A lot of those modern 'personality tests' for bias are really just recycled employment laws from the 70s.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
The Recoding of Harm, Fairness, and Justice: How a Legal and Moral Transformation Distorted Social Psychology's Understanding of Political Disagreement
SSRN · 6434759
The Takeaway
The paper argues that social psychology 'pathologizes' conservative political views by baking a 1971 Supreme Court ruling (Griggs v. Duke Power) into its scientific definitions. Because the metrics define any 'disparate outcome' as proof of a moral defect, they make political disagreements look like psychological disorders by default.
From the abstract
<p>Six influential constructs in political and moral psychology—authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, system justification, belief in a just world, implicit bias, and moral foundations theory—share a structural feature: each reclassifies conservative positions as psychological pathology by treating a contested premise as settled. That premise is that disparate outcomes constitute evidence of discrimination. This paper traces how this premise entered psychology's measurement instruments