Does Psychology Have A Diversity Problem?

Dr. Helen:

I was reading the National Journal today and found this little tidbit by Neil Munro entitled "Shrink Liberally:"

Everybody knows that the media and academia lean left. But these elites are bipartisan wafflers when compared with psychologists who donate roughly 21 times as much to Democratic candidates and political action committees than Republican ones. According to Opensecrets.org, psychologists gave 526 donations worth $499,982 to Democratic causes and candidates in the '04 and '06 cycles and the '08 cycles to date. In contrast, the shrinks opened their wallets to Republicans only 43 times, and gave just $22,255. Maybe that explains why some conservatives prefer prayer to psychotherapy.

When the APA wonders why more people don't take advantage of all that psychology has to offer, maybe they should understand that the conservative half of America doesn't trust them to be fair or objective. Diversity is a good thing, so maybe psychology needs more political diversity. It could hardly have less.

Here's a graph I made to show the contrast:



Here is another graph from a paper by Dan Klein and Charlotta Stern looking at the political diversity in the humanities and social sciences [PDF]:



I'm pleased to report that economists score the best for political diversity within these professions. (Anthropology and Sociology are even less diverse than psychology.) This leads to a lot of healthy debate amongst economists of differing perspectives and our discipline benefits from it tremendously.
(HT Instapundit)