below are some citations/ links regarding the influence of liberal politics on social psychology.   

 http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psycholog... http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3125&utm_s... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/01/diversity_of_th.html

This is a bit of a non sequiter as I'm not even sure how to approach the original question as it is framed.

However, if you would like some open discussion of the topic I suggest defining and characterizing your argument in the context of this forum. The broad statements, and articles actually leave the reader needing to invest much time in figuring out what is going on and what sort of question you are actually asking. Without this sort of context and forum it really looks like you are asking the question to stroke your ego rather than to spur on some honest discussion, it is quite off-putting and few (or none) will feel comfortable in making any sort of response.

From the articles you linked us to, it seems clear that you are pushing for political diversity in academia, something that seems at the surface rather benign. Though I do wonder if there isn't an error in causal attribution being made... I find it difficult from the articles you offer to actually figure out what the argument is aside from one of final consequences, which as you know, is its own sort of bias.

I do not currently have access to your book or the New-Yorker article (the link is bronken) so I am admitting a lack of some information about your argument. That being said, there is no reference to how a lack of political diversity has anything to do with the "myth of intrinsic motivation" or even what that is.

If you are going to honestly ask a question such as this in an online forum like this one, you really need to provide some groundwork for discussion and at very least lay out your basic argument.

All of that being said, I have a question that I have been really curious about since my introduction to the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation debate.

Since many of the things we find rewarding and motivating seem to be correlated with, and in the case of addictive behaviors, necessitated by, the stimulation of dopaminergic pathways in the brain, does this not make all "motivation" entirely intrinsic or entirely extrinsic depending on perspective? That is, in all cases of doing something that feels good, on any level, the motivational processes are ultimately carried out by a brain-based signal of "that feels good"... the process doesn't really discriminate between getting money and learning to talk, nor does it discriminate between social reward or personal reward. 

Perhaps, it is because I am not embroiled in the history of education beating down the extrinsic motivators, but I simply do not see any meaningful distinction between the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators either in definition or function. 

I know that you are more of a social scientist, so you may not have anything much to say about it. I have asked other social-cognitive scientists and they say that neurological perspectives do not belong in their theories.... Regardless, I have been wanting to mull the idea over with someone who might be able to help me iron the concepts out.

Apologies for taking your question on a tangent, but I figured that no responses in nearly 3 months meant that I wouldn't be depriving anyone of burning discussion otherwise.

Cheers.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have attacked the profit motive relentlessly making many errors of reasoning and science.  Why is this tolerated?  Maybe it is because liberal politics, not science, biases the results.  Maybe no response in 3 months means people feel intimidated, which is what happens when politics replaces science.  So the question is well framed: Is the liberal bias in social psychology related to the poorly reasoned attack on the profit motive?  How does the liberal politics bias the science.

By the way, it hasn't been  three month since  the question was posted.  

"Maybe no response in 3 months means people feel intimidated, which is what happens when politics replaces science."

Nice, way to convey a tone of fear and paranoia. On the internet, if you don't get responses it is typically because your question is boring or requires too much jargon to actually engage in (aka you are gate-keeping). Maybe you did not respond to my secondary question because you feel intimidated, which  as you say "is what happens when politics replaces science." (For clarification: I am mostly being playful at your phrasing, not intending offense.)

"Is the liberal bias in social psychology related to the poorly reasoned attack on the profit motive?"

That is at least a bit more coherent statement that can be actually discussed than "Four researchers say that social psychology’s left wing embrace has resulted in scientific error. Is intrinsic-extrinsic motivation mostly politics?"

In short, I actually think that Deci and Ryan caught just the right wave at just the right time when people were getting really fed up with behaviorism. I think their popularity can be explained easily in the context that everyone "knew" minds were more than a "black box" of external (extrinsic) causes resulting in some behaviors. In fact ALL of their original definitions make a LOT of sense when poised against the psychological community needing something better than behaviorism to work on.

Deci and Ryan have attacked extrinsic motivation (likely because they were sick of all the "behavior modification" and the stimulus-response paradigms. They have also over-valued autonomy (through choice) and undervalued belongingness, which may be a byproduct of their social upbringing and mindset... These 2 guys do have their inherent personal biases, they published and were lucky(or unlucky) enough to have social science, popular culture, and educational institutions really pick up on their ideas and run with them. As an alternative explanation, perhaps the explanations offered by these scientists were just simplified enough to be accessible and appealing to popular culture. This sort of rolling pattern of ideas from science taking on their own momentum as they are appropriated is common.

