On September 7, 2011, Tilburg University issued a press release. Diederik Stapel (b. 1966), professor of cognitive social psychology, dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a star who published in Science and appeared on Dutch television, had used fictitious data in his publications. Three junior researchers had gathered their courage and gone over his head. Stapel ran his lab on charm and intimidation, and doubting his numbers meant doubting the most celebrated man in the building. The students went anyway. Within weeks the fraud unraveled. Fifty-eight papers came down. Investigators concluded that the failure ran deeper than one liar. The field tolerated small samples, flexible analysis, and results too good to be true. The final report described a general neglect of scientific standards from bottom to top.
One year later, in 2012, a new assistant professor arrived in Stapel’s old department. Mark J. Brandt came from Chicago with a fresh PhD from DePaul University, a school that does not appear on lists of elite psychology programs, following a BA from Concordia University Chicago, a small Lutheran college in River Forest, Illinois. He had no famous adviser to trade on and no Ivy League line on his vita. He walked into a Dutch department that had just fired its most famous member and now had to decide what kind of science it wanted to do.
The timing shaped a career. There is no evidence that the Stapel affair converted Brandt to anything. His methodological instincts predate his arrival. But he built his reputation during the years when social psychology conducted its public reckoning, and the two projects that define him, the substantive one and the methodological one, turn out to be the same project. Both ask a question that sounds like an insult and functions as a research design: how do you know you sampled fairly?
Brandt is now an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, where he directs the Belief Systems Laboratory. Since January 2025 he has served with Elizabeth Suhay of American University as co-editor-in-chief of Political Psychology, the journal of the International Society of Political Psychology. In the first half of 2026 he held a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, working on how threatening life experiences change, or fail to change, political beliefs. His work has drawn more than 27,000 citations. The man from the small Lutheran college now helps decide what counts as knowledge in his field.
His research answers a question most people believe they can answer without research. What happens when a person meets a group that violates his values?
For decades the discipline had a settled answer, and the answer had a politics. The dominant program, associated with John Jost (b. 1968) of New York University, held that conservatism appeals to people with stronger needs for order, certainty, and closure, greater sensitivity to threat, and greater resistance to change. On this account, prejudice, dogmatism, and motivated reasoning cluster on the right because the conservative mind is built to produce them. The literature supporting this view was large, and much of it was sound as far as it went. Conservatives do score somewhat higher on self-reported dogmatism, preference for order, and resistance to change.
Brandt noticed something about how far it went. Consider the surveys behind the prejudice findings. A respondent in Ohio sits with a questionnaire and a feeling thermometer. She rates atheists, feminists, gay men, environmentalists, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants. If she is conservative and Christian, she rates several of these groups cold, and the correlation between conservatism and prejudice appears in the data. The questionnaire rarely asks her liberal neighbor to rate Christian fundamentalists, businessmen, the military, opponents of abortion. The instrument samples the enemies of one side.
Graduate students learn to call this a confound. Brandt and his collaborators, Jarret Crawford, John Chambers, Geoffrey Wetherell, and his old adviser Christine Reyna, called it the target selection problem, and in 2014 they built the ideological-conflict hypothesis on it. Broaden the list of target groups and the picture changes. Conservatives express hostility toward groups they perceive as liberal. Liberals express hostility toward groups they perceive as conservative. Ideological distance predicts the hostility better than the target's social status and better than whether membership in the group is chosen. Each side runs the same engine and points it at different people.
The hypothesis gets flattened into a slogan, both sides are equally prejudiced, and the slogan misstates it. Brandt has never established equality and his later work explains why the claim fails. What he established is narrower and harder to escape. You cannot measure the prejudice of one coalition using only the sacred objects of that coalition. Any study of intolerance that samples targets from one side of the political field measures ideology twice and calls the second measurement science.
Where the hostility comes from turned out to be the more revealing question. In work with Wetherell and Reyna, Brandt found that people on both sides were willing to discriminate against ideologically distant groups, and that the willingness ran through perceived value violation. The respondent does not reject the group as strange. He rejects it as dangerous to something he holds sacred. For conservatives the violated values cluster around tradition, religion, loyalty, and social order. For liberals they cluster around harm, fairness, and equality. In each case the target stops being a fellow citizen with different opinions and becomes a moral threat.
The symmetry has limits, and Brandt keeps the limits in view. Liberal commitments to universalism sometimes restrain discrimination even against disliked groups. Conservative traditionalism sometimes licenses it, while conservative self-reliance can restrain it. The engine is shared. The moral content that governs the engine differs, and content decides what people do with their hostility. A creed of universal rights and a creed of purity and hierarchy channel the same impulse toward different acts.
