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In short:

• I wrote an article that used a metaphor drawn from a Fiddler on the Roof line (“There was the time he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule”) to capture the disingenuousness around academic diversity rhetoric.

• I was denounced as a racist for “drawing an explicit parallel of Black people with mules.”

• This denunciation claimed there was a well-established racist trope in which Black people are viewed as mules.

• There is no racist mule trope; the only paper Roberts cited to support the claim provided no evidence of such a racist “trope.”

Why Should You Care?

• propaganda and how to separate it from truth

• credibility of psychological science

• rising illiberalism in academia

• demonization in action by academics

• the decline of academia

Academic Deepfakes

The concept of deepfake originated in the study of disinformation online; it originally referred to manipulating images and videos to communicate things that are manifestly false (such as a video of a public figure seemingly making a statement they never made). Waever & Buzan then extended the concept to academic articles making shit up. This is how they describe academic deepfake methods:

• “If there is a methodology at play, it is deepfake in the sense that if you break a corpus of text down into small fragments, you can reassemble it to say anything you want. Deepfake as analogy does not imply any claim about intentional falsehood. The analogy is to the technique: making somebody ‘speak’ by using splinters from them reassembled to produce meaning disconnected from the original texts.”

They identify the following features of academic deepfake methodology:

• Guilt by association

• Errors in citation and attribution

• False arguments

• Twisting of concepts to generate racism

Although I have not previously applied the term to scholarship, it applies exceedingly well to much research purporting to advance certain forms of “social justice” (such as here, here, or here). Here I argue that these deepfake features were on full display in Roberts’ denunciation of all of us as racists, and it is especially applicable of his denunciation of my horse/mule metaphor.

Background: Playing the Victim Card

Steven Roberts, a tenured professor at Stanford, played one of the biggest victim cards I have personally been involved with, and denounced me as a racist. And clearly “won” the round, at least if one’s criteria is academia — as I documented here. However, academia has rapidly radicalized, especially on racial issues and is now an outpost isolated from much of the rest of the country both generally politically and on racial issues in particular. Indeed, if one goes by most of the reaction from outside academia, one would get the picture that Roberts embarrassed himself with his manifestly ridiculous denunciation.

This grim episode involved papers accepted at a major peer reviewed journal, all of which were critical of Roberts’ claims in a prior paper that advanced a very narrow, very far left, dogmatic view of “diversity.” One might think scientists would treat this as a damning indictment of Roberts’ scientific claims — which, if you read the papers that examined Roberts claims in depth, it is. But assume that an academic outrage mob actually read the papers? Silly you.

Among illiberal academics, when scientists criticize the work of an academic of color (Roberts has stated that he has a German and a Black parent), there is only one possible interpretation — those scientists are racist. Thus, Roberts and the outrage mob’s open letter denounced as racist not only me, but the editor of that journal, and the authors of the entire set of papers that editor accepted.

And Roberts won in the sense that, within days, he successfully inspired an outrage mob of almost 1400 academics who demanded that the editor be fired and the accepted papers never to be published. They also demanded the publication of Roberts’ denunciation, and that the professional organization that oversees the journal to give Roberts anything he wants (nothing quite says “these people went mad” as yes, it really said that1). Within days, Klaus Fiedler, the editor, was ousted.

But did Roberts win on the merits, or by making shit up?

The Language Police Arrest Me for Riding a Racist Mule

He accused me of drawing on the worst type of racist trope, of using a metaphor that, in his words, “explicitly parallels people of color with mules…which is a well-documented racist trope used to dehumanize people of color.” How did I do this? Lots of detail is there, but the short version is that I used this quote from Fiddler on the Roof, “there was the time he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule” to capture the disingenuous rhetoric in academia around “diversity.”

To the untrained eye, diversity means something like “embracing all sorts of different types of people, including differences along many dimensions, including but not restricted to race/ethnicity, sex, gender identity, nationality, culture, personality, disability status, age, social class, region, religion, politics and more.”

Indeed, when the Supreme Court upheld some degree of affirmative action in college admissions, in Gruttinger v. Bollinger (2003), they clearly labored under the illusion that “diversity” meant more than “groups progressives consider marginalized.” From the decision:

When is the last time you saw those characteristics providing advantages to individuals who do not fit the progressive profile for “marginalized” for admissions or hiring in academia? In academia, “diversity” means something much narrower than what SCOTUS approved in Gruttinger v. Bollinger. Diversity, in academia, is a vision of reparations and benefits for groups that progressives deem deserving of special treatment. The horse/mule metaphor nicely captured this disingenousness.

The Evidence

There was no “explicit paralleling” of Black people with mules

The origin of the horse/mule metaphor was clearly Fiddler on the Roof, a play about early 20th century Russian Jewish village life, not any sort of racist trope. This was really obvious to anyone with half a brain, so that, if we assume that tenured Stanford professors are by most conventional metrics rather intelligent, the most viable interpretation left is that Roberts purposely distorted my paper in order to score victimization points (he did wildly succeed, I grant him that). “Was it obvious?” you ask. Here is a screenshot of the very first page of the paper (after the title and abstract):

Kinda impossible to miss, isn’t it? As I wrote elsewhere:

There is No Racist Mule Trope

Ok, so maybe I inadvertently just happened to stumble into using something that sounded like a racist trope. And if that was the case, it would indeed be unfortunate and one might understand someone being offended or feeling it was insulting. The problem with this analysis, though, is that there was no inadvertent trope to inadvertently “fall into.”

Roberts justifies his accusation wth a single reference:

To understand how the Ellenberg paper bears on Robert’s wildly successful denunciation, one must first read it. Roberts accused me of using a racist trope. What is a “trope”? It is a “common or overused theme or device.” “Love triangle” is a common theatrical trope. “Lone hero fighting impossible odds” is another.

For there to be a racist mule trope, there would need to be one in common use. There isn’t. Everyone should know this, including all ~1400 members of the mob, because none have ever seen this supposed trope used in their lifetimes with sufficient frequency to make it a “trope.”

This is the conclusion to Ellenberg’s paper:

• “But by 1950 one thing was certain, the real and symbolic marriage of mules and African Americans was ending as the mule South bowed to the machine. Blacks and mules in southern fields vanished, and the South changed, and continues to do so.”

So, even if there once had been a racist mule trope (which there wasn’t but I’ll get to that soon), it had vanished by about 1950, according to Roberts’ only source. This is hardly evidence for a “common or overused” racist mule trope in 2022. In fact, it is evidence for a minimum of 70 years of a nonexistent racist mule trope.

“But,” you say to me, “Ok, maybe there isn’t such a trope now, but maybe there once was such a trope, and you still fell into inadvertently reviving an old racist trope.”

Indeed, that was a hypothetical possibility. Let’s read some more of Ellenberg to find out.

There Never Was a Racist Mule Trope

For there to be a racist mule trope, there would need to be a common treatment of Black people as if they are mules. Ellenberg showed no such thing and did not claim that he had. Instead, he reviewed literature and historical sources to conclude that, from the mid-19th through the mid-20th century, there was an association2 of mules and African Americans. Here are some quotes from his article:

• “Perhaps the most striking years in this respect are the 1850s, when mule use exploded across the cotton South.”

• “From the mid-1920s, the number of mules declined until they disappeared statistically from the land in 1960 with the bureaucratic decision to no longer count them.”

• “To planters, the mule personified the adaptability of the slave regime to elements of progress. Slaves who worked in agriculture viewed the mule as an ever-present part of life in bondage, while "forty acres and a mule" represented the hope of Reconstruction. Postbellum landowners believed mules were the most suitable animal for sharecroppers and often dictated their use for draft power.”

• “Mules provided common ground for black and white southerners, especially after the Civil War, although the overlap was tainted with the realties of southern race relations. The mule became a fundamental part of "southerness.”

• “Perhaps because mules were so crucial to their livelihood, southern farmers, black and white, reserved a special place in their hearts for mules.”

You Will be Shocked, Shocked to Discover Racism in the Slave South

Ellenberg also wrote:

• “Slaves worked with mules daily, and both were viewed as beasts of burden admirably suited for laboring in the Deep South.”

• "In the antebellum white mind, slaves and mules were both hybrids of sorts, one not quite human and the other not quite equine.”

Ellenberg even presents a handful of quotes from people who actually did equate Black people with mules, quotes I refrain from presenting here because the language is so deeply derogatory and degrading.

The history of racism and slavery in America and elsewhere is awful stuff. Americans should know and grapple with that history.

Nonetheless, a handful of mid-19th century quotes equating Black people with mules does not a trope make. Common and overused requires more than a handful of ~200 year old quotes.

The 20th Century

But history turns. Ellenberg’s article traces how, in the 20th century, the association between Black people and mules first grew into a simply descriptive pairing (it was common to see them together in the agrarian South) and then into an inspiring symbol of resistance to oppression:

• “Davidson wrote that rural Georgia "was a well-tilled country, where you were forever seeing the _____3 and his mule against the far horizon, or the peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink.”

• “Blacks driving mules in a field surrounded by young cotton plants, blacks riding mules, or blacks in mule-drawn wagons became a firmly rooted element of the southern physical and mental landscapes on every social level, and an ingredient that set the region apart from the rest of the nation.”

• “Photographs and articles distributed during the 1930s only reinforced the link between black sharecropping and mules, although by that date millions of both whites and blacks were tied to tenancy. Even so, blacks and mules remained as central to the popular portrait of traditional southern life as cotton itself.”

• “The mule remained the symbol of poor and downtrodden southerners through much of the twentieth century. So close was the symbolic relationship between African Americans and mules that a pair of mules pulled Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral wagon in 1968. After the service at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, King's remains were placed in a sharecropper's cart drawn by two mules…”

Does that sound like a racist mule trope to you?

Benny Andrews, the artist:

What about “Mul___o”?

Mul___o4 was a Southern racist term for a person with one White and one Black parent. Superficially, it seems related to mule because of: 1. The first three letters; and 2. a mule is a hybrid, and so use of this term captured the dehumanization of Black people by treating them as a different species. However, the origin of the term is actually not clear, with mule being only one of several possibilities. The term "mul___o" also possibly has Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish origins unrelated to mules. It is also deemed offensive in some cultures but not in others.

Regardless, this term only applied to people commonly now called biracial, and not to Black people generally. My paper did not mention either this term or biracial people. Whatever the origins of the term, it would require intellectual contortions to render it relevant to this controversy.

Taking Offense at Real vs. Concocted Bigoted Tropes

The master race. Referring to nonwhite peoples as “savages.” “Whiteness” as used throughout academia to refer to something malicious. I cannot fault anyone for taking offense at use of such tropes.

But not everything that someone can concoct as some “association” with bigotry is a trope. And make no mistake, critical social justice types can “associate” almost anything with bigotry, including dogwalking, commenting on beautiful days, and Mahatma Gandhi. Consider this comment on my 1400 Academics Denounced Me as a Racist for Using a Quote from Fiddler on the Roof essay:

Yes, let’s imagine such a debate. Let’s say someone else commented, “Jussim sure has a nose for racist tropes!” I would be annoyed at this, because I did not use a racist trope. However, not even on my radar would be “This comment is the height of antisemitism.” Anyone who did have such a reaction would be plausibly characterized as a delusional loon. I mean, if someone is offended, they are offended, but this, by itself, provides literally no reason whatsoever for anyone else to take their offense seriously. From The Orwelexicon:

But let’s consider a more reasonable example. On this podcast, Yoel Inbar tries hard to grant Roberts’ empathic credibility. In it, he crafts what might be a “shoe on the other foot” test" (“How would you react if it happened to you?”). He describes a scifi story in which the heroes battle an evil cabal of conspirators secretly controlling governments, media, and corporations. I do not think he could be faulted for having a certain, “Ew, this story is beginning to sound like classic antisemitic conspiracy theories” [this is my short summary of his analysis, not a quote from him]. From the early 20th century Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, through the actual mid-20th century Nazis, to modern memes and tropes common on the far right, cabals of Jews secretly pulling the strings of power have a long and ugly history and can be readily found today. This is a trope and it is both common and very much alive.

However justified Yoel may be here, it is vastly different from my thematic point, even in the out-of-context excerpt that was held up as a racist smoking gun. I argued that researchers who wish to focus on understudied populations progressives deem warranting of reparative attention are welcome to do so. But to claim that they are doing more rigorous science or more to “diversify” psychology than those whose work focuses on samples vastly more representative of whole populations is as disingenuous as when, in Fiddler on the Roof, “He sold him a horse, but delivered a mule.” The crucial difference between Yoel’s example and mine is that he referred to an actual trope (a “common and overused” theme, still live today), whereas the “racist mule trope” is a story in the antiracist narrative style concocted by a propaganda expert masquerading as a scientist.

Here are the top hits in a Google search for “Jews conspiracy”":

Here are the top hits in a Google search for “Blacks mules”:

Who Else Shall We Denounce for “Dehumanization”? Start Here

Explain Why the Language Police are not Coming for Brian Nosek

Nosek is a bigtime influence in replication and reform of scientific practices in psychology (and has done some excellent work). Here is one of his comments at Mastodon (an alternative social media site to which some academics fled in terror and revulsion at Musk’s takeover of Twitter) regarding the PoPS/Roberts Fiasco.

“Savage” is an actual well-known racist trope.5 "Civilized" Europeans routinely referred to the various non-European peoples they conquered as savages. So why no denunciation? Because this is a political, not scientific movement. In politics, anything goes, including rank hypocrisy.

Also:

• Nothing quite says “This is, always was, and will continue to be a political rather than scientific project” as the glorification of rhetorical savagery.

• Matter-of-factness is a good tone description of Roberts’ denunciation. Presenting this type of social justice bullshit matter-of-factly does manage to camouflage its stink, making it delightfully delectable to many illiberal academics.

Conclusion

The Critical Social Justice turn in academia “centers” narrative. From Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2001).  Critical race theory: An introduction:

• “For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics. In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.” (LJ: I cannot resist commenting here: The extent to which this statement applies to this situation is deliciously ironic).

• “The narrative turn and storytelling scholarship seem well on their way toward acceptance…” 

And Lord, Roberts crafted a douzy, didn't he? In this battle, I got crushed (at least if the academic outrage mobsters were the judges), like losing a tennis match 6-0, 6-0. In self-officiated matches, each player calls the balls in or out on their side of the net. So this was like playing a match where one is crushed by an opponent who calls every ball you hit 3 feet inside the line “Out!” all the while being wildly cheered on by adoring fans. But this is not mostly about Roberts. Hell, the world is filled with liars and propagandists. The most damning part of this episode is the wildly cheering fans, the academics engaged in full-throated disregard for the facts they can see (or, in this case, do not see) with their own eyes.

You didn't know the trope because there is no trope. If you think you did but only after Roberts pointed it out, there is a well-known psychological phenomenon describing that: Hindsight bias. Roberts crafted the “trope,” if not exactly out of whole cloth then out of a few strands of thread. If you believe I am wrong here, go for it. All you need to show is that there is a non-archaic “common and overused” treatment of Black people as mules. Something like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the dog-Netanyahu leading Trump NYTimes cartoon, and the codewords and memes about Jews that you can find here.

I predict that you won’t do it even if you think such a thing exists. Because you can’t. Because the “trope” doesn’t exist.

As academia fully embraces political activism and infusing its “scholarship” with unfalsifiable progressive dogmas and presumptions (gap=discrimination, parasitic whiteness, pervasive discrimination and “isms”), one can expect papers characterized by deepfake methodology to become “progressively” (so to speak) more common.

Although this does not mean everything that emerges from academia is nonsense, it does mean that the amount of propaganda disguised as “scholarship” is likely to accelerate for the foreseeable future. Or, as I put it here, it is going to get worse before it gets worse.

Footnotes

2

“Association.” Blame academics’ delusionary beliefs that they can spot “hidden” or ”subtle” racism on the implicit association test (IAT) which treats associations as racism and which popularized the notion of “unconscious racism.” I warned of this at NSF in 2017, at a special conference on the controversies surrounding the IAT and implicit bias. Slide presented at a conference :

Overview

If you are, say, new to this controversy, start here to get the big picture. In short, an outrage mob lobbied a major psychology professional organization (The Association for Psychological Science, APS) to fire the editor of one of its journals (Perspectives on Psychological Science, aka PoPS), amidst charges of racism and editorial irregularities. In this entry, I “interrogate” the “justifications” APS has presented for the firing.

Why Should You Care?

