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Ideological distinction. The political ideologies of social psychologists in the East and West.

Bilewicz, Michal, Górska, Paulina, Cichocka, Aleksandra, Szabo, Peter (2015) Ideological distinction. The political ideologies of social psychologists in the East and West. Czechoslovak Psychology, (LIX). pp. 121-128. ISSN 0009-062X. (KAR id:53650)

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Abstract

The problem of “liberal bias” among personality and social psychologists has been widely discussed in recent years (Haidt, 2011; Duarte et al., in press; Inbar, Lammers, 2012). Most of these discussions extrapolated findings observed in American and Western European social psychology to the whole discipline. This article presents a first insight into regional differences in the political opinions of Western, and Eastern social psychologists. Based on the characteristics of intellectuals in Eastern European countries as reproducers of existing structures of dependence, we hypothesised that Eastern European psychologists would not express a “liberal bias” but instead, at least in the domain of economic opinions, that they would support rather conservative political solutions. An empirical study of social psychologists from Hungary, Poland, the USA and the UK supported this hypothesis. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that, despite forming the majority in the field of social psychology, Polish supporters of a free market economy were reluctant to express their views in public. Finally, based on the European Values Survey, we compared the economic attitudes of European social psychologists with the attitudes prevalent in their countries (i.e. Hungary, Poland and the UK). This comparison suggested that Hungarian and Polish social psychologists hold more procapitalist stances on economic issues than the poorest segments of the societies they live in, whereas British social psychologists supported state interventionism to a greater extent than the poorest sections of their society.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled keywords: liberal bias, social psychology, distinction, political opinions
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User: Aleksandra Cichocka
Date Deposited: 07 Jan 2016 21:21 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Dec 2022 13:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/53650 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Cichocka, Aleksandra.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1703-1586
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