In 2017 Brandt did something rare in his field. He made himself falsifiable. “Predicting Ideological Prejudice,” published in Psychological Science, used American National Election Studies data to build a quantitative model. Feed in the perceived ideology of a target group and the model predicts the direction and approximate size of prejudice toward it from across the spectrum. As a group is seen as more liberal, conservative warmth toward it drops on a predictable slope. As a group is seen as more conservative, liberal warmth drops on the mirror slope. Perceived ideology beat perceived status and perceived choice as a predictor. The model could be wrong in public, about direction and about magnitude, and that was the point. A theory that explains every result after it appears explains nothing.
Religion gave him his cleanest test case, and it is the one nearest his own origins, whatever those origins mean to him. He does not discuss his beliefs in his published work. He was trained at a college of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a denomination that holds to biblical inerrancy, and he went on to study religious fundamentalism as a psychologist rather than a critic. His master's thesis at DePaul examined how religious distinctions shape perceptions of other people's humanity. Early work with Reyna argued that fundamentalism supplies certainty, coherence, and closure, which helps explain its association with prejudice toward groups that challenge its moral order. So far, the standard story.
Then he ran the study the standard story never ran. With Daryl Van Tongeren he compared people high and low in religious fundamentalism, sampling targets on both sides of the religious divide. Fundamentalists disliked groups that challenged traditional religion. Secular respondents disliked fundamentalists and groups associated with them, at magnitudes the old literature never looked for because it never asked. Unbelief confers no exemption from the psychology of the sacred. The atheist defending science against creationists and the creationist defending Genesis against atheists are, at the level of process, doing the same thing. At the level of institutions they are not, and Brandt says so. Hostility toward a powerful church differs in its consequences from hostility toward a small sect, and doctrine embedded in institutions can regulate lives in ways private disbelief cannot.
The relationship with Jost's program deserves care, because Brandt is often cast as Jost's opposite and the casting misleads. Brandt accepts the reproducible average differences. His objection targets the leap from average dispositional differences to the claim that motivated reasoning and intolerance are properties of the right. He separates two questions the older literature merged. Does one side score higher on general measures of rigidity? Sometimes, modestly, conservatives do. Does one side defend its commitments when challenged, accept congenial evidence, follow partisan cues, avoid opposing views? Both do, and studies claiming otherwise have a habit of failing when someone tries them again. With Thomas Collins and Crawford, Brandt reported unsuccessful replications of findings that conservatives were especially prone to avoid cognitive dissonance.
His mature position appears in the 2025 Annual Review of Psychology chapter written with Nour Kteily of Northwestern, a shared-authorship survey of the entire terrain: values, personality, rigidity, threat sensitivity, authoritarianism, misinformation, empathy, prejudice, violence. Their conclusion resists both camps. People across the divide are more similar than scholars appreciate, and differences remain, in values, in authoritarian expression, in information environments, in which groups get targeted. Whether an asymmetry appears depends on what you measure, on which ideological dimension you examine, and on whether your design threatens both sides in comparable ways. Call it conditional similarity. It sells no books. It fits the data.
The chapter also preserves a distinction the symmetry debate keeps losing. Similar psychology does not produce equivalent politics. A cold rating on a thermometer is one thing. Exclusion from employment, education, or citizenship is another, and groups differ in their capacity to convert hostility into consequences. They differ in size, resources, institutional access, and command of state power. Brandt's framework requires studying people symmetrically while refusing to assume that political reality is symmetric. The capacity for dogmatism is widely distributed. Who gets harmed by it is a question of history and power.
His second research program starts from a different failure of the standard approach. Attitude research studies opinions one at a time, as if a man's view of immigration developed in a sealed room, apart from his views on crime, welfare, religion, and the two parties. Brandt models beliefs as networks. Attitudes and identities are nodes. Relationships among them are edges. Some beliefs sit at the center, holding many others in place. Some sit at the edge, connected to little.
The finding that emerged from this work, in research with Chris Sibley and Danny Osborne using centrality measures, reverses the folk model of the citizen. Party loyalties, ideological labels, and attachments to political groups sit nearer the center of most belief networks than positions on any policy. The policies orbit the identity. A voter opposes a program because the other party proposes it more often than he joins a party after reasoning through its programs. Philip Converse (1928-2014) asked half a century ago whether ordinary citizens have coherent belief systems at all. Brandt's answer replaces the yes-or-no question with measurement: here is how organized this person's beliefs are, here is what sits at the center, here is how a change in one place propagates or fails to propagate. Experiments with Felicity Turner-Zwinkels confirmed the propagation. Move a targeted attitude and the movement spreads to its near neighbors in the network and dies before reaching the far ones. Later work found that central attitudes resist change over time, held in place by their many connections, the way a well-anchored post resists a shove that would topple a loose one.
The practical reading is short. Persuasion aimed at a peripheral policy stays where it lands. Persuasion aimed at a central identity might reorganize a worldview, or might trigger the immune response, because the central belief holds up too much to be surrendered at a stranger's request.