Academia is one of the main knowledge production and dissemination institutions in the country. Its dysfunctions justifiably raise doubts about its credibility. The entire event reveals a slew of dysfunctions:

• Public shaming by outrage mob.

• Orwellian, Kafka-esque mechanisms for punishment.

• Abandonment of basic liberal values, such as free speech, academic freedom, open discourse and debate, and due process in exchange for imposition of far left values by mobs.

• Just how extremely ideological, sectarian and dogmatic academia has become.

• How the “diversity” and “inclusion” rhetoric so common in academia manifests as denunciation, vindictiveness, censorship, abandonment of due process, and exclusion. ICYMI: The open letter signed by almost 1400 academics displayed all of this

  • denunciation: all of us (Fiedler and four authors) are smeared as racists

  • vindictiveness: Fiedler should be punished;

  • censorship: the duly accepted papers should “unaccepted”

  • abandonment of due process: The mob did not call for an investigation or a discussion; absent either Fiedler’s chance to defend himself or question his accusers, and absent even seeing the papers accused of “racism,” the mob called for his head.

  • exclusion: Challenging psychology’s diversity-related sacred cows is now a field of land mines, and who needs that? Put differently, absent credentials deemed impeccable by mobs of academic social justice activists, criticizing anything involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion comes at sufficient personal risk to discourage most from doing it.

It is no wonder that this debate, like so many others, will mostly take place outside of academia (as in this excellent NYTimes article critical of academic and other diversity initiatives by Jesse Singal), and solutions will probably be imposed from outside of academia (as they are currently being imposed by DeSantis in Florida).

In this spirit, whether or not you are an academic, it is, perhaps, worth understanding how the academic sausage is now being made, via this case study.

APS as Kangaroo Court: Excerpts from the 1/26 APS Letter, with My Commentary

The full APS email sent to all its members “explaining” how APS made their decision to oust Fiedler is presented here. Quotes here are presented in this regular font. My comments are presented in italics.

“Dear APS Member,

In recent weeks, we heard concerns from many individuals about the editorial practices at Perspectives on Psychological Science. We learned about additional questionable editorial decisions and practices at the journal under the previous Editor-in-Chief (EIC).”

Like what? Here are excerpts from Kafka’s The Trial, about a man arrested and never informed what he did wrong:

• Police officers, as they arrest the main character, after being asked what law did he break: “Mind you, what we can do is make sure that the high officials we work for find out just what sort of person it is they’re going to arrest, and why he should be arrested, before they issue the warrant. There’s no mistake there. Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out…”

After declaring that APS made no judgments about Fiedler’s character (Fiedler addresses this in his email, so I will not), they state:

“Some people are concerned that the actions APS took were too quick to have been made with adequate deliberation and consideration of evidence. Although quick, this action was not undertaken lightly.” 

• There is no content here. APS continues:

“After the initial complaint was brought to APS’s attention, journal staff immediately gathered relevant materials for APS leadership to review. This review was conducted over the weekend following the complaint. Much of the evidence to consider was immediately available via the records kept in the journal’s online submission portal. The staff and leadership also consulted with the Publications Committee and heard from some editors of other APS journals.”

• What did they hear from other editors? Can you imagine a Court declaring someone guilty, without declaring what they were guilty of? APS is not a court, but Fiedler, APS members, and indeed the entire field of scientific psychology (one can publish in PoPS without being a member of APS) and the wider public deserve answers to this question.

Kafka, The Trial, continues:

• “Look at this, Willem (1 of the arresting officers), he [the accused] admits he doesn’t know the law and at the same time insists he’s innocent.” “You’re quite right, but we can’t get him to understand a thing,” said the other [arresting officer].

APS’s email Continued:

“Before any action was taken, the EIC (“Editor in Chief,” i.e., Fiedler) was contacted regarding the complaints and provided with a list of questions regarding his editorial actions. His response did not dispute the factual basis of any of the details included in the complaints.”

This appears to conflict with what Fiedler wrote here:

• “The second, equally important reason was that APS, the organization who holds the PPS journal, never asked me for my version, and never engaged on what seems to be a self-evident rule of procedural justice, namely, to give the target of accusation a chance to reply and provide a counter statement – ​​to be circulated in the same widespread channel as the accusations. Up to now, nobody asked for my version.”

The apparent contradiction is that whereas Fiedler says he was not asked for his version of events, APS says they did contact him. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real:

• Fiedler’s email, above, resolves the apparent contradiction as follows: Whereas it is literally true that “the EIC [Fiedler] was contacted,” as stated by APS, it is also literally true that he was given only the opportunity to respond to a series of narrowly-tailored interrogation-type questions about specific facts, and was not asked for, or to explain, his actions, procedures, and policies.

In short, APS failed to identify anything that Fiedler did to deserve being ousted.

The finale of Kafka’s The Trial is this (K. is the defendant never informed of his crime):

• But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

Here are, based on the public discourse around this, the things Fiedler might be judged “guilty” of:

• Accepting Hommel’s article. It was a mix of a stand-alone piece advocating for a different view of diversity than Roberts advocated and a critique of Roberts et al (2020); go here for the full set of links to these papers. Accepting a critique as a stand-alone article is indeed unusual. But so what? There is literally no known APS ethical standard that this violates; plus, it was also plausibly viewed as a stand-alone article presenting a perspective on diversity quite different than Roberts’. This is clearly how Fiedler saw it.

• Accepting three commentaries that sided with Hommel and were critical of Roberts. The charge is that this was “biased.” Fiedler claims he invited other commentaries, but was turned down; I have no reason to doubt this. Indeed, the public record shows he invited Roberts to comment on Hommel’s article, and Roberts turned him down! Fiedler could also have waited till he got someone more supportive of Roberts’ view, and I think this would have been of value. But so what? What makes this a firing offense? No single article, or exchange, inherently solves a controversy or ends a discussion. The solution to omitted perspectives is to keep discussing or publishing. That is (or was) presumably why the journal is called “Perspectives” on Psychological Science.

  • Worse, biases pervade the peer reviewed literature. For example, Nature recently published an entire issue on “decolonizing science” with no critical commentaries. The Nature article reviewed here made claims about discrimination based on a cartoon, a tweet, and an interpretation of a dream. Published articles by authors from prestigious institutions were routinely rejected when rewritten to be by authors from low status institutions. There is no such thing as an “unbiased” review process, because any combination of 2-3 reviewers will have limitations, biases, and blindspots. Getting stupid, annoying, picayune, tendentious, and ax-grinding reviews, and publishing biased scholarship, also is a normal part of the review process, and it happens to all of us. If we fired every editor that ever oversaw a biased review or acceptance process, there would be no editors left. The solution to bias is usually not to fire anyone, but to debate, debunk, and disconfirm. If you believe “bias” is a problem to be “solved” by firing, you just handed conservatives who gain political power moral license to fire vast swaths of academia.

    

  • This accusation plausibly reveals a not-very-hidden agenda on the part of APS and the mob. “Representation” in academia, does not mean “represented in proportion to some population benchmark.” It means “giving special benefits to people from groups seen as deserving them by the progressive left.” If population representation is what mattered, then having one article by Roberts and five by others constitutes overrepresentation of Black people in the discussion forum (1/6 is about 17% in the forum, whereas Black people are about 12-13% of the U.S. population and far lower if one includes the entire English-speaking world). But this was clearly not “adequate” for APS, thereby revealing either: 1. race based quotas (and the allegations of “racism!” “commentaries were by three white men!” give credence to this); or 2. ideological quotas (“social justice ideology must always be represented at least as strongly as perspectives criticizing it, in every forum!”).

• Accepting three commentaries by senior White men. The mob was all over this and it was implicit in the open letter calling for APS to summarily execute a dismissal of Fiedler. Left here for your edification without further comment by me.

• Not sending commentaries out for peer review. The mob was all over this. But this has been and still is a common practice at many journals that have a commentary feature, including the journal Fiedler edited. This can be viewed as “questionable” if typical procedures are viewed as “questionable” — which they may well be, but it is bizarre to fire someone without warning for adopting a common practice that was not previously prohibited.

• Having Hommel “review” Roberts’ reply. Fiedler did have Hommel read and give him feedback on Roberts’ reply. Of course, Fiedler also asked Roberts to review Hommel’s original contribution. This seems better described as “even-handed treatment” than as “racism” or “editorial malfeasance.” There is no evidence that Hommel was treated as a reviewer or that any changes were requested of Roberts based on Fiedler’s consultation with Hommel. Fiedler did request that Roberts consider Hommel’s identification of what he considered factual inaccuraces, but Fiedler explicitly informed Roberts that he need not address them all. Asking Roberts to go through each and every one of Hommel’s points was reasonably considered a pain in the ass. However, there was no reason to think that Fiedler either presumed Hommel was correct or that Roberts had to make changes. The “no harm, no foul” rule applies here, as does the “publishing is usually a pain in the ass” norm. For what its worth, my collaborators and I just had a paper titled A Defense of Merit in Science accepted at The Journal of Controversial Ideas, after receiving ridiculous reviews at other journals — and if you do not believe that, consider this: The idea that the only academic outlet that would publish a defense of merit is a journal devoted to “controversial ideas” tells you everything you need to know about the far left politicalization of academia.

• There were lots of emails between Roberts and Fiedler. There were. Roberts asked many questions. Fiedler answered them. Their purpose was to clarify the process and to encourage Roberts to provide a contribution. When did any of this become a firing problem?

• Fiedler asked Roberts to remove his denunciation of my horse/mule metaphor because it was so obviously misguided. Fiedler was concerned it would make Roberts look malicious. Well, Fiedler was definitely “guilty” of misjudging that, was’t he?

• Giving Hommel the “last word” by allowing him to reply to all the commentaries. This is normal procedure for a target article and commentaries.

  ---

Conclusion

Vague allegations of “values and ethics violations” are a well-known justification for censorship and purges. APS should identify what specific ethical guidelines, policies, or rules Fiedler violated. Until they do so, they can and will be credibly accused of illiberal practices, including censorship, vindictiveness, and engaging in an ideological purge.

Why Might This Interest You?

• It reveals APS judgment processes and their limitations and failures.

• It reveals some of Fiedler’s thinking in making some of the decisions he made.

• It fails to identify egregious behavior on Fiedler’s part, yet he was fired.

• Credibility of psychological science. It says a lot about how Psychology and academia now function, which is something to keep in mind when evaluating what does, and does not, make it into the published literature.

The APS Email with Questions Directed to Klaus Fiedler, and His Responses

Dear Klaus, 

I am writing in my capacity as Chair of the APS Publications Committee.   As Rob Gropp noted in his email to you, a great deal of concern has been voiced in the public discussion about the Perspective articles on diversity.   Both the commentary that has appeared on social media and the formal communications to the APS have been contentious and will require a formal response from the APS.

We would very much appreciate it if you could provide us with more information about the process and your objectives.  In particular, if you could provide information on the following, it will assure that we are accurately informed.

1.  What was the intent of the discussion forum? Was it intended as a response and expanded discussion around Steven Roberts’ 2020 paper that Hommel addresses in his article? Was it intended to be a discussion on Hommel’s arguments or Roberts’?

2.  Why were only the reviewers of the Hommel paper (who all reviewed the article favorably) invited to the forum?  Was it intended to be an open scholarly exchange, or a limited consideration of one perspective/argument/article?  In other words, was the forum intended to be a dialogue about of various viewpoints, or an elucidation of one viewpoint from multiple authors?

Response to 1. and 2.: I found this was a particularly insightful review process, and I therefore thought I should invite the reviewers to submit their reviews. Such a forum might instigate novel research on diversity. In addition to the three reviewers, I invited Clinton Roberts, although he had declined my invitation to review. (You can read all this in the text of my emails, which Roberts felt free to publicise)

3.  When and for what reason was it determined that the commentaries on Hommel’s article would not be reviewed externally?

PPS is a journal that allows for invited contributions without peer reviewing, as you may know. The reviews were strong enough to allow for such an exceptional procedure. I'd be happy for any arguments speaking to the contrary.

4.  When and why was the decision made to treat Roberts’ reply differently from the other submissions (I e., by soliciting input from another author in the forum)?

Roberts was not treated differently, in principle. On the contrary, he could read all other articles before he submitted, whereas the others could not see his manuscript beforehand. The only difference is explained below.

5.  What was the reason for requesting a “quality check” on Roberts’ reply from Hommel, but no similar check on any of the other commentaries?

Although all comments were (conditionally) accepted, it is of course my responsibility to make sure that there are no formal or factual inconsistencies. In Roberts manuscript, several details seemed to be incompatible with the other comments, and I was overwhelmed by the length of the manuscript and the amount of information. So I asked Hommel to help me checking the manuscript for consistency. As you may know, I told Robert that this was no review but simply a quality check. So, Roberts was not urged to respond to every point raised by Hommel. I merely wanted to help the authors avoiding embarrassing contradictions. Again, all this can be read in the confidential information that Roberts chose to append to his uploaded article.

Kind regards, Klaus

My Commentary (LJ)

There is enough here for anyone to feel vindicated. The mob and APS can say, “See! APS did its job, they contacted Fiedler and asked for his view before firing him!”

Fiedler and his supporters can say, “They asked a few narrow questions, more in the style of an interrogation, focusing exclusively on the facts of the event, and no wider context.” What sort of “wider contexts” might be relevant?

1. What are APS’s ethical principles that Fiedler supposedly violated? Absent any such identification, the proceedings deserve no credibility.

2. What are the norms among prior editors at PoPS? Did they accept commentaries without review? How about at other journals?

3. Why was firing the “right” response, rather than something far less disruptive?

In an Alternative Universe…

The process could have been more deliberative, less disruptive, and less ideologically charged. APS officials would have talked to Fiedler, and not fired him in 3 days. Fiedler could have been urged to identify some potential commentators more likely to be supportive of Roberts and not publish the exchange until that was complete. I could easily have been convinced to drop the horse/mule metaphor if Roberts dropped his histrionic “racism” denunciation. Although the nonexistence of the racist mule trope is a topic for an upcoming essay here, I still would have dropped it. How about APS guiding a process encouraging everyone to turn down the heat a bit?

PoPS would still have an editor and associate editors and would not have needed to suspend operations, the discussion would have proceeded more constructively, and APS would not be exposed to credible charges of “woke takeover” and “kangaroo court.” This event is not what inspired DeSantis and Rufo to engage in a conservative attempt to remake a Florida college; but it is the type of event that has inspired conservative exercises of political power to rein in academics gone progressively more and more wild.

Back in this Universe

Even the deliberative process I proposed above would not have been perfect. The mob smeared all of us involved and revealed the depth of vindictiveness and censoriousness that infects psychological science. APS, as an organization, could not have done much about that, at least, not in the short term. On the other hand, APS “represents” its members and reflects its leaders’ interests. Most likely, then, the entire episode functioned as a purge of PoPS’ editorial board and consulting editors, allowing them to be replaced by APS members who “reflect their values” which is usually a signal for progressive antiracist dogmas.

I was disappointed to see some of the signatories to the mob’s open denunciation letter; people who have previously voiced both recognition and opposition to rising illiberalism in academia and the progressive left, people whose scholarship focuses on bridging divides and hyperpartisanship in order to have a chance to reduce it and increase mutual understanding. I contacted a couple. To a person, their argument was some variation on “Fiedler’s behavior was egregious and he deserved to be fired.” They identified things they did not like or disapproved of, but never identified why whatever they complained about was so egregious it warranted firing, but let’s put that aside.

“I signed an open letter demonizing my colleagues as racists and calling for outright censorship because I wanted to get Fiedler fired” is a utilitarian argument (“getting Fiedler fired justifies my signing.”). This is an ends justify the means argument. Such arguments have a bad reputation because all ends do not justify all means. However, some ends do justify some means, it depends on the ends and means. Such an argument says, “Firing Fiedler was so important that I was willing to endorse all sorts of other toxic, authoritarian stuff that I do not really mean.” Of course, this analysis only applies to those making this argument; I recognize that true believers really viewed all of us as racists and enthusiastically endorsed the call for censorship.

Regardless, utilitarian arguments can be judged by utilitarian outcomes. Is APS and PoPS kowtowing to an academic social media outrage mob a “good” thing? Does the purge of scientists who believe science should eschew activism and stick to truthseeking cause more good or harm? Is the alienation of scientists who “do not share APS’s values” a good thing? If you do think these are all “good things,” please explain to all of us again how denunciation, demonization, and alienating those you disagree with or disapprove of will help you create a “diverse and inclusive” psychology, rather than a political monoculture.

