Brauchen wir eine Quote für Konservative?

Würde man bei Fachbereichen wie Psychologie und Soziologie dieselbe Logik anwenden, die aktuell in Sachen Frauenquote in Unternehmen gefahren wird, müsste man sich dort über eine Quote für Konservative Gedanken machen. Die New York Times berichtet:

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Das Ergebnis dieser Einseitigkeit kann man beispielsweise an vielen vermeintlich "wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen" über Frauen und Männer ablesen, die von interessierter Seite in die Geschlechterdebatte eingebracht werden. Dass diese Debatte damit von Anfang an unausgewogen geführt wird, tut der Wahrheitsfindung oft nicht gut.

Hier findet man den vollständigen Artikel.