His third program tests the oldest claim in political psychology, that threat drives people to the right. The claim survives on its vagueness. Threat covers job loss, terrorism, disease, divorce, bereavement, exclusion, and these are different experiences that touch different beliefs. Using World Values Survey data on more than 60,000 people across 56 countries and territories, Brandt and his collaborators found that the threat-politics relationship depends on the threat, the belief, and the country. Economic fear can push people toward the economic left, toward the welfare protections that answer it. Fear of violence correlates with culturally right-wing positions. No general drift rightward appears.
Then history ran the experiment no review board would approve. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived as a massive, sudden, worldwide threat, and Brandt's team had fine-grained American attitude data running before, through, and after its onset: 84 political attitudes, repeated cross-sections totaling more than 230,000 respondents, plus a panel. Threat perceptions jumped. The attitudes mostly held. Changes were small, concentrated in domains touching the crisis, and rarely matched what the grand theories predicted. A historic emergency wrote almost nothing on the supposedly threat-sensitive political mind, because the mind was not blank. People routed the pandemic through the party loyalties and moral commitments they already had, and the same virus confirmed opposite worldviews. His NIAS project extends the program, mapping which experiences move which political domains, and whether personal crises like bereavement and job loss work through different channels than collective ones like recession and terror. His findings to date counsel low expectations. Adult political belief is stable, and even severe experience tends to produce selective adjustment rather than conversion.
Beneath all three programs runs the methodological commitment, and here the Tilburg years return. Brandt joined the Open Science Collaboration and the Many Labs replication projects. With coauthors he published the replication recipe, practical standards for reproducing a study so that the result means something: faithful method, adequate power, analyses specified in advance, everything reported. He helped build the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which turns undergraduate methods courses into contributors to coordinated replication research, training students in the habits the Stapel generation never learned. And he has pressed the critique past statistics into theory. He and his colleagues catalog what they call questionable theoretical practices: theories defined loosely enough to fit any result, convenient examples presented as confirmation, moderators invented after a replication fails. A theory managed this way cannot lose, which means it cannot win.
The connection to his substantive work is direct. Claims about liberal and conservative psychology change with the stimuli. Choose targets one side hates, and that side looks prejudiced. Choose threats that map to one side's issues, and threat appears to drive people toward the other. Sampling is not a technicality in this field. It is where the politics gets in.
The discipline has noticed. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology gave Brandt its SAGE Young Scholar Award in 2018. The International Society of Political Psychology gave him the Jim Sidanius Early Career Award in 2021, the year the worldview-conflict research he built with Crawford also received the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize. The editorship of Political Psychology followed. He and Suhay took over manuscript processing in January 2025 with an agenda of transparency, registered reports, structured critical exchange, and broader international participation. The journal sits between two disciplines that distrust each other's methods, psychologists with their laboratory experiments and political scientists with their institutions and power, and Brandt's own work has spent fifteen years connecting the levels, individual perception to group hierarchy, personal attitude to party system, private fear to national context.
What he offers, in the end, is a colder and more useful map of political hatred than either partisan story. Prejudice grows from the perception that another group threatens the values holding a worldview together, and that perception is available to everyone. Beliefs persist because they are woven into networks of identity and loyalty, and crises rarely rewrite the networks. More evidence fails against a belief that carries a person's identity, condemning the other side's intolerance leaves your own invisible to you, and treating ideology as a fixed personality type ignores the groups and institutions that give it content. None of this cures polarization. It explains, with unusual restraint for a field that once loved elegant universal claims, why the popular cures fail.
Three students at Tilburg doubted a star and were right. The lesson Brandt's career draws from that year is not about one fraud. Check the sample. Check it especially when the finding flatters the people doing the checking.
Notes
Tilburg suspended Stapel in September 2011 for using fictitious data, with the rector forming the Levelt committee. Retraction count: 58 publications retracted by 2015. The whistleblowers and Stapel’s status: three young Tilburg researchers exposed him, and his star standing plus his habit of stamping out dissent deterred doubters. The systemic finding: the panels found neglect of scientific standards from bottom to top and a sloppy research culture. Sources: Retraction Watch, Science, and the British Psychological Society.
Career facts: BA Concordia University Chicago 2007, MA and PhD DePaul 2010 and 2012, assistant then associate professor at Tilburg 2012-2020, then Michigan State. Citations: over 27,000 on Google Scholar. Sources: Brandt CV, Google Scholar, and TBS Laboratory.
Editorship: Brandt and Elizabeth Suhay are editors-in-chief of Political Psychology, and the new team began processing manuscripts January 13, 2025. Source: ISPP journal announcement.
NIAS: theme group fellow, semester 2 of 2025-2026. The project title “A Comprehensive Map of the Threat-Politics Relationship”.
Annual Review chapter: Kteily and Brandt, 2025, volume 76, pages 501-529, reviewing dispositions, information processing, and interpersonal behavior, concluding people across the divide are more similar than scholars appreciate, and the lab lists it as shared authorship. Sources: Annual Review of Psychology and TBS Laboratory.
