Abstract
Research on human sexuality has often been controversial for ideological reasons. During the previous century, the political Right tended to oppose open inquiry on sex-related topics. Recently, however, the Left has at least matched the Right in ideology-based hostility to certain scientific ideas. Here I review my career researching controversial topics including sexual orientation, gender identity, and pedophilia. The intrusion of ideological biases in these areas has invariably been harmful to scholarship and scientific progress.
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Notes
- 1.
The founder of the Reiss Award, Ira Reiss, publicly condemned the SSSS statement. See Cantor (2020), footnote 5.
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Michael Bailey, J. (2023). Ideological Bias in Sex Research. In: Frisby, C.L., Redding, R.E., O'Donohue, W.T., Lilienfeld, S.O. (eds) Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29148-7_29
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