How Prevalent is Left-wing Social Desirability Bias?: A Research Proposal
I formulate a hypothesis that left-leaning people suffer from Social Desirability Bias on issues of race and gender and I propose an experiment to evaluate my claim.
This is one of those concepts that is totally obvious but once you put a name to it and stick it in your brain the concept seems to pop up everywhere. I first learned about this through Bryan Caplan’s blog where he highlights many interesting examples.
In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others. It can take the form of over-reporting "good behavior" or under-reporting "bad", or undesirable behavior. The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports. This bias interferes with the interpretation of average tendencies as well as individual differences.1
Good examples of Social Desirability Bias as typically conceived would include:
Survey respondents under-reporting illicit drug use.
Survey respondents under-reporting their level of bigoted beliefs.
Survey respondents over-reporting charitable donations.
Survey respondents over-reporting church attendance.
This poses a problem when surveys are being conducted. People can be systemically misleading about their true attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. More important is the fact that people do this even when a researcher is not there to conduct a survey, most clearly in the political sphere. Do you notice that political speeches are filled with socially desirable nonsense and exaggeration?
The issues of free speech and cancel culture weigh heavily in the mind’s of the right-leaning and moderate-left because it is their speech which is regarded as socially undesirable and is punished with real world consequences like losing one’s job. The issue of virtue signaling seems to be most prevalent on the left because signaling that one is an adherent to leftist thinking affords one social status and praise. At the minimum, it allows one to fit in among their peers. The right wing can attempt to virtue signal their anti-gay marriage or anti-BLM attitudes at their own risk but the most likely outcome is social disapproval from their left-leaning friends or colleagues who are more prone to social shaming by virtue of their psychological profile. The worst outcome is losing one’s job.
The rising “woke” ideology is highly critical of incorrect speech and they do not treat speech code violations lightly. I explained in a previous article:
The far left in the United States, especially those who can be called "woke", consists of a particularly intolerant group of people. This group views the world as entirely unjust. They view all statistical disparities as a reflection of historical or current oppression. They view speech as harm, going so far as to call minor faux pas and seemingly harmless comments "microaggressions." In their language they consistently conflate violence and speech.
The population at large may have some interest in the woke ideology but many follow the social customs and guidelines set out by it in order to get ahead socially or gain status. To be labelled racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and so forth is extremely detrimental to one’s social standing. Right-leaning people feel tired of having these terms used against them. Perhaps they do not feel the sting of facing the accusations like a left-leaning person might, but they do not want to be called these names because of concerns for their social standing.
I believe that left-leaning people are so hyper focused on not being bigoted that they will say socially desirable but clearly incorrect facts. I am proposing an experiment.
Have you heard something like “X% of drivers think they are better than average” where X is a number way larger than 50%? It would be difficult to verify the survey respondents claims about their driving. However this factoid is funny because you do not need to evaluate the drivers individual skills to see that drivers are systemically mistaken about their driving skills. The survey prevents a self-evident analysis of the correctness of people’s views without needing to verify. If they were randomly mistaken, it would balance out to about 50% saying they are better than average.
You could ask something like this to progressives: Are you more racist or sexist or Islamaphobic or whatever than the average self-described progressive? I think you would get way greater than 50%. I think with left-leaning people you may get outlandish numbers on questions about bigotry indicating that people are either:
Not honest in their beliefs. I think this would happen because it is so socially stigmatized. Maybe they laugh at racist jokes or harbor stereotypes but will not want to admit it and are fearful of being asked to clarify.
Engaging in social signaling. When the current ideological hysteria is fashionable, you get people willing to engage in social signaling.
Irrationally over-confident in their virtue. With current hysteria, I would think that people may systematically over predict the racist attitudes of others. Maybe even self-described progressives.
Think they fit their own definition of not racist/sexist/etc. and others violate it. I think that everyone has their own conception of what racist or sexist or homophobic means. Racist seems to be people other than me. As this term of attack loses it’s effect, there has been a movement toward the use of the term Nazi and White-Supremecist, which also lack clear definitions. It is not that they started being used without clear definitions. It is that the terms are used for political purposes and the circle expands until the true definition is no longer the most common usage.
The new development of “all white people are racist” because of contributing to “systemic racism” may be a variable of concern with the term racist. It may soon become socially undesirable to call yourself “not racist” as it is socially undesirable to call yourself “color blind.” These definitions change to serve political ends. George Orwell recognized a similar phenomenon on the use of political language in Politics and The English Language2:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
I think that you could perform this experiment with right-leaning people as well. They might be afraid of the consequences of being honest and they might also suffer from the same biases. We could attempt to measure this and compare. You could ask questions appealing to right-leaning people’s socially desirable traits and see which group conforms to social desirability more. You could see which beliefs are most socially desirable to the population at large as well.
The simple measure would be (% of population who thinks they are better than average) - 50% = error in populations thinking. You could also have someone place themselves on the scale and look at distributions. You could test people’s perception of other people’s perception of how they stand in relation to the average. You could eliminate ambiguity of terms by asking something concrete like “Do you use the racial slur XYZ more or less than the average member of (sample)?” in order to avoid the problem of bad definitions. You could compare groups to see how often they say socially desirable things. I would guess less agreeable people would less frequently fall victim to this bias. You could see how controversy changes over time as certain self-descriptions become less and less desirable.
My overall thesis is that everyone suffers from this problem but left-leaning people would suffer significantly from this bias on questions of race and gender. This article involves a lot of speculation. I would genuinely want to see this experiment conducted or be referred to an experiment of this nature. Comment if you know of one. This study could be conducted cheaply and online by someone with a large audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias
Orwell, George (1946). Politics and the English Language.
I'm almost certain that you're right that this bias would be reflected in any survey you put to people on the left. I do have concerns with the framework in this case though: this is a real effect, true enough, but the analysis and terminology of the heuristics and biases program sort of gets in the way here. Talk about "bias" suggests to me some sort of cognitive error, a failure of rationality if you will, even if the term technically just means "tendency of the system to return output in direction X". The way I see it, the issue here is twofold – I believe the proximal reason for people to give biased answers to questions of this nature comes down to the following:
1. They don't actually know themselves well enough to answer the questions truthfully since the mind seemingly isn't designed for self-awareness and introspective transparency
2. They are very likely to substitute the factual question ("Are you more/less biased than the average person?") for a normative one ("Are you a better/worse human being than the average person?") or a question about their current emotional state ("How do you feel about the idea that you may be biased?") and then proceed to answer that question as truthfully as they can
People in general have a strong aversion to seeing themselves as morally inferior and the purpose of a "self-image" is not to portray yourself as accurately as possible but to make the best impression possible, i.e. the whole idea of a stable self with certain fixed characteristics is to a large degree about signalling, which results in precisely this type of self-serving bias in self-appraisal.
So, in short the most economical explanation for this bias is simply that people aren't aware that they are in error and aren't even trying to be factually accurate in the first place. Framing it as a bias might give the impression that they are trying and failing to give factually correct responses whereas I believe they are rather succeeding at a separate task, namely to (truthfully) signal their moral status to the questioner.
You might be interested in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmatched_count technique used in "Do Americans Really Support Black Athletes Who Kneel During the National Anthem? Estimating the True Prevalence and Strength of Sensitive Racial Attitudes in the Context of Sport " study https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/21674795211019670