Publish or Politic: Referee Bias in Manuscript Review1

To clarify the role of cognitive bias in manuscript review, designated more and less politically liberal area specialists and nonspecialists were sent either of two versions of a brief empirical report contrasting student political activists' and nonactivists' psychological well‐being. The forms were identical, except that all references to activists and to nonactivists in the results and discussion sections were interchanged. The referees, led to think that they were participating in a study of the usefulness of a closed‐ended manuscript evaluation procedure, were asked to rate the article's publishability and the degree to which specific criteria for scientific quality were met. The main results confirmed the expectation that publication verdicts handed down about a paper containing information of social import are sometimes biased by a reviewer's political orientation. However, the results were largely null regarding the susceptibility to value‐intrusion of scholarly inferences anchored to discrete criteria. Ego involvement is implicated as a mediator of biasing effects in the editorial process.