I am personally unconvinced that it is due to a liberal bias of the social science and education field. Partly because their popularity made sense in their historical context, and partly because there are examples of Deci and Ryan being called out for their work and especially for their blanket recommendations for what is best for motivating students. Recently Deci and Ryan have redefined many of their original claims due to the results in their research and from pressure from other researchers. While these guys may be guilty of their own bias in research design, there have been many scientific refutations of their ideas.... and as such, change has been in order.... And if you boil it down to biology, their distinction is moot and doesn't seem to have any utility anymore for educators or researchers. It is an idea, in my opinion, due for retirement.

What would more conservatives do to the field anyway? Would they have said "Yes this behaviorism thing is PERFECT!"? Or would they have added more voices to the opposition of the idea? I am not sure that this line of reasoning would goes anywhere either.

What I see when I look at the pattern of Deci and Ryan's research taking over the motivation research literature is, that at the time, the ideas filled a need. Then others jumped on the bandwagon of the "shiny new idea", then as time progresses more refined theories will fill in where this one lacks strength in utility and explanation.  Suggesting that this one pattern in research is anything outside what might be expected and has been observed through the progress of the history of science, seems to be skirting on the side of "tilting at windmills." 

I could just as substantially say that the pattern you seem to be describing is due to a lack of intellectual rigor or an absence of strong leadership among social scientists over the last 40 years or so... or perhaps due to social scientists as a whole casting the role of empiricism and true scientific thinking too far off from their own research. Perhaps social scientists reject that which allows them to make meaningful progress, because they live in a tradition that is blind to the differences between reality and noise. I doubt any of these ideas fit well with a group embracing liberal politics as an explanation.

I don't really feel that any of these are parsimonious or even plausible realistic explanations. I actually I don't even think the pattern is anything but noise, or, in better words, not anything outside of how communities of people build knowledge. In psychology we saw vitalism, overturned by behaviorism, overturned by cognitive science and so on... Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolution really embraces the idea that science is based not only on a cumulative process but on periods of revolutions instigated by finding and investigating "anomalies" which shift the scientific community in a new direction. We see examples of this over and over again...

Are you impatient for a new shift, how is it that you feel some malignancy at work here? I am certainly open to solid evidence, you know some testing of null and plausible alternative hypotheses. ;-)

As for the discussion of the political state of social sciences, since the burning of The Library at Alexandria and likely before, the arts and sciences have attracted a more progressive crowd, one who embraces that which authority condemns. It is a liberal tradition in which we live. The specific "party lines" of modern day politics may not coincide well with those from those traditions, but the current culture of academia is a welcome safe-haven for liberal minds, particularly those who are persecuted by more conservative political bodies.

While I can see and acknowledge that there are far more liberals in the social sciences I am not entirely sure that is something to be terribly concerned about. It is something that will bias a researcher. What I struggle with is that, I see little difficulty of conservatives in gaining positions of political power and I see little difficulty of politicians making claims that are in complete opposition to science.... what I don't see are a significant number conservatives bothering to dedicate themselves to a life that involves the pursuit of knowledge, particularly the acceptance that this knowledge may contradict belief systems, and particularly (as is the case these days) when it comes at a significant economic cost to them. What I do not see is substantial numbers political conservatives being actively or systematically excluded by opportunity, by financial means, by anything that science is doing aside from being itself.

So, could it be that conservatives just have a habit of choosing business school or law school over the less *shiny* social science schools? In which case, if I temporarily grant you my first couple points, it seems to me that the more harmful process is that scientists are actively excluded from political influence, rather than individuals who identify as political conservative are actively excluded from science careers. Traditionally the path to increasing diversity is to reduce barriers, to get more conservatives in social science I suppose we could temporarily suspend teaching social justice, feminism, all of the hard sciences, anything that might reference evolution, and so on. This is admittedly, a bit of a straw-man I understand.... but what would one do to honestly reduce the barriers to conservatives joining social science? We would have to make a social scientist career either glamorous or high-paying from the start... which is its own kind of straw-man...  

A point I am driving at here is that not every pattern you see must have a grand or meaningful explanation. That I remain unconvinced that the particular pattern actually poses much of a long-term problem to scientific pursuit. And further I don't see any evidence of meaningful barriers to people who are politically conservative.

Edited: Just to add, I have read (and completely enjoyed) your Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation at 30: Unresolved scientific issues. And I am guessing we are mostly in accordance in that area.