4: Political & Politicized Psychology

Identify criteria that can be used to gauge the impact of moral and political objectives on psychological research programs.

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Political versus politicized psychology: Are value neutrality and objectivity obsolete ideals? This series of articles identifies criteria that can be used to gauge the impact of moral and political objectives on psychological research programs that are ostensibly dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of the truth. Several articles also explore the difficulties of drawing sharp fact-value distinctions and the resulting threats that arise to the value-neutrality and objectivity of knowledge claims in behavioral and social science (with special reference to work on racial policy reasoning and on foreign policy preferences). Finally, a subset of articles goes beyond "cursing the darkness" to "lighting candles" -- to identifying conceptual and methodological strategies for checking creeping politicization. These strategies include turnabout thought experiments (that are often readily translatable into actual experiments in the laboratory or in representative-sample surveys), the development of Q-sort techniques for translating case studies into standardized data languages with common metrics, and adopting a posture of constructive ambiguity in evaluating styles of reasoning in individuals and groups (recognizing the ease with which partisans can affix negative or positive value spins to a given pattern of reasoning or to its opposite).

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