Support for Campus Censorship

Many scholars conceive modern Western universities as places for open inquiry and relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, some 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, U.S. college-aged adults, undergraduates at a U.K. university, and undergraduates at a Hungarian university; total n=1,616) and three domains of group differences, we found that people were more censorious of statements that portray lower status groups unfavorably (women, Black people, Muslims) than otherwise identical statements that portray higher status groups unfavorably (men, White people, Christians). We also found that these differential standards in censorship preferences increased as participants self-identified as more politically liberal, perhaps reflecting Liberals’ greater aversion to inequality and protectiveness toward low-status groups. Such patterns (especially in conjunction with other recent work finding similar patterns) challenge the conventional wisdom that evaluative biases generally _harm_ low-status groups and _reinforce_ existing hierarchies. Our results suggest instead that, at least in recent years in modern Western societies, biases in information evaluations seem designed to _help_ low-status groups and to _eliminate_ or _reverse _existing hierarchies.