New research exposes the ideologies of economists: Suggesting that economics is anything other than a rigorously objective and deeply scientific discipline can generate quite the controversy among economists. Even after the failure to predict the 2008 financial crisis — for which neoclassical economics was criticized for being too hierarchical, prescribed, and dismissive of alternate perspectives — the mainstream has continued to claim a fervent commitment to neutrality. But research published earlier this year by Mohsen Javdani, associate economics professor at the University of British Columbia, and Ha-Joon Chang, professor at Cambridge University, calls these claims into question, and provides strong evidence for a pervasive ideological groupthink within the discipline.

Smith or Marx? Javdani and Chang surveyed 2,400 economists across 19 countries (92% of which held PhDs) in which respondents were asked to either agree or disagree with 15 statements made by famous economists. The trick? The researchers randomly changed the author of the quote without their knowledge to test whether the mere attribution of a name would alter their opinion on the statement. Quotes made by Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, for example, were misattributed to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in a bid to detect underlying prejudices. Other participants meanwhile were not given a source attribution, and had to evaluate the statement without knowing its author.

“Strong ideological bias”: The results suggest that ideology does indeed have a tendency to displace scientific objectivity among economists. Respondents were less likely to agree with a statement attributed to a non-mainstream source, and more likely to agree with quotes attributed to Kenneth Arrow and David Levine — regardless of its content. A large majority (82%) of respondents said that a statement should only be evaluated by content rather than author, suggesting that many have a genuine inability to acknowledge underlying biases. Interesting too, is that — despite the overwhelming dominance of neoclassical doctrine in the mainstream — randomized source attributions produced a definite lack of consensus over theory and policy.