If this really is how academia rolls now, there never was a serious chance that APS leadership would produce a deliberate and constructive resolution. As I wrote here, in academia, it was going to get worse before it gets worse, no matter what APS did.

On 1/26, APS sent this email to its members, one which attempts to “justify” its summary judgment of Fiedler. If you are, say, new to this controversy, start here to get the big picture. My response to their letter will appear in a subsequent Substack entry.

In short, paraphrasing, they state:

• We took this very seriously

• We had good reasons (the specifics of which they declined to state) for firing Fiedler.

For more, read their full email.

Below, I present Klaus Fiedler’s response to the APS email, sent to Robert Gropp, Chief Executive Officer of The Association for Psychological Science (APS) on 1/28, and it is reprinted here, as written, with his permission.

Klaus Fiedler’s Response to Robert Gropp’s email of January 26, 2023

Immediately after I read the new APS email that promised “further clarifications”, I wrote the following text to the email’s sender, APS Chief Executive Officer Robert Gropp. Just as in several previous emails I have sent to APS, I did not receive any response to my question. Indeed, I have never been given a chance to respond to APS’ accusations, nor have I been told what specific behavior justifies the harsh consequences. My pertinent questions to APS have always remained unanswered.

Dear Robert:

I would like to respond to these "further clarifications". Would you publish my responses using the same email circular, so that this time at least APS members get a chance to also provide my perspective on the alleged editorial malpractices?

Please respond in due time ... to enable temporal contiguity

Thanks and best regards, Klaus 

Regarding the most recent letter distributed to all APS members, I deliberately contest that several statements conveyed by Robert Gropp are misleading, unwarranted, or fully uninformative.

The statement “We learned about additional questionable editorial decisions and practices at the journal under the previous Editor-in-Chief (EIC)” remains as vague and uninformative as all former accusations. To interpret the validity of this message, it would be necessary to know: (a) what is the relative rate of negative versus positive evaluations of the EIC’s practices; (b) the operational definition of “questionable editorial decisions and practices”; (c) what judgment prompt was used by for the assessment? Critical readers may want to see the raw data (i.e., the verbatim evaluations in a repository) and evidence that these raw data are not selective. Do the devaluations that Robert Gropp alludes to merely reflect frustrated remarks by authors of rejected submissions to a journal with an extremely high rejection rate? Why does APS’ assessment not reflect the overly positive feedback I received from so many other sources concerning the quality of my editorial work? (I could easily provide a no-name version thereof). Whatever the case, the present statement hardly qualifies as “further clarification” as the circular letter consists of generalities and no specific points.

Let us be honest. The point that “concerns from many individuals about the editorial practices” gave rise to the APS action is a giveaway. The APS action was prompted by widespread disquiet about ‘racism’, not editorial practices. A disquiet was triggered by a misconceived and unfounded accusation, as the unreported evidence shows.  

Another paragraph is highly misleading: “Before any action was taken, the EIC was contacted regarding the complaints and provided with a list of questions regarding his editorial actions. His response did not dispute the factual basis of any of the details included in the complaints.”

This sounds like the EIC was given a chance to provide his counter-version of the entire episode by established procedural justice rules. This criterion of fair treatment was never met because (a) APS selected the list of (interrogation-type) questions provided; they did not constitute the EIC’s perspective. Many reverse questions raised by the EIC remained unanswered, despite his explicit request. (b) The EIC was given less than 24 hours to resign, much too fast to allow for a fair discussion of divergent perspectives. (c) The EIC was not offered the same widespread email distribution list to present his counter-arguments to the same broad audience to which APS had already sent out its accusations. His remarks would have gone unnoticed. (d) APS had already admitted the journal’s mistake and created social realities before the EIC could respond.

Finally, Robert Gropp writes, “The Board reviewed the EIC’s actions and concluded that the EIC demonstrated poor editorial judgment and bias,” again without specification of what “poor editorial judgment and bias” was found based on what criteria and diagnostic methods. To repeat, this negative evaluation is at variance with a plethora of positive feedback I received in countless emails. The discrepancy strikes me as conspicuous and calling for transparent cross-validation. So far, I have never received an evidence-based report on what exactly APS classified as poor editorial work. And, the present email circular falls short of what it promises, namely “further clarifications”.

With best regards, Klaus Fiedler (former EIC)

This was originally posted on 1/23/23 as a call for signatories.

2/1/23 Update

• The letter (which appears in the second half of this entry) was sent to the APS CEO and Board on January 30, 2023.

• A new letter, open to anyone is coming, so please do not sign on here anymore.

• I have edited the introduction accordingly.

The Text of the Letter Sent to APS

Board of Directors, and the

President and President-Elect of the Association of Psychological Science

Profs. Jennifer L. Eberhardt and Alison Gopnik,

Dear Jennifer and Alison,

We are writing to express our deep concern about your decision to summarily dismiss Klaus Fiedler as editor of PoPS. Having considered all the evidence available to us, we feel that the Association’s actions were unfair, unjustified and a complete denial of due process and the kind objectivity and rationality that one can reasonably expect from a scientific association.

Editors should always have a great deal of latitude in selecting reviewers and deciding how to deal with a manuscript. Fiedler’s actions suggest that he hoped to get an informed discussion going on the pages of PoPS on a vitally important topic – the forceful political infusion of ideological positions into what should be an objective and rational science.

As far as the evidence is available, Fiedler has not done anything to justify his instant dismissal. The reviewers he selected were chosen based on merit and their proven expertise. The fact that they were all critical of Roberts' ideologically driven research in no way indicates bias. They all offered detailed and reasonable justifications for their assessments.

Roberts' suggestion that their status as 'senior white males' had anything to do with their critical assessment of his work is itself racist. Racial status should play no role in selecting reviewers as Roberts implies, nor are editors obliged to seek more favorable reviews to balance the unfavorable ones.

The APS in almost instantly dismissing Fiedler acted in a reprehensible way that is not fitting for a scientific association. Your action represents a complete betrayal of fundamental principles of fairness, due process and objectivity, as the German Psychological Association also stated. Members have not been consulted, the process was not open and transparent, and Fiedler was not given an opportunity to explain his actions.

Even more worrying is that hundreds of our colleagues signed a petition demanding Fiedler's dismissal, without having the benefit of hearing his explanation. We should all be profoundly concerned by this serious violation of fundamental academic principles by our own scientific association.

 We request that you revisit this issue, give Fiedler equal chance to explain his actions, and publish both sides of the case so that all members of APS can have access to the relevant facts and make up their mind accordingly. In particular, those who rushed to judgment without full information should have an opportunity to reconsider their position. We look forward to your urgent response.

With best wishes,

Feel free to add your

Name, Professional Affiliation via the Comments section below. That is all you need add (though if you wish to leave further comment, that is also welcome). The main list will be periodically updated. Thanks.

Prof. R.I.M. Dunbar, University of Oxford, UK

Prof. Mario Mikulincer, Reichman University, Israel

Professor Catherine Salmon , University of Redlands

Prof. Joachim Krueger, Brown University, USA

Prof. Geoffrey Miller, University of New Mexico, APS Fellow

Prof. Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern School of Business

Prof. Pamela Paresky, Johns Hopkins University 

Prof. Roy Baumeister, University of Queensland

Prof. Joseph Forgas, Psychology, UNSW, Sydney

Prof. Brad Bushman, Ohio State University

Sally Satel MD, Yale University School of Medicine

Prof. Lee Jussim, Rutgers University

Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Reichman University

Prof. Peter Swan, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Prof. Nira Lieberman, University of Tel Aviv

Prof. Gun Semin, Utrecht University

Prof. Keith Stanovich, University of Toronto

Prof. Dr. W. Stroebe, University of Groningen

Prof. Michael Mills, Loyola Marymount University

Prof. George Paxinos, NEURA, Australia

Prof. Steven Pinker, Harvard University

Prof. Bernhard Hommel, University of Dresden

Prof. Paula J. Stanovich, Portland State University

Prof. Gilad Hirschberger, Reichman University

Prof. Patrizia Catellani, Catholic University of Milan

Prof. Yavor Paunov, Royal institute of Technology, Stockholm

Prof. Csaba Pleh, Central European University, Vienna

Prof. Mark van Vugt, Free University of Amsterdam

Prof. Steve Stewart-Williams, University of Nottingham Malaysia

Prof. George Marcus, Williams College, USA

Prof. Joel Cooper, Princeton University

Prof. Ken Sheldon, University of Missouri, USA

Prof. Anna Krylov, University of Southern California

Prof. Doug Kenrick, Arizona State University

Bill Frezza, MIT Free Speech Alliance

Prof. Bob Maranto

Prof. Marco Del Giudice, University of New Mexico, USA

Prof. J. Michael Bailey, Northwestern University

Prof. Joseph H. Manson, University of California, Los Angeles

Prof. James West, Vanderbilt University

Prof. Chris C. Martin, Oglethorpe University, USA

Prof. Jessica Hehman, University of Redlands

Prof. Andreas Bikfalvi, University of Bordeaux, France

Prof. Dorian Abbot, The University of Chicago
Prof. Robert Knapp, Reed College

Prof. David Kane, Harvard University

Prof. David Mandel, York University

Dr. Eddie Waldrep, Dept. Veterans affairs

Dr. Jane Fisher, University of Nevada, Reno

Dr. Colin Wright, Manhattan Institute

Dr. Carl  Beuke, New Zealand

Prof. Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State university

Prof. Glenn Geher, State University of New York

Prof. Rebecca Shiner, Colgate University

Prof. Delroy Paulhus, University of British Columbia

Prof. John Paul Chou, Rutgers University

Prof. Zach Goldberg, Georgia State University

Prof. Rob Sica, Prof. David Potts, Colorado State University

Prof. David Potts, City College of San Francisco

Prof. Richard Lowery, University of Texas, Austin

Prof. David Donaldson, Ottawa University

Prof. Julie Fitness, Macquarie University

Prof. David C Geary, University of Missouri

Prof. Sadredin C. Moosavi, Rochester Community Technical College
C. Alan Reber, California Southern University

Dr. Samantha Malone

Prof. Robert Kay, University of British Columbia

Prof. Alex Bertrams, University of Bern

Prof. Luana Maroja, Williams College

Dr. Nathan Honeycutt, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Prof. David Morgan, Spalding university

Dr. Samuel Rosenthal, Optave Diagnostics

Dr. Penny Adrian, Trauma Service

Dr. Frank Scavelli, University of East Anglia

Prof. Christopher Ferguson, Stetson University

Prof. Daniel Lakens, Eindhoven University

Prof. David Bertoli, University of Georgia

Dr. David Smith, American College of Education  

Prof. John Staddon, Duke University

Prof. Darrell Worthy, Texas a &M University

Prof. Matt Osborne, Austin Peay state University

Prof. Gad Saad, Concordia university

Prof. James Thompson, University College London

Prof. Axel Meyer, University of Konstanz

Prof. David Morgan, Spalding University

Dr. J Metz, SNIA

Prof. Chris Ellis, Bucknell University

Prof. Matthew J Grawitch, Saint Louis University

Dr. Nathaniel Bork, Rutgers University

Prof. Karl-Markus Mueller, Furtwangen University

Dr. Robert Lynch, Penn State University

Prof. Joseph Cesario, Michigan State University

Dr. Florian Ploeckl, University of Adelaide

Prof. Holger Mitterer, University of Malta

Dr. Bill Frezza, MIT Free Speech Alliance

Prof. Gregory Connor, Maynooth University

Dr. Leif Rasmussen, Northwestern University

Prof. Markus Buehner, LMU Munich

Prof. Jacob L Mackey, Occidental College

Prof. Charles Negy, University of Central Florida

Prof. Randy Wayne, Cornell university

Prof. Eric Kaufmann, Birkbeck College, University of London

Prof. Scott Yenor, Boise State University

Prof. Eric Rasmusen, Indiana University

Prof. Harald Uhlig, University of Chicago

Prof. Barry Smith, University at Buffalo

Prof. Richard Sparks, Mt. St. Joseph university

Prof. Gisela Muller-Plath, Technische Universitaet Berlin

Dr. Peter Hayes, Durham University

Nicholas Schappaugh, Georgia State University

Prof. Maxim Olchanyi, University of Massachusetts

Prof. Chris Rhoads, University of Connecticut

Smriti Mehta, UC Berkeley

Michael Lewis, University of Houston

Prof. Bradley Campbell, California State University, LA

Dr. Rachel Hartman, UNC Chapel Hill

Dr. Timur Sevincer, Leuphana University Luneburg

Mackenzie Moreno, DePaul University

Prof. Robert Gunn, College of the Desert

Prof. Coel Hellier, Keele University

Dr. Ruud Custers, Utrecht University

Prof. Thomas Mueller-Gronbach, University of Passau, Germany

Prof. Henk Aarts, Utrecht University

Prof. Laszlo Majtenyi, University of Miskolc

Prof. Thomas Huddle, UAB Heersink School of Medicine

Prof. Barry Smith, University of Buffalo

Prof. Ginger Katz

Prof. Steven Miller, Williams College

Prof. Charles Trzcinka, Indiana University

Prof. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School

Dr. Kirsty Miller, Lecturer

Prof. Elizabeth Weiss, San Jose State University

Prof. Joseph H. Manson, University of California, Los Angeles

Charles Trzcinka, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Dr Carole Sherwood, Clinical Psychologist

Kristine Danowski, MEd, MS, PhD(c), Retired

Nurit Haspel, Professor of Computer Science, UMass Boston.

Klaus Fiedler’s Statement

As a personalized target of a social-media attack on twitter, leading to a petition, I was accused as a racist, as a journal editor (of PPS), who abuses his editorial power and who violated alleged journal rules and diversity norms. I was not only forced to resign as Editor in Chief but also to tolerate insulting aggressions, threats to my scientific reputation and my personal dignity.

However, I also received reinforcing many affective support mails and reconfirmations from scholars all over the world, who expressed their appreciation of my ethical behavior and my editorial style, and started several counter movements in the social media. While I was always very grateful for what these colleagues have done for me, I only heard lately that some of them found I could have done more to rectify myself and to publicize my own perspective of the absurd accusations. I was told that I literally owe my friends such a rectifying statement, just because many important facts are simply unknown to many observers. 

Why I refrained so far from presenting my own perspective

The first and foremost reason why I never provided a counter-version or rectifying statement is that the entire episode was so absurd and surreal. I therefore expected that - in spite of, or exactly because of the wisdom of the social media crowd - it could only take a moment to recognize that there is virtually nothing to justify the accusation that I am a racist, or that I have abused editorial power and ignored existing journal rules.

The second, equally important reason was that APS, the organization who holds the PPS journal, never asked me for my version, and never engaged on what seems to be a self-evident rule of procedural justice, namely, to give the target of accusation a chance to reply and provide a counter statement – ​​to be circulated in the same widespread channel as the accusations. Up to now, nobody asked for my version.

The third reason was that, as a social psychologist, I did not want to play the role of a defendant, which presupposes that there are reasons to be defensive. Taking a defendant role might induce a hindsight effect, that is, a reconstructive memory illusion driven by the outcome scenario in which I am the defendant. In contrast, my understanding was always that I am the victim, not the potential perpetrator in a malicious play.

Fourth, I did assume, and I continue to assume, that there are ethical reasons not to blatantly reveal confidential details about editorial processes. Peer reviewing and the entire editorial correspondence strikes me as a matter of trust (and academic responsibility), preventing me from talking in public about my editorial strategy and my correspondence with other reviewers. In this particular case, though, after the entire editorial correspondence was publicized anyway, confidentiality constraints no longer prevent me from the following clarifying comments.

Finally, I have to admit that I missed an important point that motivates my supporters' claim. Not only many observers but also many "prosecutors" who signed the petition against me, may simply not know many crucial facts.

In an attempt to be as concise as possible in the remainder of this note, I first provide some background information about the editorial project that led to this serious conflict, before I point out that there can be no evidence whatsoever to justify the harsh sanctions postulated in the petition. In the end, I briefly comment on the typical misunderstandings fostered by an uploaded “preprint” by Roberts, which triggered the wide-spread social-media response.

• The editorial project was well-motivated: A recently published article by Hommel, arguing that diversity is a multidimensional concept, whereas a previous article by Roberts had interpreted diversity largely in terms of race discrimination, promised to open a fruitful discussion forum. To initiate this discussion forum, all three reviewers of the Hommel article were invited to submit a publishable version of their reviews, along with a comment by Roberts. The entire project lasted about half a year, during which no conflict could be anticipated. All contributions were accepted for publication, pending some editorial quality control of the finally submitted comment by Roberts – the only comment that could not be read by any other discussant before. The purpose of this quality control was to protect authors from detecting embarrassing inconsistencies only after print. Roberts was repeatedly assured that the "quality control" was not a review process; the acceptance of his comment did not depend on Hommels' evaluation.

