Ideological bias and argument from authority among economists
That is the topic of a new paper by Mohsen Javdani and Ha-Joon Chang, here is part of the abstract:
Using an online randomized controlled experiment involving economists in 19 countries, we examine the effect of ideological bias on views among economists. Participants were asked to evaluate statements from prominent economists on different topics, while source attribution for each statement was randomized without participants’ knowledge. For each statement, participants either received a mainstream source, an ideologically different less-/non-mainstream source, or no source. We find that changing source attributions from mainstream to less-/non-mainstream, or removing them, significantly reduces economists’ reported agreement with statements. This contradicts the image economists have of themselves…
And from the paper:
Consistent with our overall findings, we find that for all but three statements, changing source attributions to a less/non-mainstream source significantly reduces the agreement level. The estimated reductions range from around one-tenth of a standard deviation to around half of a standard deviation.
The largest agreement reduction is for this sentence:
“Economic discourse of any sort — verbal, mathematical, econometric — is rhetoric; that is, an effort to persuade.”
You also can test which kinds of authority reassignation alter the level of agreement. And thus:
We find that the estimated ideological bias among female economists is around 40 percent less than their male counterparts.
The countries where economists exhibit the highest ideological bias are Ireland, Japan, Australia, and Scandinavia, where for Austria, Brazil, and Italy the ideological bias is smallest. South Africa, France, and Italy are most conformist to mainstream opinion.
It is a wordy and poorly written paper, and they don’t consider the possibility that deference to authority perhaps is the rational Bayesian move, not the contrary. Still, it has numerous results of interest. Here is the authors’ blog post on the paper.