COVID study: 84 political attitudes, 8 threats, N=232,684 cross-sectional plus a 552-person panel; changes were small and rarely matched theoretical predictions. Source: UBC colloquium page.
Central attitudes resist change: panel and experimental studies found central attitudes more stable and more resistant, though similarly persuadable. Source: ResearchGate publication list.
Key papers for your citation trail: Brandt, “Predicting Ideological Prejudice,” Psychological Science 2017; Brandt, Sibley, and Osborne, “What Is Central to Political Belief System Networks,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2019; Brandt and Sleegers, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2021; Brandt and Crawford, “Worldview Conflict and Prejudice,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 2020. All are listed at TBS Laboratory publications.
Extrapolations you can keep without a link. Concordia University Chicago as a small Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod college in River Forest is standard fact; the inference that Brandt lacked an elite pipeline is self-evident from the CV. The Ohio respondent with the feeling thermometer is a composite of how ANES prejudice items work, not a specific person. The line that Brandt does not discuss his own religious beliefs in his published work is accurate as far as I can find, but it is a claim about absence. I gave Jost‘s birth year as 1968 from general knowledge. Stapel’s 1966 and Converse‘s 1928-2014 are confirmed.
Current Directions in Psychological Science. The full cite: “The Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis: Intolerance Among Both Liberals and Conservatives,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 27-34.
The Revaluation: Mark Brandt and the Currency of Scientific Capital
In the winter of 2000, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) stood before his audience at the Collège de France and turned his instruments on science itself. He had spent forty years arguing that every social arena runs on struggle, that art, religion, law, and the academy each constitute a field where players compete for capital the field alone can mint. Now, dying, he asked the question his critics had waited for. If science is a field of interested struggle like the others, why believe anything it produces? The lectures became his last book, Science of Science and Reflexivity, and his answer holds the key to a career that began nine years later in Chicago and passed through the wreckage of Dutch social psychology.
Bourdieu's answer, in short: the scientific field is a struggle like the others, with one structural peculiarity. The stake is the monopoly of scientific authority, and in a field with high autonomy the only weapons the game accepts are demonstrations. To beat a rival you must mobilize methods, data, and proofs that the rival's allies can check. Interest drives the players; the rules of the field launder interest into knowledge. When autonomy fails, when standing can be won through charm, volume, or friends in the press, the laundering stops, and the field produces careers instead of truth.
Begin, then, with the capital. In 2011 Diederik Stapel held nearly every form the field of social psychology could issue. Institutional capital: full professor and dean at Tilburg University. Symbolic capital: papers in Science, prizes, a reputation as the man with the golden touch. Social capital: co-authors and doctoral students across two continents, a Dutch press that called him for comment on the news of the day. His findings had the exact quality the field then paid for. They were counterintuitive, tidy, and telegenic. Thinking about meat makes people selfish. Messy environments make people discriminate. The market price of such results was high, and Stapel manufactured them, because the field, as then constituted, assayed the coin by its shine.
The same year, a graduate student at DePaul University finished a dissertation on whether psychological dispositions carry fixed political meanings. Mark Brandt held almost no capital of any kind. His BA came from Concordia University Chicago, a small Lutheran college in River Forest. DePaul granted respectable degrees that opened no doors by themselves. His adviser, Christine Reyna, ran a serious lab, and no network of elite placement ran through it. In Bourdieu's terms, Brandt entered the field without inherited position, and entrants without inherited position face a standard choice. They can pursue a succession strategy, playing the established game and waiting decades for their turn, or a subversion strategy, attacking the going definition of excellence and betting the field can be made to change its price list.
The bet only pays when the price list is already cracking. Brandt's timing, which he did not choose, put him at the crack.
Three publications in 2011 did to psychology's currency what a bank run does to a currency of the older kind. Daryl Bem (b. 1938) published evidence for precognition in the field's flagship journal, using the field's standard methods, which meant the standard methods could prove anything. Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn published “False-Positive Psychology,” showing that ordinary analytic flexibility let a researcher find significance for absurd claims. And Tilburg suspended Stapel, whose fraud had passed every checkpoint the field maintained for fifteen years. The three cases differed in culpability and agreed in implication. The counterintuitive finding in the glamour journal, the asset on which thousands of careers were built, had no reliable backing. The Levelt inquiry made the systemic point official: the failure ran from bottom to top, through reviewers who liked results tidy and journals that printed what was too good to be true.
What followed was a revaluation, and Bourdieu supplies the vocabulary the participants lacked. A reform faction, centered on figures like Brian Nosek and institutionalized in the Center for Open Science from 2013, moved to demonetize the old capital and mint new denominations: preregistration, direct replication, open data, open code, large collaborative samples. The Reproducibility Project delivered the devaluation notice in 2015, reporting that of one hundred published psychology findings, roughly a third replicated. Incumbents rich in the old currency experienced what Bourdieu calls hysteresis, the lag of a habitus trained for a game that no longer exists. Men who had spent twenty years perfecting the elegant small-sample study woke to find their skill reclassified as a questionable research practice. Some adapted. Some spent the decade writing indignant commentaries, which is what hysteresis sounds like in print.