• Roberts then uploaded his comment, preceded by a “case study” in which my name was dropped abundantly, although he never accused me explicitly of racism, abuse of editorial power or any other violation of specific editorial norms. The end of the uploaded article was a protocol of the editorial correspondence. It is noteworthy that his version of the editorial process is largely congruent with my own version, which only includes some comments on the editorial goals. Both versions clearly reveal that my editorial style was friendly, impartial, fair, and driven by the motive to trigger a fruitful discussion forum, leading to novel insights and implications on the scientific discourse on diversity. It is hard to see what aspect of my editorial action (ie, what verbal action) justifies any of the harsh accusations in the petition.

My commented version of the editorial correspondence can be found in https://heibox.uni-heidelberg.de/f/3541c5faa7ed44d487dc/?dl=1

Readers may alternatively refer to the appendix of the “preprint” uploaded by Roberts.

• As already mentioned, though, evidence against my editorial style or decisions can not even be found in the uploaded article. The malicious and highly personalized social-media attack mainly reflects an extremely low threshold for unwarranted constructive inferences of social-media users, probably facilitated by APS' premature tendency to accept the underlying protest … in the absence of any solid evidence and without asking the witch to provide her own version in an unbelievable witch hunt.

To undo but the most obvious mistakes and misinterpretations of the entire affair and to put the record straight, I append here a list of obvious facts that may not be common knowledge:

• The planned discussion forum was not a critique of Roberts' former article but the potential of Hommels' recent call for a broader perspective on diversity

• The three reviewers whose comments were published in the discussion forum were by no means the only ones whom I had asked to review the Hommel paper. Several others—Roberts included—declined.

• I nevertheless invited Roberts to participate as a further commentator in the discussion forum.

• I am neither personally related to the reviewers invited for the discussion forum nor did I ever do joint research with one of them. The unwarranted impression that I may personally like these scholars relies on emails I use to send out to all my reviewers, who are doing honorary work for me. Hundreds of scholars have received these personally committal and overly grateful mails, which go beyond superficial thank-you letters. I would have never expected that these mails - for which I received many compliments - could be misunderstood as reflecting a bias in favor of selected reviewers.

• It is simply not true that the journal's Editor in Chief cannot publish comments without additional peer reviewing. Immediately accepted articles are as wanted by the journal as immediate desk rejection.

• I never rejected any submission by Roberts. On the contrary, I always stressed that his comment is accepted. The final “quality control” was exclusively meant to protect authors from embarrassing inconsistencies when articles go to print without sufficient control.

• I intended the entire thread of publications to start a scientific discussion, not to end it in favor of one side or the other. This open-minded goal must have been evident from my announcements.

The critical question, to reiterate, is whether any of my editorial actions documented here and in the attached file, or in any other source of cogent evidence, justify any of the harsh claims propagated in the petition.

Klaus Fiedler, former editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science (PoPS, a major and influential academic psychology journal) accepted papers (by Hommel, Stanovich, Stroebe and me) that were critical of a previously published paper (Roberts et al, 2020).  Roberts is a biracial Stanford professor.1 The substantive controversy involved how diversity is and should be implemented throughout psychology.  Roberts et al (2020) advocated for greater “representation” of Black and other “minoritized”2 groups “of color.”  The critics made many arguments, including:

• Diversity is not just race. Human diversity includes a vast … diversity of characteristics (e.g., personality, politics, social class, upbringing, skill sets, experiences, interests, age, religion and many more).  Scientifically, for psychology to produce a representative science, it needs to capture all of this diversity, and not exclusively the types of diversity advocated by progressive activists.

• Diversity is irrelevant to certain types and purposes of research.

• Roberts et al (2020) was as much political activism and propaganda as it was science. This was detectable by identification of a slew of demonstrably false claims or distortions that always “just happened” to advance a far left progressive worldview and agenda. For example, Roberts et al (2020) repeatedly bemoaned a supposed lack of sufficient (whatever that means) racial diversity in psychology and called for strong steps by authorities (e.g., all sorts of DEI mandates) to ensure better racial diversity. Hommel and I showed, using data from the U.S. Census, European equivalents to the U.S. Census, and educational statistics, that Robert et al’s (2020) own data actually showed that “minoritized” groups were already represented at levels at or exceeding that of the underlying population.

Serious discussion of these issues was quickly derailed by:

1. First, Roberts posting a paper denouncing all of us as racists.

2. Outrage spread on social media. Some can be found linked below.

3. An open letter denounced Fiedler and the critics as racists, and called for the Association for Psychological Science (APS, which oversees PoPS) to summarily execute an order to fire Fiedler and for the commentaries to be unaccepted for publication. It also called for PoPs to publish Roberts’ denunciation, and for APS to give Roberts pretty much anything else he wanted as reparations for the (according to the mob) terrible way he was treated. With respect to Fiedler, APS caved to the mob. They gave Fiedler an ultimatum to fire or be resigned, and he resigned.

Long Version: Links to Primary Sources, Commentaries, and Broader Perspectives

What follows next are links to articles providing more detail. It is worth noting, as evidence for the radicalization of academia, that the view from outside academia has consistently roundly condemned the open letter and associated mob justice. The view from inside academia is more mixed.

Short Written Overviews:

• Prestigious Psych Journal Cans Editor for Soliciting Criticism of Black Psychologist (Washington Free Beacon)

• ‘I Am the Victim’: A Journal Editor Is Under Fire After a Diversity Debate Is Derailed (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

• A Shameful, Useless, Counterproductive Dispute in Psychology (Chronicle of Higher Ed).

Primary Sources

• Racial Inequality in Psychological Science by Roberts et al (2020), the paper which Hommel criticized.

• Dealing with Diversity in Science, Hommel’s criticism of Roberts et al (2020).

• Commentary on Hommel and on Roberts et al (2020)

  • Toward a Psychology of Ideas Rather than Demographics by Stanovich

  • The Myth of the Need for Diversity among Subjects in Theory-Testing Research, by Stroebe.

  • Diversity is Diverse: Social Justice Reparations and Science, by me.

• Diversity for Truth, Hommel’s reply to the commentaries.

• Roberts’ denunciation, calling us all racists and lying about my paper in particular.

• The Open Letter signed by almost 1400 academics denouncing Fiedler and the four authors of the five papers as racist, calling for authorities to summarily execute an order to fire Fiedler, and calling for those five papers to be unaccepted.

• The alternative open letter opposing that summary execution and calling for a more deliberative and due process.

• APS demands that Fiedler either resign or be fired. He resigned. There is not exactly a public record of this, but, here, APS “explains” its actions.

• German psychology society upbraids APS (the professional organization that oversees PoPS) for lack of procedural justice.`

• Notes from a Witch Hunt (long overview by me as it was happening)

• 1200 Academics Denounced me as Racist for Using a Quote from Fiddler on the Roof (essay by me, on my experience of the outrage mob’s ire).

• Joachim Krueger’s letters to APS and PoPS resigning as member of the organization and editorial board member in protest of their handling of the whole situation.

• At least 6 of 7 PoPS associate editors have resigned. I have not found any statement by APS or PoPS about this. The first image is the current list of associate editors found here as of 12/31/22. The second image is the list from earlier in 2022, which can be found here.

  

Compare the above, showing a single associate editor, with below, from June, 2022, showing 7.

• Klaus Fiedler defends himself. Setting the Record Straight, posted here on 1/20/23.

• 1/26/23, APS issues another statement.

It is worth pointing out that there is an apparent conflict between Fiedler’s 1/20/23 statement and APS’s 1/26 statement. Fiedler wrote:

• “The second, equally important reason was that APS, the organization who holds the PPS journal, never asked me for my version, and never engaged on what seems to be a self-evident rule of procedural justice, namely, to give the target of accusation a chance to reply and provide a counter statement – ​​to be circulated in the same widespread channel as the accusations. Up to now, nobody asked for my version.”

• APS on 1/26 wrote:

  • “Before any action was taken, the EIC was contacted regarding the complaints and provided with a list of questions regarding his editorial actions. His response did not dispute the factual basis of any of the details included in the complaints.”

As of this writing (1/26), I have no information that might resolve this contradiction. The apparent contradiction is that whereas Fiedler says he was not asked for his version of events, APS says they did contact him. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real:

• On 1/28, I received this email from Klaus Fiedler. It resolves the apparent contradiction as follows: Whereas it is literally true that “the EIC [Fiedler] was contacted,” as stated by APS, it is also literally true that he was given only the opportunity to respond to a series of narrowly-tailored interrogation-type questions, and was not asked either for, or to explain, his actions, procedures, and policies.

• A letter protesting APS’s treatment of Fiedler open to academics (including graduate students) and scientists (whether or not academics, including those who are retired, can be found here. This was a joint effort and not “my” letter — many of the signatories were approached via email (some by me, many by others).

Eventually, I tracked down the one source that Roberts relied on when denouncing me for using a racist trope. I discovered an academic deepfake:

There is No Racist Mule Trope

Academics Weigh In

The entries mostly cheerleading or justifying the witch hunt are flagged with **.

• In Defense of Scientific Integrity and Due Process, Quillette, by Joe Forgas. “Reviewers should always be chosen based on their expertise and merit, and not their racial or identity status.”

• Woke Witch Hunt in Psychology? Spectator, by Joe Forgas. “The far more troubling issue is how leading professional associations in a scientific field have now been corrupted by Woke ideology to a degree where unsupportable and unexamined accusations of racism can result in the immediate dismissal of an outstanding editor, and the gratuitous slandering of the good name of a serious and decent scientist.”

• Diversity is a Trojan Horse, Minding the Campus, by John Staddon. “It is this Trojan-horse dilemma—passing off ideological claims as scientific—which entangled an editor of APS journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, Klaus Fiedler…”

• The Campus Battle Between Critical Theory and Liberal Enlightenment Hits Home. Nate Bork, Substack. “Agree with us or we will accuse you of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, bigotry, xenophobia, patriarchy, etc. and ruin your career and your entire life. We will also ruin the lives of anyone who doesn’t join us in our attacks, or who remain silent, or who voice support for any position which disagrees with us.”

• What Happened at Perspectives on Psychological Science? Two Psychologists/Four Beers Podcast. Yoel Inbar & Rachel Hartman. From the show notes: “They try to untangle a complicated story of peer review gone awry, explain the dueling open letters condemning and supporting Fiedler, and critically evaluate the allegations against him as well as the process that led to his dismissal as EIC [Editor in Chief].”

• Racist Debacle at Perspectives on Psychological Science.** Google doc. Flavio Azevedo. “A personal collection of links and resources towards awareness of the existing and pervasive systemic racism in academia.”

• You Also have an Ideology.** Moin Syed, Substack. “What we are witnessing in psychology, and indeed in many other disciplines, is a disruption in the normative ideology. Many more folks have shifted their thinking from the interpersonal model to the systemic model, from colorblindness to anti-racism, and are subsequently trying to put this ideology into practice.”

• How Woke Critical Theory is Destroying Science. Real Clear Education. Robert Maranto & me. “This activist minority is loud, aggressive, and skilled at ginning up the type of online outrage that got Fiedler fired…How can we save academia from itself?… a first step might involve extensive congressional hearings establishing the depth of academia’s free inquiry problems and ideological capture. Such hearings could prove less partisan, more popular, and more important than most of what Congress does.”

• Klaus Fiedler is a victim — of his own arrogance.** Uli Schimmack, on his blog site. “Yet, nobody else has supported Fiedler’s claim that it is entirely fair and acceptable to invite three White-ish reviewers to submit their reviews as commentaries and to accept these commentaries without peer-review.” (I can’t resist commenting — why Schimmack claims that no one else supported Fiedler in this is puzzlingly false, as can be seen throughout the links posted here, LJ).

People Hate this Shit: The View from Outside Academia

As far as I can tell, no one outside of academia has expressed endorsement of the mob witch-hunting behavior here. In a popular rebellion against the deplatforming of Dorian Abbot, thousands attended his talk when it was moved to Princeton’s Madison Program. Similarly, free and paid subscriptions to Unsafe Science skyrocketed immediately following this event, suggest something similar.

• How Biden’s Rogue Deputy Fooled Us, And Why 1,400 Psychologists Hunt Dark Pirate Jussim. Blocked and Reported podcast, Jesse Singal & Katie Herzog. 2nd half is on this, about 25 min in. From the show notes: “Then, less-important co-captain Jesse Singal investigates what happened when German psychologist Klaus Fiedler took the helm at the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science — and how his quartermaster’s criticism of its race obsession led its American crew to mutiny. Doing so, he crosses paths with the notorious Dark Pirate Jussim and his evil steed, a racist mule whose mere mention is said to bring a ship a thousand years of bad luck.”

• Raising the Roof (video, my appearance on Andrew Doyle’s UK TV show). When Andrew asked a question suggesting this event was mostly a cynical power grab, my reply was, paraphrasing: “That’s in the mix, but, mostly, I think people believe their own propaganda.”

• A Rush to Judgment in Psychological Science. Quillette. “Yet nowhere does Roberts demonstrate that any of these men exhibited racial animus. And some of Roberts’s efforts to make this case are flat-out absurd.”

• The Sign in Lee Jussim’s Window, Minding the Campus. “The psychologists are burning another witch.”

• Psychology journal editor’s ouster over racism allegations continues bad precedent, The College Fix. “Scientific organizations “have got to stop responding to Twitter mobs.”s

• Spike in paid subscriptions to Unsafe Science post witch hunt:

A Selection of Excellent Essays that Help Understand What the Hell Happened through Broader Sociocultural Trends

• From Russia with Love: Science and Ideology Then and Now. Anna Krylov. “My everyday experiences as a chemistry professor at an American university in 2021 bring back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good memories—more like Orwellian nightmares.”

• America’s cultural revolution is just like Mao’s. Xiao Li. “…no historical analogy is ever perfect, and to seek exactitude over verisimilitude is to miss the point. There are differences, yes, but when it comes to fundamentals, the two moments have much in common.”

• The American Soviet Mentality. Izabella Tabarovsky. “Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building.”

• No Enemies to the Left. Paul Robinson. “Before 1917, Russian liberals believed that they were not free, and that they lived in an oppressive state which needed sweeping away. To this end, they adopted the slogan ‘No enemies to the left!’ While not engaging in political violence themselves, they refused ever to condemn it, except when carried out by the state or the political right.”

• Suicide of the Liberals. Gary Saul Morson. “Vorotyntsev gives ground and holds his peace, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary,” a word Solzhenitsyn italicizes to suggest that, in other cultures and periods, a different term of opprobrium will play the same role.”

• Social justice as social leverage. Helen Dale & Lorenzo Warby. “Again and again, we observe that once something is declared to be a matter of social justice, opposition to such a claim becomes illegitimate. This is not a bargaining-to-make-things-better strategy. This is a social dominance strategy.”

• Is Everything “Problematic”? By me. In which I show how the narrative techniques that have rapidly ascended the academic ladder of presumed credibility can make anything seem racist or bigoted, including dog-walking, commenting on a beautiful day, and Mahatma Gandhi.

• The Implementation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Academia. Report by Nathan Honeycutt and me, based on his dissertation. Nate is now at FIRE.ORG. From the Executive Summary of the report: “DEI attempts to mobilize individual forms of affirmative action and selective preferences for those groups progressives consider protected. Most Americans oppose selective preferences based on race and gender.”

• Ideological Intensification. Mason Goad and Bruce R. Chartwell. A data packed report on DEI in the academy. For example: “The number of DEI-related projects receiving NIH funding grew significantly between 2010 and the present, increasing roughly 5 to 1,000 times depending on the DEI term.”

• Is “Woke Science” The Only Science Allowed in Academia? Lawrence Krauss. Talk slides such as these:

• The Radicalization of the American Academy. By me. Unsafe Science data packed essay. Section heading: “You Can Make Many Bizarre Claims in Academia IF You Frame Them as Advancing Social Justice.”

• The Radicalization of the American Academy. Full length academic chapter, packed with far more data than the essay above. Authors: Jussim, Honeycutt, Paresky, Careem, Finkelstein & Finkelstein. Posted at Unsafe Science as a report for paying subscribers.

