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IDEOLOGICAL BIAS IN PSYCHOLOGY / Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall 1978)

Joseph Adelson, Guest Editor
Arien Mack, Journal Editor

The author explains that Catherine Stimpson, editor of Signs, a journal devoted to women’s studies, finds herself on a slippery slope—many of us are on that slippery slope, one gets there by addressing “relevant” or value-laden topics, and one must thereupon learn to keep one’s footing, by which the author asserts an attempt for objectivity.

persuasive arguments drawing on evidence from child development, psychopathology, and early-education research have been advanced on both sides of the debate between home rearing and child day care. Positions have become polarized and the issue of daycare is now a controversial one.

Psychologists have confounded the scientific and theological views, and have turned psychology into the secular religion of our times. The author is referring to a very influential minority of humanistic community and the social psychologists.

Sentimentality is recognizable in psychotherapy whenever the therapy imposes a simplified language on experience. This language, invented for the therapy, is then used in the currency of therapeutic exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the prevailing ideologies of American social psychology. The authors define social psychology broadly to include both the academic specialty and those aspects of clinical and developmental psychology that have social implications. Especially important here are theories of socialization and moral development—the metaethics and unstated assumptions pervading this area of research reveal most clearly the dominant ideological orientations of the current research enterprise.

Examines the influence of ideology on social scientists' empirical research into the 1960s student movement during and immediately after that period.

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