Robert Merton (1910-2003) had described the norms such reforms invoke, communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and treated them as the working ethos of science. Bourdieu's amendment, in the 1975 paper that founded his sociology of science, was that the norms double as weapons. Players invoke the official values of the field against rivals whose position depends on quietly violating them, and this interested invocation, whatever its motives, can force the field toward its own professed standards. The replication movement is the amendment enacted. The reformers did not import foreign values into psychology. They took the field's Mertonian catechism, which every incumbent had recited in every methods course, and presented the bill.
Brandt arrived at Tilburg in 2012, one year after the suspension, a new assistant professor in the department that had employed the fraud. He bought the new currency at issue price. He joined the Open Science Collaboration and the Many Labs projects, the large multi-site efforts that made replication a genre rather than an insult. In 2014 he led “The Replication Recipe,” a widely cited standard for what makes a replication convincing: faithful method, adequate power, analyses fixed in advance, everything reported. He helped build the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which converts undergraduate methods courses into replication engines, reproducing the new habitus in the next generation, which is how a revaluation becomes permanent. A newcomer with nothing invested in the old assets lost nothing in their collapse and held early positions in the new ones. By the time preregistration badges appeared on journal covers, the man from Concordia held a portfolio.
That is the first layer, and if it were the only layer Brandt might merely be a well-timed methodologist. The second layer concerns what he did with the new capital, and here Bourdieu's account of autonomy and its limits does its best work.
No scientific field floats free. Each sits inside the field of power and imports pressures from it, and psychology imports politics through the composition of its producers, who sit, by every survey, almost entirely on the left. From this population had come a doxa, a background certainty too obvious to defend: rigidity, intolerance, and motivated reasoning belong to the right. The certainty rested on a large literature, and the literature rested on an unexamined practice. Researchers measured prejudice against atheists, feminists, and gay men, the sacred objects of one coalition, and rarely against fundamentalists, businessmen, and soldiers, the sacred objects of the other. The instrument sampled one side's enemies and the field mistook its own political homogeneity for a finding about conservative minds. Nobody conspired. Doxa needs no conspiracy. It needs only a room where everyone shares the same blind spot and no one's career depends on naming it.
Heterodoxy against a doxa can travel two roads, and the two roads illustrate Bourdieu's central claim about autonomous fields. The first road runs outward, toward the public. A critic can convert scientific standing into public capital, denounce the discipline's politics in the press, found organizations, address donors and legislators. Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) took a version of this road with the Heterodox Academy, and the road has a known toll: the field discounts the capital of members who appeal over its head, whatever the merits, because such appeals attack the field's autonomy, its jealously guarded right to judge its own products. The second road runs inward. The critic frames the heterodox claim in the field's most autonomous language, method, and forces colleagues to answer it on ground where their own professed rules bind them.
Brandt took the second road without detour. The ideological-conflict hypothesis, built with Crawford, Chambers, Wetherell, and Reyna, never argued that psychology discriminates against conservatives. It argued that the prejudice literature had a target selection problem, a sampling error, the kind of error the replication movement had just spent three years teaching the field to fear. The timing made the two projects one. Having helped raise the field's methodological anxiety, Brandt directed the anxiety at the field's most politically comfortable literature. A reviewer who had accepted preregistration and adequate power had already accepted the premise that convenient sampling corrupts inference, and could not reject the ideological-conflict papers without rejecting the reform he had just endorsed. The heterodoxy arrived dressed in the new orthodoxy's own uniform. In 2017 Brandt pressed the advantage with the move the new regime paid best: a quantitative model of ideological prejudice, published with its predictions exposed, falsifiable in public. Under the old currency a finding gained value by surprising the reader. Under the new one it gained value by risking failure, and Brandt's model risked failure about the doxa itself.
Consecration followed, in the sequence Bourdieu's studies of academic careers describe. The SAGE Young Scholar Award in 2018 marked him as legitimate. The International Society of Political Psychology's early career award in 2021, and the theory prize for the worldview-conflict program the same year, marked the heterodoxy itself as legitimate, the field absorbing its challenger, which is how fields survive. The Annual Review chapter with Nour Kteily in 2025 belongs to a consecrated genre: the invitation-only synthesis, the text through which a field announces what it now believes, assigned to authors it now trusts. And in January 2025 came the form of capital that stands above the others because it issues them. Brandt became co-editor-in-chief of Political Psychology with Elizabeth Suhay. An editor consecrates. He decides which manuscripts enter the record, which methods count as sound, which young researchers acquire the line on the vita that Brandt himself once lacked. Thirteen years separate the unconsecrated arrival at Tilburg from the desk where the field's judgments get made. Bourdieu spent Homo Academicus mapping how long that road runs for men without inherited position. It runs shorter during a revaluation, for those who hold the new currency early.