Appendix: Voices of People of Color Widely Ignored in Psychology

What follows here is the finale of my widely denounced paper.

The best of Roberts et al’s (2020) arguments constitute a call for including the excluded, at least if they are committed to the norms of science and to making coherent, evidence-based, logical arguments. I endorse these best arguments. In this spirit, I end this piece with quotes from scholars of color whose ideas and views relevant to issues in psychology closely related to those raised by Roberts et al (2020) and Hommel, and which I almost never see referenced or discussed in academic psychology literatures (especially ironic, since at least one, McWhorter, is a linguist and is highly influential on psychology-related topics [such as racism and intolerance] outside of academic psychology). None are psychologists, and I list their fields in a spirit of diversifying the field of ideas from which academic psychology draws. I note that this is not a sample of quotes representative of anything at all; it is a convenience sample of voices of people of color that have been largely excluded from scientific psychology.

Wilfred Reilly (2021, political science): “…people of color are successful in modern America to an almost surprising degree, which is rarely discussed—for different reasons—by either the “social-justice” left or the contemporary hard right. As of 2019, seven of the top 10 American ethnic groups in income terms—Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Persian, and Arab Lebanese Americans—were “people of color” as this term is generally conceptualized…”

Hrishikesh Joshi (philosophy, 2022): “…social pressure to avoid sharing evidence against a particular claim undermines the confidence we can place in that claim, because it makes more likely the possibility that the (first-order) evidence that does make its way to us is a lopsided subset of the total. This has the perhaps tragic implication that we can typically be less confident of morally and politically laden issues than we can about ‘dry’ subjects like chemistry or cell biology.’”

George Yancey (sociology, quoted in Kristof, 2016): ““Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me [Kristof]. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

Luana Maroja (2022, biology): “Extreme emphasis on sexual harassment stifles productive scientific discourse between men and women.”

Musa al-Gharbi (2020, sociology): “Diversity is important. Diversity-related training is terrible.”

Marisol Quintanilla (2022, entomology): “It is very strange that the surveys assume that race is fixed when it is really a spectrum (for example I have Spanish, Chinese, North African, and Native American ancestries) and the same forms pretend that gender is on a spectrum (11 options in most Michigan State surveys) when it is clearly binary (mammals are sexually dimorphic).”

John McWhorter (2021, linguistics): “Woke racism: How a new religion betrayed Black America” (book title).

Roland Fryar (2022, economics): “More corporate leaders should be trying to solve diversity challenges in the same way they solve problems in every other aspect of their business: through intelligent use of data, rigorous hypothesis testing, and honest inference about what is working.”

Amna Khalid (2022, history): “Having grown up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, I know well what happens when freedom of expression is threatened and people are bullied into silence. It pains me deeply to see this happening in my adopted country.”

Sarah Haider (2022, Founder, ex-Muslims of North America): “The activist game, to sum in one sentence, is about results… The thinker game is about truth… Years ago I was asked on a podcast whether it was possible to be effective and intellectually honest in the activist space. I said no.”

As psychology and academia embrace activism in the name of social justice, calls to include the previously excluded will likely accelerate. In that spirit, I look forward to responses by academics calling for DEI that celebrate the inclusion in this article, and therefore, in the psychology peer reviewed literature, of the heretofore excluded voices of people of color quoted above, and, more important, their substantive views.  Doing so might help psychology to deliver that horse it sold.

Footnotes

Bernhard Hommel

Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

Faculty of Psychology, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Hommel (this issue1) has discussed and expressed his worries about the increasing intrusion of activist thinking into science. Based on the article of Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, and Mortenson (2020) on “Racial inequality in psychological research”, he highlighted three hallmarks of this intrusion: (1) a blindness to the multidimensional nature of diversity; (2) the failure to distinguish psychological mechanisms from the impact of moderators; and (3) a blindness to agency (in contrast to circumstances or “the system”) as a factor to explain psychological phenomena. Hommel argued that the uncritical acceptance and the introduction of political activist arguments into science would be likely to damage scientific freedom and independence. Jussim (this issue), Stanovich (this issue), and Stroebe (this issue) have commented on these claims. All three commentaries agree that intermixing political activism and science is not a good thing and likely to damage the reputation of science and its advocates, which would further reduce the impact of scientific insights on public decision-making. All three commentaries also agree with the three problematic hallmarks that Hommel (this issue) discusses, they even provide further evidence for them and add further implications. Given this general agreement, it makes little sense to defend or repeat my claims, nor would the reader benefit from comments of a European working in Germany and China on the various US-American political issues and implications that the commentators are raising. Accordingly, I will focus on common ground that my target article and the three commentaries, and to some degree even the article of Roberts et al., reveal and try to extract three general lessons with respect to how our discipline, or science as a whole, might constructively deal with diversity in the future.

Science for power or truth?

The systems-theorist Luhmann (1996) has characterized social systems by means of their currency or guiding value. According to his approach, the currency of science is truth, and it is this value that activities in the system try to maximize, while the currency of politics is power. This distinction relates to the two definitions of diversity provided by the Oxford dictionary that Jussim (this issue) is citing. Maximizing truth in our scientific theorizing requires the consideration of diversity in the first, variety sense. If our conclusions and theoretical claims can be demonstrated to not hold for a particular subset of individuals, if we thus fail to capture the whole diversity humankind can offer in our theorizing, our approach is at least incomplete, if not entirely wrong. Considering this kind of diversity is essential for finding truth, and so it is this kind of diversity that is important for science as a truth-seeking activity. The second definition refers to the active inclusion or involvement of particular subsets of individuals. Demands that relate to this definition, as put forward by Roberts et al., commonly use arguments that refer to either representativeness or power, or both (as in the case of Roberts et al.).

Hommel (this issue) has argued that, given the number of possibly relevant variables, truly representative designs are simply unrealistic and Stroebe (this issue) has explained that and why true representativeness is actually of no theoretical relevance anyway. Hence, representativeness is unrelated to truth, at least if it comes to the investigated participants. How about representativeness on the side of the researchers? As the commentators and Roberts et al. have emphasized, finding the truth is likely to be facilitated by a diversity of opinions on the researcher side. While race may not be the most obvious factor generating or indicating opinion diversity (Stanovich, this issue), the commentators have discussed various findings showing that more diverse groups are likely to find solutions faster or more likely, or solutions that are more creative or interesting. Less clear is, however, how this kind of diversity can be achieved. Mixing as many personal features as possible might be an option, but I am not aware of convincing empirical evidence suggesting that worldviews, perspectives, intellectual preferences, and other relevant features are strongly correlated with any of the features discussed by political activists or considered by affirmative action, such as race, gender, socioeconomic background, or sexual preference. As long as we do not have a clear vision with respect to how intellectual diversity can be effectively maximized, no selection (which implies trust in the randomness of the underlying distribution) seems more useful than strong selection based on cues with unknown validity. However, formulations such as “one might expect White journal editors—whose gatekeeping function positions them to govern what is worthy of publication—to be less likely than journal editors of color to publish research that highlights the role of race in human psychology” (Roberts et al., 2000, p. 1296) suggest that it is not quest for truth that is driving this argument but a struggle for power. Striving for power is not illegitimate in a democratic society, but it falls into the realm of political activism, rather than science.

The lesson one can take from these considerations is probably well captured by the distinction between representativeness and representation. With respect to investigated participants, it seems more important to make sure that one’s theoretical assumptions and predictions hold for all kinds of people, which suggests that the representation of diversity in samples makes it more likely to find the truth, than to strive for true representativeness (according to whatever criterion one might favor). With respect to the investigators, it seems more important to make sure that as many ideas and views as possible are represented in a research team than to strive for representativeness of ideas and views according to some criterion. For instance, it is easy to imagine that the theorizing of a research group becomes deeper, more balanced, and (thus) more realistic if the team members vary in their background and theoretical conviction or perspective (such as environmentalists and geneticists in a team of developmental researchers), but it is hard to see why a truly representative distribution of corresponding positions in the team would be required. This suggests that representation is important for truth, but representativeness is not, whereas the opposite holds for politics: Given that the political currency is power, and power hinges on the numbers of supporters (e.g., majority), representation is nothing, but representativeness is all. Accordingly, it makes perfect sense that political activists are interested in representativeness, while scientists are, or at least should be, interested in representation.

Grounding doubt in statistics or theory?

The scientific quest for truth ideally culminates in theories that capture our insights into the functioning of our study objects or subjects, as in the case of psychology. Theories are thus the eventual goal of science and statistics are one of the many tools we are using to test and to build them. These roles of theories and statistics as ends and means, respectively, have changed and even tended to reverse in the recent years. In the course of the so-called replication crisis in psychology (e.g., Open Science Collaboration, 2015), statistics often dominate the discussions, and they seem to represent the actual goals of many studies. One example is the overly restricted interpretation of failures to replicate previous findings, which are often not taken as a theoretically interesting hint to a not-yet-fully understood moderator, context condition, or sample characteristic, but rather as evidence that the investigated phenomenon does not exist (e.g., Wagenmakers  et al., 2016). If we are interested in promoting more interest in, and more empirical activities with respect to diversity, it would be useful to reconsider this unfortunate shift of emphasis from theory to statistics in two ways.

First, various authors, including the three commentators and Roberts et al. (2020), have rightly pointed out that researchers should actively engage in testing the generality of their theoretical ideas, but the narrow interpretation of replications failures as undermining the theory under test does not provide an optimal reward schedule for theorists to participate in such testing. Even though repeated failures to replicate should certainly be taken serious and at some point motivate dropping the theoretical approach, a realistic interpretation of at least some replication failures would be that they point to the existence of important moderators that the theory has yet to consider (Stroebe, this issue). According to this interpretation, failures to replicate would actually be welcome because they help guiding theorists to develop even better versions of their theory. De-escalating the ongoing methodological debate and emphasizing this very valuable function of systematically extending theory testing to new populations would help a great deal to convince researchers of the use and promise of embracing diversity in science.

Second, the commentators have emphasized that jumping from statistics to theoretical conclusions is commonly more complicated than activist arguments imply. One example is the disparity fallacy mentioned by Stanovich (this issue), according to which non-representative distributions necessarily imply societal injustice—thereby neglecting various possible other factors that may just as well explain the distribution (Sowell, 2019). Another is the conclusion that theory testing with non-representative samples is necessarily problematic, a line of reasoning that Stroebe (this issue) forcefully argues to be incorrect. Hence, statistical observations as such commonly do not tell us much without further theoretical assumptions. Accordingly, the fact that the Stroop effect, say, has only been tested in particular parts of the world population is insufficient to argue that theories about the Stroop effect are necessarily incorrect. What is needed to bolster such an argument is a theoretical scenario that could explain why a particular not-yet-investigated subpopulation may indeed not show the effect, and why that would theoretically matter. Hence, even if the Stroop effect was not yet tested in Catholic nuns, say, this fact alone is insufficient to challenge a particular Stroop theory. But if a realistic theoretical scenario could motivate the idea that strong religious or Catholic beliefs somehow restructure the cognitive system in such a way that processing Stroop stimuli might indeed be different in nuns, including this particular subpopulation would become important and worthwhile. In short, scientific doubt needs to be grounded in theoretical reasoning, but not (just) in statistics.

Diversity as noise or explanandum?

Lewin (1931) has pointed out that our present scientific practice in psychology is still reflecting the Aristotelian idea that sorting (e.g., phenomena into processing or system categories) implies understanding. Aristotelian (as contrasted to Galilean) science is based on the conviction that only non-random events should be considered in scientific research, which among other things is reflected in our current statistical reasoning, according to which truth is revealed by eliminating or at least controlling the noise in the data (Hommel, 2020). Diversity is a particularly potent generator of noise in data, which makes it a natural enemy of researchers interested in noise-free, clean data that make it easier to find significant effects. Accordingly, we either try to reduce the amount of inter-individual variability by testing homogeneous or highly selected groups of participants, or by testing large samples, in the hope that inter-individual differences cancel each other out. In contrast to these strategies, Lewin (1931) strongly advocates a transition to a Galilean mode, in which both mean differences and inter-individual variability around the particular means need to be explained by using the same theory. A Galilean theory of the Stroop effect would thus not only need to explain why people are faster and more accurate when naming the color of the word GREEN written in green than when naming the color of the word RED written in green, but it would also need to explain why some people show a more pronounced difference between these two conditions than others. Galilean psychology would thus be more challenging to theorists, but it would also generate more interesting, and eventually more useful theories and make much more efficient use of collected data than our traditional Aristotelian approach (Hommel & Colzato, 2017)—a kind of “from nose to tail” approach to empirical research. Adopting a Galilean approach in psychology would very naturally attract attention to, and generate interest in human diversity, because diversity would no longer be considered an annoying noise factor but a central explanandum and key target of all theorizing.

Conclusions

The target paper of Hommel (this issue) and the three commentaries by Jussim (this issue), Stanovich (this issue), and Stroebe (this issue) asked the question how psychology should deal with human diversity. My impression is that the major conclusions from this exchange are threefold. First, all contributions share the major claim of Roberts et al. (2020) that diversity is, or at least should be an important ingredient of psychological research and theorizing. Yes, people are different and this needs to be reflected in our work. Second, science and political activism both have their rights, functions, and importance, but mixing them up is very likely to do a bad service to psychology in general and weaken its reputation and role in public discussions in particular. Science is interested in truth while political activism is interested in power, and both aims are unlikely to support each other. Hallmarks of the intrusion of politics into science are the reduction of the diversity concept to one or few features that are assumed to indicate power disparities that call for repair, the failure to distinguish between the mechanisms and the content of psychological representations, and a selective focus on circumstances, society or “the system” as the only factor in explaining human behavior. Third, relying on theoretical considerations, rather than real or apparent statistical disparities, and considering diversity as explanandum, rather than noise, may provide a good starting point for raising more and broader interest in human diversity and the important information it can provide.

References

Hommel, B. (2020). Pseudo-mechanistic explanations in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Topics in Cognitive Science, 12, 1294-1305.

Hommel, B. (this issue). Dealing with diversity in psychology: Science or ideology? Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Hommel, B., & Colzato, L.S. (2017). The grand challenge: Integrating nomothetic and ideographic approaches to human cognition. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:100.

Jussim, L. (this issue). Diversity is diverse: Social justice reparations and science. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Lewin, K. (1931). The conflict between Aristotelian and Galilean modes of thought in contemporary psychology. Journal of General Psychology, 5, 141–176.

Luhmann, N. (1996). Social systems. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716

Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D., & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15, 1295–1309. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620927709

Sowell, T. (2019). Discrimination and disparities. New York: Basic Books.

Stanovich, K.E. (this issue). Toward a psychology of ideas rather than demographics. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Stroebe, W. (this issue). The myth of the need for diversity among subjects in theory-testing research. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Wagenmakers, E. et al. (2016). Registered replication report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 917-928. 10.1177/1745691616674458.

Acknowledgements

The author was supported by a Double-100 Talent Grant of the Province of Shandong, China.

Footnote

This article was completed with support from the Institute for Humane Studies under grant number IHS001397.  My positionality statement can be found here.

Abstract

Because the term “diversity” has two related but different meanings, what authors mean when they use the term is inherently unclear.  In its broad form, it refers to vast variety. In its narrow form, it refers to human demographic categories deemed deserving of special attention by social justice-oriented activists. In this article, I review Hommel’s critique of Roberts et al (2020), which, I suggest, essentially constitutes two claims: 1. that Roberts et al’s (2020) call for diversity in psychological science focuses exclusively on the latter narrow form of diversity and ignores the scientific importance of diversity in the broader sense; and 2. Ignoring diversity in the broader sense is scientifically unjustified. Although Hommel’s critique is mostly justified, this is not because Roberts et al (2020) are wrong to call for greater social justice-oriented demographic diversity in psychology, but because Hommel’s call for the broader form of diversity subsumes that of Roberts’ et al (2020) and has other aspects critical to creating a valid, generalizable, rigorous and inclusive psychological science. In doing so, I also highlight omissions, limitations, and potential downsides to the narrow manner in which psychology and the broader academy are currently implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“Of course, there was the time he sold him a horse, and delivered a mule.”

Tradition, from the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof.

 The Oxford Languages Dictionary provides two definitions of diversity:

1.      The state of being diverse, variety.

2.      The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.

Inasmuch as “the state of being diverse” is not very helpful for understanding the meaning of “diversity,” I looked up “variety.”  The same dictionary defines “variety” as “the quality or state of being different or diverse; the absence of uniformity, sameness, or monotony.”  The first definition is clearly the broader of the two and subsumes the second definition. This risks creating confusion about what is being discussed. If someone promises “diversity” interpreted in the broader sense, but delivers “diversity” in the narrower sense, that person is plausibly interpretable as having, metaphorically, sold a horse but delivered a mule.

