Where did viewpoint diversity come from? In the 2010s, American social psychologists began to argue over how to deal with the fact that most of them were liberals (in the American sense) and looked at human social behavior and cognition through that ideological lens. The quarrel had been triggered by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that, for epistemological reasons, their field needed more political diversity. Only a system of ideological checks and balances would enable them to rein in the otherwise-unquestioned prejudices of the majority.
This intervention represented a challenge to the discipline’s hitherto dominant epistemic value of value neutrality because it requires the identification of researchers with a political stance. Amid the widely discussed replication crisis of psychology and other scientific fields, many of Haidt’s colleagues took seriously the concern that their moral and political biases could be part of the reason that so many of their findings could not be reproduced. The liberal-bias controversy contributed to a larger push for reforming the institutions of science to curb the inherently biased thinking of human beings.
That the proponents of viewpoint diversity focus on science does not mean that their project is free of moral-political views. In fact, their political epistemology is very much rooted in the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and emerged in response to the American culture wars. Part of their political mission is to emphasize scientific knowledge production rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. Beginning in 2015, the nonprofit advocacy group Heterodox Academy carried the demand for more viewpoint diversity into the wider moral economy of higher education.
Before viewpoint diversity came to be fought over as an epistemic value of social psychology, social psychologists had discovered it as an object of study. This happened amid the turmoil of the American culture wars in the 1990s, which shaped the rearticulation of moral psychology as a new subfield of social psychology. Inspired by anthropology, Haidt and others began to compare moral judgments across national cultures and social classes. The primal scene of this new moral psychology was the critique of what began to look like an ethnocentric construction of morality by an earlier generation of developmental psychologists who had reduced morality to the promotion of fairness, prevention of harm, and defense of individual autonomy — a view shared by their European and North American middle-class test subjects but not by Haidt’s lower-class Brazilians, for whom morality also concerned sanctity, loyalty, and authority.