A Bourdieusian reading owes its subject the reflexive turn, and two questions survive the celebration. The first concerns the new regime. Orthodoxies do not end; they rotate. Preregistration and open data now function as badge capital, and badge capital can be gamed as shine once was, preregistrations written loosely, registered predictions quietly outrun by the prose. The reform generation now holds the editorships and the prize committees, and its convenient beliefs will be tacit to it, as target selection was tacit to the generation before. Where the new blind spot sits is a question Brandt's own method says someone outside the current distribution of capital will answer.
The second question cuts closer. Conditional similarity, the position Brandt and Kteily defend, that the two sides share psychological machinery while differing in values, targets, and institutional power, happens to be the position that maximizes standing with every audience at once. It concedes enough asymmetry to keep the left-leaning field, enough symmetry to draw citations from the field's critics, enough complexity to fill an Annual Review chapter. A cynic reads the position as portfolio management. Bourdieu declines the cynicism, and his reason is the argument of the deathbed lectures. In a field with restored autonomy, the strategy that maximizes standing is the strategy that survives checking, because checking is what the field now pays for. Brandt's position holds across audiences because he built it from representative targets, exposed predictions, and replications that others could run, and interest and evidence point, for the moment, in the same direction. That alignment is not a personal virtue. It is what a scientific field produces when its currency is sound, and it is the outcome Bourdieu, turning his sociology of struggle on his own trade in the last winters of his life, argued was worth the struggle to secure.
The field did not reward Brandt despite his lack of inherited capital. It rewarded him because a collapse had wiped out the inherited capital of others, and he held the only assets the new regime honored: methods anyone could audit, and a willingness to be wrong in public. Stapel's currency needed the field's trust and could not survive its scrutiny. Brandt's needs the scrutiny and cannot survive without it.
Notes
Structure. The essay runs one argument through two layers. Layer one: the replication crisis as a revaluation of scientific capital, with Brandt entering at the crack and buying the new currency at issue price. Layer two: the rigidity-of-the-right literature as doxa in a politically homogeneous producer field, and Brandt’s heterodoxy succeeding because it wore the new orthodoxy’s uniform. The frame Bourdieu texts doing the work: “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason” (1975, Social Science Information) for capital, autonomy, and norms-as-weapons; Homo Academicus (1984) for consecration and career time; Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004, from the 2000-2001 Collège de France lectures) for the deathbed question and the answer that closes the essay. Merton comes in once, as the man whose norms Bourdieu reweaponized, which is the scholarly lineage and lets you cite both authorities.
Scenes and status details. Bourdieu’s last lectures open the essay; the closing returns there so the frame brackets the subject. Stapel‘s 2011 portfolio and Brandt‘s 2011 empty portfolio are set side by side as the two positions before the crash. The consecration sequence, SAGE 2018, ISPP and Wegner 2021, Annual Review 2025, editorship January 2025, is arranged as Bourdieu arranges academic careers, ending on the desk that issues capital to others.
The reflexive section. Bourdieu without reflexivity is hagiography with jargon, so the essay asks the two questions the frame demands: what the new regime’s badge capital conceals, and whether conditional similarity is portfolio management. I resolved the second with Bourdieu’s own late argument rather than a verdict of my own, which keeps it analysis rather than character reference. If you think the resolution is too generous to Brandt, the cut point is the sentence beginning “Bourdieu declines the cynicism”; everything after can end harder.
Sources beyond the ones already given in this thread. Bourdieu 1975: “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason”. Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity/University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bem, “Feeling the Future,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011. Simmons, Nelson, Simonsohn, “False-Positive Psychology,” Psychological Science, 2011. Open Science Collaboration, “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” Science, 2015, the 36 percent figure, which I rendered as “roughly a third.” Brandt et al., “The Replication Recipe,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2014. Center for Open Science founding, 2013. The Stapel, Levelt, editorship, Annual Review, and award material carries over from the sourcing in the first essay.
Extrapolations. The claim that psychology’s producers sit almost entirely on the left is well documented; see Duarte et al., “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015, though note Haidt is a co-author, so you may prefer Langbert’s or Inbar and Lammers’ survey data. Inbar and Lammers, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012, found roughly six percent of social psychologists self-identify as conservative. Bem’s birth year 1938 and Haidt’s 1963 come from general knowledge. The line that Stapel’s press called him about the news of the day is an extrapolation from his documented media profile in the Dutch press; the “messy environments” finding refers to his retracted 2011 Science paper on disorder and discrimination, which is accurate to cite as retracted. The characterization of Reyna’s lab as serious but not a placement network is my inference from the CV record. Whether Brandt himself would accept the Haidt contrast as fair is unknown; the essay attributes no motive to either man, only strategy, which keeps it inside the NYT test.
