Censorship on Campuses

Modern Western societies conceive universities as places for open inquiry and relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, many scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses. The present investigation tested whether people have heightened desires to censor information on campuses that is perceived as threatening to group equality or reinforcing of status hierarchies—specifically, information that portrays low-status groups unfavorably. Across four samples from three countries (U.S. adults and three college-aged samples in the U.S., U.K., and Hungary; total n=1,616) and three domains of group differences, we found that people were more censorious of information that portrays lower status groups unfavorably (women, Black people, Muslims) than identical information that portrays higher status groups unfavorably (men, White people, Christians). We also found that these differential standards in censorship preferences increased as participants were more politically liberal, likely reflecting Liberals’ greater aversion to inequality and protectiveness toward low-status groups. Such patterns (especially in conjunction with other recent work) challenge the conventional wisdom that evaluative biases generally _harm_ low-status groups and _reinforce_ existing hierarchies. Instead, in modern Western societies, at least in recent years, biases in information evaluations seem designed to _help_ low-status groups and _eliminate_ or _reverse _existing hierarchies.