That, in a nutshell, is Hommel’s critique of Roberts et al (2020) paper on “Racial inequality in Psych Research,” and it hits the bullseye. Diversity, in the broadest sense, which subsumes and therefore includes the narrower sense, is crucial for a valid and credible psychological science. “Diversity” is diverse. Even when restricting the term’s usage to people, the ways in which people can be diverse is vast, including demographics, political, experiential, expertise, and varieties of cognitive styles, beliefs, and values. Restricting the term even more, to focus specifically on psychology, the vastness of diversity is critical for understanding and evaluating the quality and validity of psychological science. The vastness of diversity is relevant to psychology in diverse ways, including but not restricted to: 1. aspects of human psychology that have received scientific attention; 2. the samples of people that have been the subject of empirical investigation; and 3. the researchers themselves. The diversity of researchers themselves is important for both reasons of justice (excluding people from particular backgrounds is an injustice) and science (a science populated by researchers from diverse backgrounds is more likely than one populated by those from a narrow set of backgrounds to study a broader diversity of aspects of human psychology and, possibly, to be more highly motivated to ensure that more diverse samples of people become the subject of psychological science).

Hommel has made three main arguments: 1. Diversity goes so far beyond race (and other marginalized or underrepresented demographics) that, even though from a social justice/activism/reparations standpoint focusing on race and/or other marginalized or underrepresented demographics makes a great deal of sense, scientifically, i.e., from a validity-seeking or truth-seeking perspective, it is not justified; 2. Race may matter for some scientific questions vastly  more than others (moderators vs. mechanisms) and Roberts et al (2020) did little to demonstrate fundamental differences in psychological processes based on race for scientific questions; and 3. Agency, aka as “self-selection,” constitutes an alternative to discrimination as an explanation for gaps (i.e., perhaps differences in demographic distributions into various positions at least in part reflects preferences and interests) and that Roberts et al completely failed to acknowledge this as even a possibility.

To evaluate Hommel’s critique, one must first consider Robert et al’s review. It reflects much of what is currently wrong with academia in general and the social sciences including psychology in particular. This does not mean everything in it is factually incorrect or wrong, but it is an almost surreal mixture of ideologically infused anti-racist activism and science. Once upon a time “antiracism” had a simple conventional meaning of “against racism” – but what anti-racism even means now depends on one’s ideological worldview. The conventional form of anti-racism until very recently has been that of Martin Luther King’s invocation to judge people by the content of their character. One can now routinely find arguments to judge people on their individual merits rejected by academics (e.g., a Google Scholar search on “the myth of meritocracy” yielded over 2600 papers). The modern far left version is that racism is deeply infused into every aspect of America’s and indeed most western democracies’ social, cultural, and political life and that King’s invocation seems quaintly naïve.

The Perils of a Politicized Science: A Case Study

This is not the place to conduct a thorough critique of the Roberts et al (2020) paper. Nonetheless, in order to evaluate Hommel’s critique it may be useful to point out some of the more obvious flaws of the Roberts et al (2020) article. First, a general principle: activism-infused scholarship can often be detected by its flagrant disregard for truth and/or its tendency to highlight facts that actually are true only if they fit the activist narrative, and to systematically ignore narrative-contesting facts. It has been argued that, because activism prioritizes seeking power to implement political goals, and anything goes when seeking power, activism inherently compromises truth (Haider, 2022). Although political agendas have a long and ugly history of compromising the natural and social sciences (Brothers, Bennett & Cho, 2021; Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020, in press; Krylov, 2021; Martin, 2015; Smith, 2014), whether they inherently do so is beyond the scope of the present paper. Nor is this the place to navigate the nuances of “everything is political” as applied to psychological scholarship, although it is worth stating that, even if everything is political in some senses, this does not liberate scholars to engage in distortions or omissions of inconvenient evidence.

I present two examples of unjustified or inadequately justified claims from the Roberts et al (2020) paper and one from Roberts & Rizzo (2020). It starts with Roberts et al’s (2020) very first sentence. “It is well documented that race plays a critical role in how people think, develop, and navigate the social world (Roberts & Rizzo, 2020).” Roberts & Rizzo (2020) is about racism. It is not about the role race plays in any of the myriad of ways that people think, develop or navigate the social world irrelevant to racism. Is there a shred of evidence that “racism plays a critical role in how people think” about anything other than race, racism, power, status, and hierarchies? There may well be, but Roberts & Rizzo (2020) did not present it.

Second, Roberts & Rizzo (2020) is itself a deeply flawed analysis. While claiming (p. 6) that “…white supremacy is deeply and intricately woven into the fabric of U.S. society…” they systematically overlook evidence that is inconsistent with this conclusion. For example, after reviewing evidence on how White people disproportionately hold many positions of status and power, they failed to include the evidence showing that Asian Americans hold more college and professional degrees than any other U.S. Census demographic group (USA Census, 2022a), and also have the highest family incomes (it may be worth pointing out that “Asian Americans” includes many groups, including Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Pakistani and Filipino descent, as well as many others). Similarly problematic for their perspective has been how many African immigrants’ education and income exceeds that of White people in the U.S. (USA Census, 2022b). Also excluded from their review are studies showing that, controlling for educational attainment, Black women actually earn more than White women (Fryar, 2011), and “high school completion and college attendance rates are uniformly higher for black women than for white men across the parental income distribution” (Chetty et al, 2019, p. 744). Although this review is not the place to present a richly nuanced review of the extent to which this and other similar evidence challenges claims of pervasive White supremacy (though see Reilly, 2021, for a brief readable review that is far more extensive than the present article), it concretely demonstrates how Roberts & Rizzo (2020) presented facts and studies selectively.

Third, Roberts et al (2020) bemoan the fact that 83% of editors in several mainstream psychology journals were White between 1974 and 2018. Census data (USAFacts, 2022) shows that percent White in the U.S. in the 1970s was nearly 90% and it did not dip below 83% until the 1995. As Hommel correctly pointed out, the U.S. is not the only country that contributes to psychological science in the English language journals they surveyed. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the population of other countries that do so. The Black proportion of the population has been (and continues to be) historically even lower in other English-speaking countries (relevant to journal editors), such as Canada (3.5% in 2016; Statistics Canada, 2019) and the UK (3%, Index Mundi, 2022). Of course, scholars where English is not the primary language also contribute to the English language psychological literature. Hommel reported that the overall European percent Black is 1.3%.

Thus, with respect to a scientific analysis of “inclusion” and “representation,” at least with respect to psychology editors in the sample that Roberts et al (2020) studied, the average percent White editors from 1974-2018 is consistent with a level of representation that approximates or (depending on one’s benchmark) is less than that of the underlying population. As such, it debunks rather than confirms the notion that there is some sort of unjust gap in the demographics of the psychology editors they found crying for special remediation policies. But that assumes that “inclusion” means “no evidence of exclusion”; it also assumes that “representation” refers to the statistical representation in proportion to some standard (whether representation in the population or some other standard, such as proportion of PhDs is appropriate, is beyond the scope of this article). However, if one takes a political activist lens, one demanding reparative social justice rather than a scientific one, to atone for historical discrimination, “inclusion” must be satisfied by biases favoring those historically marginalized groups. Similarly, when using that same political activist lens, “representation” does not mean statistical representation in proportion to the population, it means overrepresentation (in order to provide reparations for past bias). Inclusion and representation, too, then, can constitute (political social justice) mules delivered when (scientific) horses were promised. It would be easy to present more such examples because there are so many in the Roberts et al (2020) and Roberts & Rizzo (2020) articles, but it would get tedious, so now I turn to an evaluation of whether Hommel’s criticisms are valid.

From a political activist perspective, Hommel’s criticisms are entirely wrongheaded. All criticisms of arguments forwarded to advance a political agenda are wrongheaded to the extent that they are potential obstacles to advancing that agenda. Politics is a no-holds barred game; almost anything goes, including lying, distorting, and promoting propaganda to justify and advance one’s preferred policies and outcomes. The “winner” is determined not by truth or demonstrable improvements to human well-being, but only by who gains power and gets to implement their preferred policies. In an excellent analysis of propaganda in science, Gambrill & Reimann (2011) developed an index for reviewers to use when evaluating papers submitted for publication, and which includes these items (and many more like them, rephrased here as questions).

Did the paper acknowledge that the nature of the problem addressed is in dispute?

Did the paper present only one view of the problem?

Did the paper present their view as established (when it is not)?

Are possible harms of the view promoted described?

Are controversies regarding prevalence noted?

I will leave it to readers to decide the answers to these questions regarding the Roberts et al (2020) and Roberts & Rizzo (2020) papers for themselves.

Hommel’s Scientific Critique

I now turn to Hommel’s specific criticisms on scientific grounds. They are mostly well-justified. His first was that Roberts et al (2020) ignored all forms of diversity beyond the demographic categories of special concern to social justice-oriented academics. This is clearly true. Nonetheless, just as a mule is horse-like (indeed, genetically, it is half horse), Roberts et al make some scientifically valid and important points. For example, they are on solid scientific ground when they call for greater transparency (e.g., providing info on the demographics of samples) and acknowledgements of limitations. They are also on sound scientific grounds to argue that, if one only studies White people, one cannot possibly know the same phenomenon would hold among non-White people. Of course, scientifically, exactly as Hommel implied, one cannot possibly know the same phenomenon would hold across any two identifiable groups unless those groups were studied.

Roberts et al (2020, p. 1302) are probably right when they attribute variation in sample racial identity composition to “...authors of color [being] more invested in communities of color...” Less clear is the scientific justification of their lauding of research that includes massive underrepresentation of White people in their samples (e.g., 19% for developmental psychologists of color). I note here that, even in 2021, when the U.S. is more racially/ethnically diverse than ever, the population is 75% White (including what the Census refers to as Hispanics, who can be of any racial identity) or 59% White (excluding Hispanics; USAFacts, 2022).

Similarly, it is not clear that Roberts et al’s (2020) dim view of the methods used by White social psychologists that produced a 69% overall proportion of White participants is justified. Given that the studies they examined went from the 1970s (when the U.S. was nearly 90% White) through the 2010s, when the U.S. ranged from about 60-75% White (USA Facts, 2022), the samples collected by White social psychologists more closely corresponded to American national demographics than did those of any other combination of field and author demography that Roberts et al (2020) reported. If one includes the racial demographics of the countries in which the research was performed in Robert et al’s (2020) sample of articles, the proportion of White people in the population is likely even higher given the very low levels (about 1%) of Black people (and other people of color) in European samples. Although relatively few psychology publications report truly representative samples, the samples collected by White social psychologists did the best job of the fields Roberts et al (2020) examined with respect to capturing racial demographics that approximate the underlying population demographics during the time period they studied. Scientifically, representativeness is clearly a methodological strength, so why the dim view? From a reparative social justice activist perspective, population demographic representativeness is a liability because it fails to massively overrepresent demographics of color, as Roberts et al (2020) document is the case, e.g., with developmentalists of color.

To be sure, if some psychologists in some fields wish to devote extra effort and attention to samples of color, I have no objection. Special attention to samples of color deserves a place in psychological science. Let’s not pretend, however, that such samples are somehow inherently scientifically more rigorous than ones that more closely approximate the demographics of the underlying population. Scientists who wish to plow their fields with mules should permitted to do so; they should not, however, pretend that those mules are horses or suggest that, unless others give up their horses, they are doing something scientifically suboptimal.

Similarly, when Roberts et al (2020) call for things like positionality statements and diverse individuals in the review process, their exclusion of the vast array of characteristics highlighted in Hommel’s review is not at all justified from a scientific standpoint (even though it is entirely justified from an activist standpoint of reparative justice). Given that a person’s positionality is some combination of the very long list of statuses, demographics, identities, beliefs, values, and experiences Hommel lists, indeed, it is the sum total of everything they are, identify with, have experienced, and have done and accomplished, it is hard to see how this will be implemented in any scientifically serious way (although it is quite easy to see how, restricting it to statuses relevant to progressive activist views of reparative justice and who is in protected v. unprotected categories, it could be implemented briefly). Adding “diverse individuals” in the review process makes a great deal of scientific sense if Hommel’s and the dictionary’s broad definition of diversity is used; and that includes (but is not restricted to) the far narrower types of diversity for which Roberts et al (2020) call.

Hommel’s second criticism, that racial identities may matter for some scientific questions but not others and that Roberts et al (2020) did little to demonstrate fundamental differences in the psychological processes based on race for scientific questions is also valid. Roberts et al (2020) failed to demonstrate or review evidence demonstrating widespread racial differences in any psychological phenomena or processes. Again, centering race without providing evidence that doing so makes much of a difference for many psychological phenomena is another tell that what is going on here is more activism than science. Do Black people simply not use the availability heuristic? Do Black people’s visual neurons respond differently to geometric shapes? These would be examples of fundamental psychological differences. It is surely true that, unless someone tests those possibilities we will never know, and doing so is just as surely worthwhile science. Scientifically, it would indeed be surprising if there were no differences at all in some of the psychological characteristics of Black and White people. Of course, scientifically, and consistent with Hommel’s critique, the same speculation about the potential existence of fundamental psychological differences applies to all the characteristics Hommel lists (such as sex/gender, culture, religion, SES, politics, intelligence, motivations, upbringing, experience, personality to name some, and there is probably an infinity of additional ones that he did not mention). The reasons to center race, ethnicity, or people of color are political/activist (reparative justice), not scientific, even though there are indeed good reasons to study people from every sort of background that exists (diversity in the first definitional sense, which does not reject but subsumes the second and certainly includes racial/ethnic identities).

Hommel’s final point, that agency (sometimes referred to as “self-selection”) may play some role in demographic distributional differences (for anything) is on solid scientific grounds, which should be obvious to anyone who has ever studied anything in psychology. He has not even argued that it does play a role, only that it might, and that this possibility isn’t considered in the Roberts et al (2020) paper at least with respect to editors, and with respect to their call for a variety of policies to eliminate what they believe are obstacles to psychologists of color. Anyone can see that Hommel’s criticism of this glaring omission is obviously true just by reading the Roberts et al (2020) paper.

Roberts et al (2020) do not refer to “self-selection” or “agency” explicitly anywhere in their paper. They nonetheless did present an example of agency in action. Their analysis of the relation between author race/ethnicity and the racial/ethnic makeup of the samples under study is clearly an example of an agency-based gap. The systemic racism hypothesis predicts biases favoring White people generally and, therefore, White participant samples. Therefore, when, developmental psychologists of color undersample White participants (Roberts et al [2020] reported this as 19%), presumably, they are choosing to do so. They are not being coerced into doing it by White supremacist individuals, policies or practices. If so, this is agency, and it obviously does explain part of the “gap” in racial sample composition across different race/ethnicity of author by field combinations.

As another example of how self-selection can at least partially explain some gaps that are routinely attributed to systemic biases, consider the gender gap in STEM. High achieving high school girls self-select into STEM fields less than do high achieving high school boys, at least in part, because high achieving girls tend to have more skills and therefore more options; having more options they are more likely to choose non-STEM options (Wang, Eccles & Kenny, 2013). High achieving boys, in contrast, are more likely to only be good at math and science and are more likely to pursue STEM fields because they have fewer other good options for professional careers (Wang et al., 2013). Evaluating the extent to which this explains gender gaps in STEM is beyond the scope of the present paper. It is sufficient to point out that the evidence that self-selection sometimes at least partially accounts for some gaps means that one cannot attribute gaps to bias unless one first rules out alternative explanations, such as self-selection. As Hommel argued, ignoring the possibility of self-selection (and other alternative explanations) should not be an option for scientific papers seeking to explain gaps.

The Epistemic Consequences of Politicizing Psychological Science

Just as manifestly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, Hommel’s point about agency, however valid, is often on very dangerous political grounds, at least within academia. Even considering the possibility that underrepresentation in some desirable attribute stems from something about group differences (choices, culture, attitudes, skills etc.) rather than their victimhood constitutes grounds for social justice academics to denounce, mob, and ostracize (Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020; Stevens, Jussim & Honeycutt, 2020). If it is viewed as legitimate to only attribute gaps to discrimination, and, within academia, some sort of sacrilege to view them as resulting from other sources (except when those other sources are flattering to groups social justice academics deem worthy of favor), our “scientific” literature will be compromised to the point of uselessness.