What Nobody Decided: Mark Brandt and the Tacit Practices of Political Psychology
Picture a graduate student in 2005 building a prejudice study. She does what her training taught her hands to do. She pulls the standard scales from the literature, the feeling thermometers with their standard target lists: atheists, feminists, gay men, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants. She adds nothing and removes nothing, because the reviewers recognize these lists, her adviser used these lists, the classic papers validated these lists. She makes no decision about whom to sample. The decision was made for her by no one, transmitted to her through worked examples and corrected drafts, and she will transmit it the same way. When her data show that conservatism predicts prejudice, the finding will be true of her instrument and she will read it as true of the world.
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career on what is happening in that room. His subject is the tacit, the part of competence that runs beneath articulation, and his account of it is the deflationary one. Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) established the topic with the observation that we know more than we can tell. A tradition after Polanyi inflated the insight into something grander, shared paradigms, collective presuppositions, a group mind holding the discipline's assumptions in common. Turner's work, from The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions in 1994 through Understanding the Tacit twenty years later, dismantles the inflation. There is no collective object, no shared premise stored in some disciplinary cloud. There are only individuals, each habituated through similar training paths, each carrying in his own hands and hunches the residue of the same worked examples. What looks like a discipline's shared presupposition is a population of separately trained people whose habits happen to converge because their apprenticeships did. The convergence needs no agreement, no doctrine, and no decision.
Two consequences follow. First, what was never articulated was never argued for, and what was never argued for has never paid the bill of justification. Tacit practices enjoy a structural immunity. You cannot contest a claim nobody made. Second, beliefs resting on tacit practice can be convenient without anyone arranging the convenience. A belief is convenient, in the sense Turner's framework isolates, when it serves the interests of its holders and when the practices generating it stay below articulation, so that holding it costs nothing and examining it occurs to no one. Convenience is not fraud. Fraud requires a decision, and the entire point is that no decision happens.
The pre-Brandt consensus in political psychology was a convenient belief. A discipline whose producers sat almost entirely on the left had established that rigidity, intolerance, and motivated reasoning belong to the right. The belief flattered its holders, and it rested on a practice nobody could see because everybody performed it. Target selection ran on inherited scales, and the scales sampled the sacred objects of one coalition. The practice was tacit in Turner's exact sense. No methods section defended the target lists, because the lists arrived as equipment rather than as choices, the way a carpenter's grip arrives with the hammer. A researcher who used them displayed competence. A researcher who questioned them had no vocabulary for the question, because the vocabulary is what did not exist. The belief and the practice sustained each other in the dark, and the arrangement could have run indefinitely, since the population that might have noticed the sampling shared the training that made the sampling invisible.
What Brandt did, read through Turner, was articulation. The ideological-conflict papers he built with Crawford, Chambers, Wetherell, and Reyna took a practice that lived in hands and gave it a name, the target selection problem, and a description precise enough to test. Articulation is a status change, and the change is irreversible. Before the name, using the standard lists was competence. After the name, using the standard lists is a defense of the standard lists, a claim, contestable, billable. The practice did not merely become visible. It became an assertion its users had never intended to make and now had to either justify or abandon. Reviewers who had waved the old instruments through for twenty years began asking authors why their targets all came from one side, and the question, once askable, could not be unasked. Turner's framework explains why the field experienced Brandt's move as it did, as something between a discovery and an accusation. Articulating a tacit practice always carries that double charge, because it reveals to practitioners a decision they were making without deciding.
The articulation landed when it did because the field had entered a general wave of it. The replication reform that followed 2011 was, in Turner's terms, a campaign to force tacit practice into explicit rule across the board. The old research culture ran on unarticulated craft: when to stop collecting data, which analyses to try, which studies to write up. The reforms demanded that the craft be stated in advance and in writing. Preregistration is nothing else. It is compulsory articulation, the requirement that a researcher tell before he knows, so that the telling can be checked against the doing. Brandt worked on the instruments of the campaign, the Many Labs collaborations, the replication recipe that spelled out what a convincing replication must state. And his substantive heterodoxy rode the wave, because a field freshly convinced that unarticulated practice hides error had lost its immune response to the news that its most comfortable literature rested on exactly that.
Turner's deflationary account also explains the part of Brandt's program that a triumphal reading misses. Articulation does not replace the tacit. It relocates it. A rule, once written, must still be applied, and application is a skill, and skill is tacit, and the regress has no floor. Brandt appears to understand this in his hands if not in these words, because his most farsighted project is the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which embeds the new practices in undergraduate methods courses. CREP does not argue students into open science. It habituates them, through worked examples and corrected drafts, the same channel that transmitted the old target lists. The reform reproduces itself by apprenticeship because there is no other channel. On Turner's account there never is.
