth the efforts that would be involved in such endeavors. In any case, these sorts of ideological what-ifs make interesting thought experiments.