Even when discrimination is the only source of some gap, we will never be able to know it with anything approximating scientific certainty, if researchers fear studying alternative explanations. Those alternatives can only be ruled out if they are studied; if many scientists fear to study them, they will not be studied or will be understudied. If they are not studied or are understudied, they cannot be ruled out. Similarly, even if alternatives to discrimination can be studied without fear of punishment, but only by researchers who either are members of the underrepresented group or have established reputations as fully committed to social justice as construed by activists, the risk of biased studies and unjustifiably canonized conclusions becomes high (Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020, in press). As such, the scientific benefits of diversity that come from clashing perspectives, dueling biases, and motivated skepticism will have been lost to psychological science. In such a situation, the extent to which the “scientific” literature reflects the underlying reality risks being severely compromised (Joshi, 2022).

These issues are all controversial. My view of the relative merits of the Roberts et al (2020) and Hommel articles may be a minority, at least in academia (although last I looked, truth is not determined by majority vote). Nonetheless, the best way to resolve controversies is to air them so people can see the evidence and arguments. Referring to the modern development within academia of denouncing claims that gaps and inequalities result from anything except oppression (and not referring to the Roberts et al, 2020 article per se, which did not denounce anyone), suppression is often something sought by political activists seeking power (Stevens et al, 2020); but it is terrible for science (Joshi, 2022; Krylov, 2021).

Diversity, Equity, and the Political Exclusion of the Vast Majority of Americans from Academia

I prefer a psychological scence that, when it promises a horse, delivers a horse. In this spirit, it is worth considering some data that can be used to compare academic claims about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” with an assessment of how diverse and how inclusive academia is on one of the dimensions highlighted by Hommel – politics. As we (Honeycutt & Jussim, in press) wrote: “Academia skews heavily left and the social sciences skew massively left (Langbert & Stevens, 2021). The skew is so extreme that, to those unfamiliar with the data, claims about the skew may sound like propaganda intended to delegitimize academia. In fact, some research has demonstrated that Americans–even those on the political right–underestimate just how massive the skew is (Marietta & Barker, 2019). But if extreme left skew constitutes justification for delegitimizing academia, then academia has delegitimized itself.”  For example:

• Langbert & Stevens’ (2021) study of party registration of over 12000 faculty found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in most elite social science departments ranged from a low of 3:1 in economics to a high of 42:1 in anthropology (in between was sociology, at 27:1).

• Buss & von Hippel’s (2017) survey of over 300 social psychologists found that they voted for Obama over Romney by a ratio of 75:1.

Furthermore, many academics are not just on the left, they are on the extreme left. Honeycutt (2022) found that, in a survey of almost 4000 faculty from across the disciplines, 40% self-identified as radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists (or some combination). In contrast, national surveys of Americans typically find that only 4-15% are on the far left (Hawkins, Yudkin, Juan-Torres, & Dixon, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2014).

Figure 1 is a visualization that captures the state of “inclusion” and “diversity” in academia on the political dimension:

This then shows part of the mule that was delivered when the horse was sold. It seems unlikely to me that most Americans will view the academy as particularly inclusive if it functions, intentionally or not, to exclude the vast majority of Americans on political grounds. To be sure, self-selection/agency plays a role here, too, and perhaps the major role, but to the extent that the academy has created a hostile environment for those who dissent from far left politics, it bears more than a little responsibility for that self-selection (Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020). Furthermore, the historical facts are that it was not always this way (Duarte, Crawford, Haidt, Jussim & Tetlock, 2015), meaning that there is nothing inherent to academia that produces a massive skew of far left activists. Thus, the academy’s proclamations about inclusion, while the academy writ large functions to exclude most Americans, are likely to ring hollow and be viewed as the disingenuous propaganda of far left activists.

Science and Policy

Most Americans Reject Affirmative Action

Diversity in the narrow progressive sense advocated by Roberts et al (2020) and currently being implemented throughout academia is plausibly viewed as an extreme form of affirmative action. Pew has repeatedly found that large majorities of Americans of every racial/ethnic group they surveyed (including but not restricted to Black and Hispanic [the term they used] Americans) oppose use of race in college admissions and hiring (Graf, 2019; Horowitz, 2019). Similarly, California, a majority-minority state, and one of the most liberal, recently re-affirmed its ban on affirmative action ((Friedersdorf, 2020). From the purely scientifically valid “racial inclusion of participants is important for psychological science” standpoint that Roberts et al (2020) advocated, they should welcome such inclusive research (given how racially inclusive it was of participants); but from a political activist standpoint of advancing progressive values and academic DEI policies, such findings should be denigrated, dismissed, or ignored.

Build Effective Policies on Sound Science

None of this is to deny the ongoing presence of discrimination and other obstacles that uniquely affect members of some groups more than others. However, even Roberts et al (2020, p. 1306) declare that their “… work is not an indictment of psychological scientists…” Such problems are not likely to be solved, therefore, by targeting interventions at individual scientists. Inasmuch as recent research in both laboratory and real world contexts shows nonzero but very low levels of acts of discrimination in dyadic interactions (Campbell & Brauer, 2021; Nodtvelt, Sjastad, Skard & Thorbjornsen, 2021; Peyton & Huber, 2021), academia’s commitment to targeting individual behavior, such as requiring DEI statements for everything from job applications (Berkeley, 2022) to conference submissions (Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2022) seems not merely misguided, but likely to do more harm than good. In the absence of evidence of high levels of individual acts of discrimination, such policies are not only a colossal waste of human time and effort but likely to accelerate the exclusionary functions highlighted here by dissuading individuals who refuse to profess allegiance to narrow progressive worldviews from entering academia (Thompson, 2019). If, however, professional organizations and institutions can identify ways in which their policies actively discriminate or create unfair obstacles that fall disproportionately on some groups, those organizations and institutions should identify and extirpate those policies.

In doing so, however, it will be important to keep in mind that the mere existence of policies in place when a gap has been identified does not constitute any evidence whatsoever that those policies discriminate or that removing or changing them is inherently beneficial. Consider traffic laws. Police can and have abused their power to issue more tickets to Black motorists (Pierson et al, 2020). The idea that this means we should abandon speed limits would be absurd. The dangers of eliminating speed limits are, perhaps, so obvious that my even mentioning it might seem like hyperbolic overreach. However, proposals far more extreme than eliminating speed limits have been taken quite seriously by progressive activists, including many in academia. The “defund the police” and related movements had enough credibility and success to be predictably followed by what has become known as “police retreat or pullback.” This was predictably followed by dramatic crime spikes, which themselves disproportionately victimized the very communities for whom such movements sought justice (Cassel, 2021; Reilly, Maranto & Wolf, 2022).

The implication for activist academics seeking to change the world should be clear: Tread lightly. Do not rush into implementing policies untested by rigorous research assessing effectiveness, costs, and unintended side effects. Do not rush into implementing even promising research-based policies without giving enough time for the findings to be vetted by skeptical scientists and policymakers (see, e.g., Sampson, Winship & Knight, 2013 for a detailed discussion of the complexities in doing so). As Fryar (2022) recently put it, “This is the key step that is missing in every DEI initiative I have seen in the past 25 years: a rigorous, data-driven assessment of root causes that drives the search for effective solutions. In other aspects of life, we would not fathom prescribing a treatment without knowing the underlying cause.”

Diversity (Broad Form) Can Improve Psychological Science

The cognitive arguments for diversity are often well-justified. Assuming a shared commitment to truth, evidence, and logically coherent interpretations of evidence, there are good reasons to believe that different experiences, values, and views can contribute to improving the quality of psychological science. This is likely a major reason why ethnically diverse teams have produced more influential papers (AlShebli, Rahwan & Roon, 2018) and politically diverse teams produce better Wikipedia articles, especially on political topics (Shi, Teplitskiy, Duede, & Evans (2019). Furthermore, different biases are necessary in order to maximize the skeptical vetting that is so crucial to the long-term scientific processes capable of producing valid conclusions (Merton, 1942/1973; Stanovich, 2021). The current political monoculture threatens the ability of psychology to produce valid conclusions on politicized topics (for reviews replete with concrete examples of the canonization of demonstrably false conclusions on politicized topics, see Crawford & Jussim, 2018; Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020, in press; Martin, 2015; Smith, 2014).

This then has the downstream consequence of undermining the credibility of psychology and other social sciences as the wider public begins to understand it. In a large national survey, for example, Marietta & Barker (2019) found that the greater the political skew that people believe characterizes academia, the less credibility is given to its scholarship.

It should therefore not be surprising that, as psychologists and other social scientists embrace and justify embedding full-throated political activism in their scholarship, academia will come to be justifiably viewed as an engine for progressive politics. This is already evoking exercises of political power by those who oppose progressive politics, exemplified by Florida’s Republican governor and legislature recently voting to undermine tenure protections in the Florida system (Tampa Bay Times, 2022). As ham-handed and harmful as this may be, it is a politically inevitable response to academia’s embrace of a progressive monoculture and political activism. Political battles will be fought using political tools, and not exclusively in the pages of peer reviewed journals or DEI committees. It would not be surprising to discover that cuts to government funding of social science are among the next targets in the sights of politicians who oppose the academic far left.

Conclusion: Free Inquiry is Crucial to Psychological Science and Maximally Inclusive of the Diverse forms of Diversity

Although individual scientists surely have their biases, as a field, maximizing the validity of psychological science can best be accomplished by free inquiry. Free inquiry in psychological science inherently involves embracing credible and rigorous voices, regardless of identity status or other group memberships or personal characteristics. Free inquiry includes the intense organized skepticism that Merton (1942/1973) argued was a critical norm of science; as such, it is some insurance that bad policies and bad conclusions will be identified. It is insurance against the epistemic follies identified by Joshi (2022) that can be produced by an academic culture of denunciation and suppression. As such, free inquiry by a diversity of voices in the first, broad definitional sense of diversity, unfettered by the demands and sanctions of those who would impose their subjective values on others, is maximally inclusive in the most meaningful sense.

The best of Roberts et al’s (2020) arguments constitute a call for including the excluded, at least if they are committed to the norms of science and to making coherent, evidence-based, logical arguments. I endorse these best arguments. In this spirit, I end this piece with quotes from scholars of color whose ideas and views relevant to issues in psychology closely related to those raised by Roberts et al (2020) and Hommel, and which I almost never see referenced or discussed in academic psychology literatures (especially ironic, since at least one, McWhorter, is a linguist and is highly influential on psychology-related topics [such as racism and intolerance] outside of academic psychology). None are psychologists, and I list their fields in a spirit of diversifying the field of ideas from which academic psychology draws. I note that this is not a sample of quotes representative of anything at all; it is a convenience sample of voices of people of color that have been largely excluded from scientific psychology.

Wilfred Reilly (2021, political science): “…people of color are successful in modern America to an almost surprising degree, which is rarely discussed—for different reasons—by either the “social-justice” left or the contemporary hard right. As of 2019, seven of the top 10 American ethnic groups in income terms—Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Persian, and Arab Lebanese Americans—were “people of color” as this term is generally conceptualized…”

Hrishikesh Joshi (philosophy, 2022): “…social pressure to avoid sharing evidence against a particular claim undermines the confidence we can place in that claim, because it makes more likely the possibility that the (first-order) evidence that does make its way to us is a lopsided subset of the total. This has the perhaps tragic implication that we can typically be less confident of morally and politically laden issues than we can about ‘dry’ subjects like chemistry or cell biology.’”

George Yancey (sociology, quoted in Kristof, 2016): ““Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me [Kristof]. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

Luana Maroja (2022, biology): “Extreme emphasis on sexual harassment stifles productive scientific discourse between men and women.”

Musa al-Gharbi (2020, sociology): “Diversity is important. Diversity-related training is terrible.”

Marisol Quintanilla (2022, entomology): “It is very strange that the surveys assume that race is fixed when it is really a spectrum (for example I have Spanish, Chinese, North African, and Native American ancestries) and the same forms pretend that gender is on a spectrum (11 options in most Michigan State surveys) when it is clearly binary (mammals are sexually dimorphic).”

John McWhorter (2021, linguistics): “Woke racism: How a new religion betrayed Black America” (book title).

Roland Fryar (2022, economics): “More corporate leaders should be trying to solve diversity challenges in the same way they solve problems in every other aspect of their business: through intelligent use of data, rigorous hypothesis testing, and honest inference about what is working.”

Amna Khalid (2022, history): “Having grown up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, I know well what happens when freedom of expression is threatened and people are bullied into silence. It pains me deeply to see this happening in my adopted country.”

Sarah Haider (2022, Founder, ex-Muslims of North America): “The activist game, to sum in one sentence, is about results… The thinker game is about truth… Years ago I was asked on a podcast whether it was possible to be effective and intellectually honest in the activist space. I said no.”

As psychology and academia embrace activism in the name of social justice, calls to include the previously excluded will likely accelerate. In that spirit, I look forward to responses by academics calling for DEI that celebrate the inclusion in this article, and therefore, in the psychology peer reviewed literature, of the heretofore excluded voices of people of color quoted above, and, more important, their substantive views.  Doing so might help psychology to deliver that horse it sold.

References

al-Gharbi, M. (2020). Diversity is important. Diversity-related training is terrible. Retrieved on 9/2/22 from: https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/diversity-important-related-training-terrible/ 

AlShebli, B. K., Rahwan, T., & Woon, W. L. (2018). The preeminence of ethnic diversity in scientific collaboration. Nature Communications, 9(1), 1-10.

Berkeley, University of California (2022). Rubric for assessing candidate contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Retrieved on 9/5/22 from: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity

Brothers, K. B., Bennett, R. L., & Cho, M. K. (2021). Taking an antiracist posture in scientific publications in human genetics and genomics. Genetics in Medicine, 23(6), 1004-1007.

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Campbell, M. R. & Brauer, M. (2021). Is discrimination widespread? Testing assumptions about bias on a university campus. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(4), 756–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000983

Cassell, P. G. (2020). Explaining the recent homicide spikes in US cities: The “Minneapolis Effect” and the decline in proactive policing. Federal Sentencing Reporter, 33(1-2), 83-127.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2020). Race and economic opportunity in the United States: An intergenerational perspective. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2), 711-783.

Crawford, J. T., & Jussim, L. J. (Eds.). (2017). The politics of social psychology. Psychology Press.

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Wolfgang Stroebe

Department of Social and Organizational Psychology

University of Groningen

Grote Kruisstraat 2/1

9712TS Groningen

The Netherlands

Abstract

Roberts and colleagues focus on two aspects of racial inequality in psychological research, namely an alleged underrepresentation of racial minorities and the effects attributed to this state of affairs. My comment focuses only on one aspect, namely the assumed consequences of the lack of diversity in subject populations. Representativeness of samples is essential in survey research or applied research that examines whether a particular intervention will work for a particular population. Representativeness or diversity is not necessary in theory testing research, where we attempt to establish laws of causality. Because theories typically apply to all of humanity, all members of humanity (even American undergraduates) are suitable for assessing the validity of theoretical hypotheses.  Admittedly, the assumption that a theory applies to all of humanity is also a hypothesis that can be tested. However, to test it, we need theoretical hypotheses about specific moderating variables. Supporting a theory with a racially diverse sample does not make conclusions more valid than support from a non-diverse sample. In fact, cause-effect conclusions based on a diverse sample might not be valid for any member of that sample. 

In their analysis of “racial inequality in psychological research”, Roberts and colleagues focus on two aspects, namely an alleged underrepresentation of racial minorities in all levels of psychological research and the effects they attribute to this underrepresentation. Hommel (2022) has persuasively argued that the perception of an underrepresentation might be the result of a base-rate fallacy. Therefore, I will focus on the effects such an underrepresentation might have on psychological research. Because space restrictions prevent me from commenting on all these alleged effects, I will focus on the section, in which they deplore the lack of diversity in participants in psychological research, which supposedly makes this research unrepresentative.

The lack of representativeness in psychological subject populations is a complaint that has frequently been aired in psychological publications. Already in 1946, McNemar complained, “the existing science of human behavior is largely the science of the behavior of sophomores” (p. 333).[1] More recently, Arnett (2008) argued, “research on the whole of humanity is necessary for creating a science that truly represents the whole of humanity” (p. 603). Because research on all of humanity is a tall order, Henrich et al. (2010) tried to suggest more realistic options such that universities should create “non-student subject pools – for example, by setting up permanent psychological and behavioral testing facilities in bus terminals, Fijian villages, rail stations, airports and anywhere diverse where subjects might find themselves with extra time” (p. 82). Compared to these proposals, the demand to increase the number of minority subjects in psychological research that highlights race seems extremely reasonable.