Which brings the frame to its second application, the one that runs forward. The open science movement now holds the journals, the badges, and the prize committees. Its practices are hardening from campaign into training, from explicit rule into the next generation's unexamined equipment, and Turner's framework predicts with some confidence what comes next. New tacit layers are forming now, in the gap between rule and application. What must a preregistration specify, and how loosely may it say it? Which deviations from plan count as reasonable adaptation and which as the old flexibility in new clothes? When a registered prediction fails, how much interpretive rescue is craft and how much is evasion? No document settles these questions. Reviewers settle them case by case, by feel, and the feel is being transmitted to students as competence, unarticulated, undefended, unbilled.
And around the new practices, convenient beliefs are available for the growing. That transparency guarantees validity, when it guarantees only checkability. That what replicates is important, when replicability screens for stability, not for significance or truth. That the methodological reform solved the field's political problem, when it articulated one blind spot while leaving the producer population unchanged, so that the conditions that grew the last convenient belief remain fully in place, waiting to grow another one whose location, by the nature of the case, nobody inside can currently see. The belief that the field has been fixed may become the most convenient belief of all, since it retires the very vigilance that produced the fix.
Does Brandt hold convenient beliefs? Turner's framework says a belief can be convenient and true; the two properties live on different axes. The test the framework does offer is practical. Are the practices generating the belief articulated, and does the holder keep them under the discipline of checking? Conditional similarity, the position Brandt and Kteily defend, is comfortable for a man who needs standing with a left-leaning field and credibility with its critics, and comfort is a warning, never a verdict. What can be said is that Brandt has kept his generating practices unusually explicit, representative target sampling stated as a rule, predictions exposed in advance, models built to fail in public. Articulation is the only known solvent for convenience, and he applies it to his own work at a rate the field does not require of him. Whether he will keep applying it now that his practices are becoming the water, and he is one of the men who decides what the training transmits, is the open question, and Turner's framework says his intentions will have less to do with the answer than his students' habits will.
Turner's larger work on expertise supplies the stakes. In Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts he describes the modern arrangement in which publics accept expert claims on trust, without the capacity to audit the practices behind them. Political psychology's findings about who is prejudiced and who is rigid travel into journalism, law, and policy on that trust, and the tacit layer is where the trust gets spent, because the tacit layer is what no outsider can inspect and no insider thinks to mention. A field that studies bias owes its audiences an account of where its own practices hide, and for one practice, in one literature, at one moment, Brandt provided it. The graduate student of 2005 assembled her target list without a decision. The graduate student of 2026 assembles hers knowing the list is a claim. That difference is the contribution, and it is a large one, and Turner's framework adds the caution that keeps it honest. Somewhere in the equipment of 2026, arriving as competence, transmitted through corrected drafts, another undecided decision is settling in, and the person who will one day name it is unlikely to be anyone now senior enough to have stopped noticing.
Notes
Structure. The essay runs Turner’s framework in three movements: the tacit practice (target selection as inherited equipment, no decision anywhere), the articulation (Brandt naming the practice converts it from competence into claim), and the forward application (the open science regime growing its own tacit layer and its own candidate convenient beliefs). The opening and closing scenes mirror: the 2005 graduate student who assembles a target list without a decision, the 2026 student who assembles one knowing it is a claim, with a new undecided decision settling into her equipment. That mirroring carries the frame’s central point, that articulation relocates the tacit rather than abolishing it.
The Brandt-convenience question. I handled it with Turner’s test rather than a sincerity verdict: convenience and truth live on different axes, and the only solvent is keeping generating practices articulated and checked. The essay credits Brandt with doing this at an above-required rate and leaves open whether he continues once his practices become the training. If you want it colder, cut the sentence beginning “What can be said is that Brandt has kept” and let the open question stand alone.
Sources. Turner: The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Understanding the Tacit (Routledge, 2014); Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (SAGE, 2003). Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension (1966), source of “we know more than we can tell,” which I paraphrased at that length deliberately. Brandt facts, ideological-conflict papers and co-authors, Many Labs, replication recipe, CREP, the Kteily chapter, carry over from the sourcing in the first two essays; the CREP description as undergraduate-embedded replication training is on the lab’s materials and the CREP project page at OSF.
Extrapolations. The 2005 graduate student is a composite built from how survey research training works, inherited scales, reviewer recognition, adviser precedent; no link needed, but she is illustrative, not a person. The claim that no methods sections defended target lists is a generalization about the pre-2014 literature that Brandt’s own papers document by implication; it is defensible but stated broadly, and you could soften to “rarely defended” at no cost. The three candidate convenient beliefs of open science (transparency equals validity, replicable equals important, the field is fixed) are my construction within the frame, presented as predictions the framework generates rather than as documented positions anyone holds, which keeps them inside the NYT test. The questions about preregistration looseness and deviation-judging reflect live methodological debate; if you want an anchor, the literature on preregistration adherence includes Claesen et al., “Comparing dream to reality,” Royal Society Open Science 2021, which found frequent undisclosed deviations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211037.
