Thursday, January 21, 2010

Conservatism of Non-Academic Scientists


There's been discussion lately about how "liberal" professors are (at least in North America). For example, this blogpost and the paper by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross. The latter argue that people with liberal political views are more likely to want to become professors. Demographic differences explain 43% of the difference in liberalism between professors and others.

The interesting thing to me is the huge gap between professors and non-academic scientists in the chart. It does makes sense that non-academic social scientists are more liberal than non-academic natural scientists. But non-academic scientists are four times as likely to be conservative as professors and less than half as likely to be liberal.

1 comment:

  1. I saw this. Not entirely tongue-in-cheek, the most interesting bit to me is that bartenders are the most moderate profession. I suppose that in order to be a bartender you need to be non-judgmental, pragmatic and get on with all kinds of people. They do have the same liberal bias as social workers which probably also provides insight into their job.

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