“I would like to think of my field of social psychology as a scientific field. I believe in science. I am enthusiastic about it. And so I am acutely pained when the field that I so strongly identify with, and want to advance, has basic failures in conduct as a normal science. And I discovered these failures when I examined the claims about stereotype inaccuracy.”

“The idea of confirmation bias is people they selectively seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, and they’re more critical of information that disconfirms their beliefs. And as far as I can tell those patterns really do pervade the social sciences. And one way that manifests is—compare stereotype accuracy or inaccuracy to almost any area! If people are going to make any claim that say intrinsic motivation increases academic achievement, they’re going to have data to support the claim. They’re either going to have their own data or cite some famous review article or meta-analysis. But if they want to claim that stereotypes are inaccurate, they don’t need any data—that’s fine! You can just do that!!!”

“If people on the extreme left are over-represented—and there is good evidence for that in academia, especially in the social sciences and humanities—and if such people are most likely to unjustifiable exaggerate the views of their ideological opponents, you’re going to have academia filled with people who despise conservatives because they truly see them as fascists and Nazis. And so why is that a problem? It’s a problem intellectually for all sorts of reasons. It feeds back into the confirmation bias problem. To the extent that the social sciences address political issues and simply stigmatize people who disagree with their views then it’s going to be very difficult to have an honest conversation about zillions of politicized issues.”