Overview of Chapter 3: What Free Speech Can Learn from Social Science
Social science research has provided many insights into the study of free speech. Two findings that are especially relevant to campus controversies are (1) what people say about issues related to free speech and (2) why they hold the views they do. The first two sections in this chapter follow from these findings.
For the first section, we rely on various reputable polls to show that the public (including students) values free speech in the abstract; free speech rivals privacy and equality in salience.7 Digging below the surface, though, the data reveal high variation in reactions to free speech in practice. For example, although most college students affirm that free expression is an important value, their views shift substantially when asked about hate speech—defined in the survey as “attacks on people based on their race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” Only about half of the students believe that such speech should be protected by the First Amendment. And party identification intensifies this divide: just thirty-five percent of Democratic students think hate speech should be protected, compared to nearly double the percentage of Republican students (sixty-five percent) who would protect hate speech from regulation or punishment.8
Why the difference between support for free speech in theory and in practice? And why the divide between Republicans and Democrats? The second section of the chapter turns to explanations. Chiefly, they center on in-group bias or favoritism—a phenomenon that psychologists have long noticed in experimental research. In the free speech context, the idea is that we humans tend to be more supportive of policies advocated by members of our own group (or “team”).
Seen through the lens of in-group bias, results about the differences between how Republican and Democratic students respond to different kinds of speech are unsurprising: the findings imply that we are less committed to free expression as a value than we are to the speech itself, favoring expression we like and disfavoring expression we don’t like.
This section of the chapter draws on social science examples of in-group bias over free speech disputes—and not just for students and other members of the public. It turns out that in-group bias also afflicts judges when they make decisions in First Amendment disputes. Like the public, they, too, respond to the ideological content of the speech, such that liberal/Democratic judges tend to support liberal speech and conservatives/Republicans, conservative speech.
Almost needless to say, in-group bias in free speech judgments is so universal that it is likely to hamper the ability of students and professors alike to analyze free speech controversies dispassionately. For this reason, the final section of the chapter ends with strategies recommended by psychologists for neutralizing bias, such as being aware of the susceptibility to bias.
7See Figure 3-4 in Chapter 3. All raw data used in the book will be housed on the companion website, along with a tool that enables users to analyze the data and make tables and charts.
8Knight Foundation-Ipsos, College Student Views on Free Expression and Campus Speech 2024 24 (2024), https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Knight-Fdn_Free-Expression_2024_072424_FINAL-1.pdf