Before social psychologists begin to worry how they could guarantee that an experimental manipulation developed to operationalize a theoretical construct for American undergraduates would reflect the same construct for inhabitants of Fijian villages, or for business executives rushing to catch their plane or train, I can reassure readers that representativeness of subject populations is unnecessary in theory testing research. This argument has frequently been advanced before (e.g., Calder et al., 1982; Mook, 1983; Stroebe & Nijstad, 2009; Stroebe et al., 2018). It is probably due to the popularity of inductivist notion of “external validity” (Campbell & Stanley, 1966) that these arguments have never gained wider acceptance among psychologists even though it is quite easy to demonstrate their correctness.[2]

Most psychological theories apply to all of humanity. Although they do not explicitly state this, the fact that they do not specify a particular subpopulation to which they apply, implies that they claim implicitly to apply to the totality of mankind. Thus, any subsample of members of mankind (e.g., American undergraduates) would be an appropriate subject for testing such theories. If a theoretical hypothesis is not supported in an experimental study with a group of undergraduates, then the theory has to be rejected. If the hypothesis is supported then the theory has been supported.

This does not mean, however, that such confirmation proves a theory to be true (Popper, 1959).[3] A theory can never be proven to be true, because it is impossible to rule out all alternative explanations for a given finding. In testing a theory, a researcher has to translate theoretical variables into manipulations and into measures of the effect of these manipulations. There is always the possibility that these “auxiliary hypotheses” (Gadenne, 1984; Trafimow, 2012), which link abstract and unobservable theoretical concepts to empirical manipulations, could be wrong. Alternatively, the experimenter might not have been successful in eliminating potential third variables that might have been responsible for the effect. But the more strong empirical tests a theory has successfully undergone, the more it can be considered as well supported.

The assumption that a theory applies to all of humanity is also only a hypothesis that can be proven wrong. However, conducting research in bus terminals is not a suitable procedure to address this problem. If a theory is supported by experiments in two bus terminals, we cannot be certain that it might have been rejected by a study conducted in an airport (or Fijian village). Similarly, if a theory is supported in a bus terminal but not an airport, we do not know the reason for this discrepancy. To be informative, any test of the assumption that a theory applies only to specific subsections of humanity has to be guided by theory.

Let me use a classic study by Hovland et al. (1949) to illustrate this point. They tested whether one-sided or two-sided communications were more persuasive. They used army soldiers as subjects and found no difference: Both types of communications appeared to be equally persuasive. However, when they divided their participants into subgroups according to their level of education, they found two-sided communications more effective with the more highly educated participants and one-sided communications to be more effective with individuals with lower levels education. Thus, if they had conducted their research with samples of undergraduates, they would have concluded that two-sided communications were most effective and if they had done the study with factory workers, they might have found one-sided communications to be most effective. But most importantly, if they had conducted their study with a random sample of humanity – should such a feat be possible – they would have found no difference. And this last conclusion would have been invalid for most members of their sample. Thus, “it is a misconception to assume that research on the whole of humanity would create a science that truly represents the whole of humanity. If no moderation is expected, any subgroup of the population will do equally well, even the often maligned undergraduate students” (Stroebe & Nijstad, p. 596). Similarly, if race moderates effects, the findings of a study conducted with a racially diverse sample might result in conclusions that do not apply to any of the racial subgroups in that sample.

Therefore, a psychological science that acknowledges potential racial differences in psychological processes has to start out with theories about such differences. To be psychologically meaningful, such differences have to be linked to measurable psychological constructs. Merely demonstrating that minority subjects respond differently from white participants is not psychologically meaningful or interpretable, unless that difference can be attributed to some psychological construct (e.g., attitude, personality trait). However, once such a construct has been identified, it is likely that the racial difference in responses is due to the fact that this particular construct is more or less frequent among different racial groups. Thus, I would not expect that any of the recommendations made by Roberts and colleagues (2020) (e.g., “establish a diversity task force”; “release public diversity reports annually”) is likely to result in a psychological science that reflects racial diversity. 

Representativeness of samples, although not important for theory testing research, is important for many forms of applied research. For example, when researchers aim to determine the percentage of a population that has a particular characteristic (e.g., votes Republican; holds a particular attitude), representativeness of samples is important. In this research, one does not attempt to establish laws of causality, but wants to infer from a small sample how certain features are distributed in a large population. Similarly, if one wants to assess the effectiveness of a planned mass media campaign to persuade Fijian villagers to eat more vegetables, one must pretest that intervention with respondents, who are representative for that population (i.e., Fijian villagers rather than American undergraduates).  But this limitation does not apply to theory testing, which after all, is the main focus of research conducted in psychology departments.

References

Arnett, J. J. (2016). The neglected 95%: why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist, 63, 602-614.

Calder, B. J., Phillips, L. W., & Tybout, A. M. (1982). The concept of external validity. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 240-244.

Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. G. (1996). Experimental and Quasi-experimental. Design for Research. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.

Christie, R. (1965). Some implications of research trends in social psychology. In O. Klineberg & R. Christie (Eds.), Perspectives in social psychology (pp. 141-152). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Gadenne, V. (1976). Die Gültigkeit psychologischer Untersuchungen. (The validity of psychological Research). Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer.

Hommel, B. (2022). Dealing with diversity in Psychological science or ideology? Perspectives on Psychological Science,

Hovland, C.I., Lumsdaine, A & Sheffield, F.D. (1949). Experiments on mass communication. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Mook, D. G. (1983). In defense of external invalidity. American Psychologist, 38(4), 379-387.

McNemar, Q. (1946). Opinion-attitude methodology. Psychological Bulletin, 43(4), 289 – 374.

Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. London, UK: Routledge.

Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D., & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1295-1309.

Trafimow, D. (2012). The role of auxiliary assumptions for the validity of manipulations and measures. Theory & Psychology, 22(4), 486-498.

Stroebe, W., & Strack, F. (2014). The alleged crisis and the illusion of exact replication. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(1), 59-71.

Stroebe, W., Gadenne, V., & Nijstad, B. A. (2018). Do our psychological laws apply only to college students? External validity revisited. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 40(6), 384-395.

Stroebe, W., & Nijstad, B. (2009). Do our psychological laws apply only to Americans? American Psychologist, 64, 569.

[1] His complaint was either premature or prescient, because in 1949 the proportion of studies based on undergraduate participants in JASP was only 20% (Christie, 1965).

[2] The concept of external validity is inductivist, because it asks “To what populations, settings, treatment variables, and measurement variables can this effect be generalized?” (Campbell & Stanley, 1966, p. 5). In theory-testing research, we do not generalize from effects. The theory specifies the class of people to whom it applies.

[3] As I have argued elsewhere, the same applies to rejections (e.g., Stroebe & Strack, 2014)

Keith E. Stanovich

University of Toronto

Abstract

The public will rightly not value a science that is more concerned with demographic population matching than with ideas. Taking further steps in the direction of identity politics will reduce public confidence in psychology’s conclusions and reduce trust and respect. If psychology embraces demographic quotas, there will be self-selection out of the discipline, and that self-selection will harm our science.

Recently there have been many discussions about ideological bias in psychology impeding necessary scientific checks and balances (Campbell & Manning, 2018; Ceci & Williams, 2018; Crawford & Jussim, 2018; Duarte et al., 2015; Jussim, 2018, 2022). Roberts et al. (2020) and Hommel (this issue) focus on the issue of race as a factor in the intellectual composition of psychology. I have written on ideological bias (Stanovich, 2021) but not race, and see some analogies and dis-analogies between the two that are worthy of comment.

Political ideology is a direct indicator of differences in worldview that may impact the way that many topics in psychology are studied (educational achievement gaps, family structure, poverty, violence, parenting, sexual orientation, crime, immigration, environmentalism, drug addiction, fairness, etc.). In contrast, race is a very indirect indicator of perspective variability because it is only moderately related to differences in worldview.

Ratios of 10 liberals to 1 conservative are common in psychology, whereas the population ratio is closer to 1:1 (Buss & von Hippel, 2018; Duarte et al., 2015; Jussim, 2022). However, a well-trained psychologist would be the first to point out that even discrepancies this large do not automatically mean that bias or discrimination is at work. Gross (2013) explored the many alternative hypotheses for the ideological disparity in academia and concluded that self-selection was the dominant factor, and it was a much more important contributor than bias or discrimination (but see, Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Jussim, 2021, 2022).

It should be noted that the analysis by Gross (2013) occurred prior to the advent of DEI statements as a criterion for employment in many universities. Such statements now function like ideological loyalty oaths (McBrayer, 2022), screening out anyone who cannot convincingly support current progressive positions regarding race and gender (Huemer, 2022; Jussim, 2019; Rozado, 2019; Small, 2021; Thompson, 2019). As the report of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (2022) on DEI statements points out, these statements require applicants to take a specific position on social and political issues that are highly contested. As DEI statements become even more prevalent, they will become an overtly discriminating mechanism against conservative applicants (or indeed even liberal Democrats who balk at endorsing the specific terms and positions of identity politics).

Unlike the case of DEI statements which can prevent the hiring of conservative faculty, there are no overt barriers to hiring racial minorities on psychology faculties. Indeed, the implementation of affirmative action and “diversity hires” at the faculty level signal just the opposite. Overt attempts to include minorities are common across the academic landscape. If indeed an underrepresentation does exist, it is certainly due to a pipeline effect (Gross, 2013; Kuncel & Worrell, 2022; Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009)—starting long before the faculty hiring process commences. Attempts to prove bias and discrimination in research psychology thus must move the focus away from standard analyses of hiring practices, and this is just what Roberts et al. (2020) do. They choose a very curious way to operationalize bias and “structural inequality” in psychology—by examining the number of articles published in three areas of psychology that “highlight the role of race in human psychology.” This is an odd metric, because there is no way of determining the absolute number of such articles needed to indicate a completely unbiased psychology. What is the number of concepts/categories that could possibly be highlighted in psychology journal articles? The population space here is totally unknown. There is no way to determine how many articles in psychology should highlight religion, or highlight social class, or highlight sex, for example. Furthermore, there is no logical or empirical model that dictates that the intellectual category of “number of articles that highlight race” has any relation at all to the number of people of color in the population—no more so than the number of articles that highlight religion should have any relationship to the number of people in the population who are non-atheists.

 Hommel (this issue) implies that Roberts et al. (2020) are committing a version of the disparity fallacy (a termed coined by Coleman Hughes, 2018), and indeed this seems to be the case. The disparity fallacy is the idea that any difference in an outcome variable that is viewed as unfavorable to a minority group must be due to discrimination (Clark & Winegard, 2020; Goldberg, 2021; Sowell, 2019). Of course, all psychologists know that discrimination is only one of many possible alternative explanations for any group difference. And they also know that eliminating alternative explanations is the way to get at the proper causal model for the disparity. Psychologists should also be prominent in explaining to the public that remedies for social problems depend upon having the right causal model.

As mentioned previously, the research by Gross (2013) indicated that even a disparity as massive as the 10 to 1 ideological difference in social science faculties is not necessarily due to discrimination. In that case, an alternative hypothesis (self-selection) seemed to be more determinative than the hypothesis of bias. Disparity alone is not an indication of bias or discrimination, contrary to the assumptions of many current anti-racism programs. Indeed, the ideological imbalance in psychology probably accounts for the discipline’s embarrassing silence regarding the falsity of the group disparities model that lies behind many current anti-racism efforts (“As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism,” Kendi, 2018; “We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large” p. 10, Kendi, 2016).

Hommel (this issue) probably sees the disparity fallacy in Roberts et al. (2020) because of words like “structural inequality” and “systemic inequality” in the latter.  Hommel’s conjecture is reinforced by a media report of this research titled: “Psychological Research has a Racism Problem, Stanford Scholar says” (deWitte, 2020) and by the fact that the authors seem to endorse a quota-based solution (“This means that journals should consist of diverse editors, reviewers, authors, and participants—ideally at rates that mirror diversity at the national level or within psychology” [italics added], p. 1304). I deliberately employ the “Q-word” (quota) here.  Those of us who have been in academia for a while know that the genteel euphemism “diversity” will be used to usher in an industrial-sized bureaucracy of bean counters to “establish a diversity task force” (p. 1304) to “ensure that the recommendations are monitored and enacted” (p. 1304)—thus, quotas.

Roberts et al. (2020) acknowledge that their analysis and recommendations generalize: “the core issues tackled here extend to other social groups as well, including but not limited to those based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, and political orientation (p. 1304).” Hommel worries about the combinatorial explosion of demographic and psychological categories this entails.

I too worry about the implications of all these recommendations, particularly as they are filtered through an intrusive university and research bureaucracy that drains more faculty energy every day. What happens when “ideally at rates that mirror diversity at the national level or within psychology” is “extended to other social groups as well” and then a “diversity task force….ensures that the recommendations are monitored and enacted.” The psychological research community will become more like what parts of the university are now—focused more on progressive credentials than on advancing knowledge. We want contending ideas in psychology, not contending cells in a 3 x 3 x 2 x 6 x whatever matrix of demographic characteristics, especially if (as discussed in the context of race above) the categories in question are not a direct measure of diverse thinking, but only indirect indicators of probabilistic differences.

No one who decries the intellectual monoculture within universities wants to see a quota system that mandates the hiring of equal percentages across the ideological spectrum. Likewise, we don’t want a science built around demographic quotas. Such mandatory population matching will undermine the field and reduce its status and impact on public policy. The public will (rightly) not value a science that operates on that basis. Population quotas will end up undermining our science just like affirmative action undermines the status of high-achieving minorities in college admissions—by casting doubt on the qualifications of all minority candidates (Loury & Sandel, 2020). Applying quotas to our science will likewise reduce public confidence in its conclusions and reduce trust and respect. A quota-based science will end up being a Pyrrhic victory for advocates of identity politics. They will inherit a psychology that the public does not believe or respect.

The use of quotas will also cause an exodus from our discipline among those who value ideas over demographics. Potential psychologists are already choosing to conduct their work from within other disciplines such as economics, linguistics, neuroscience, business administration, marketing, computer science, and human factors engineering. Others are doing their work in think tanks and independent institutes outside of academia altogether. If psychology lurches in the direction of demographic quotas, there will be more self-selection out of the discipline, and that self-selection will harm our science.

References

Buss, D. M., & von Hippel, W. (2018). Psychological barriers to evolutionary psychology: Ideological bias and coalitional adaptations. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6, 148-158.

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2018). The rise of victimhood culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ceci, S. J., & Williams, W. M. (2018). Who decides what is acceptable speech on campus? Why restricting free speech is not the answer. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13, 299-323.

Clark, C. J., & Winegard, B. M. (2020). Tribalism in war and peace: The nature and evolution of ideological epistemology and its significance for modern social science. Psychological Inquiry, 31, 1-22.

Crawford, J. T., & Jussim, L. (Eds.). (2018). The politics of social psychology. New York: Routledge.

deWitte, M. (2020, June 24). Psychological research has a racism problem, Stanford scholar says. Stanford News, https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/24/psychological-research-racism-problem-stanford-scholar-says/

Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e130.

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (2022, June 2). FIRE Statement on the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria in faculty hiring and evaluation. https://www.thefire.org/issues/fire-statement-on-the-use-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-criteria-in-faculty-hiring-and-evaluation/

Goldberg, Z. (2021, May 28). Exposing the group disparities = discrimination fallacy. Substack, https://zachgoldberg.substack.com/p/exposing-the-group-disparities-discrimination?s=r

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Huemer, M. (2022, June 18). Who cares about diversity? Substack. https://fakenous.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-diversity

Hughes, C. (2018, May 14).  The racism treadmill. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2018/05/14/the-racism-treadmill/

Inbar, Y., & Lammers, J. (2012). Political diversity in social and personality psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 496-503.

Jussim, L. (2018, March 17).  The reality of the rise of an intolerant and radical left on campus. Areo.  https://areomagazine.com/2018/03/17/the-reality-of-the-rise-of-an-intolerant-and-radical-left-on-campus/

Jussim, L. (2019, February 24).  My diversity, equity, and inclusion statement. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2019/02/24/my-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statement/

Jussim, L. (2021, March 25).  How social norms create a culture of censorship, part 2. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202103/how-social-norms-create-culture-censorship

Jussim, L. (2022, May 12).  The radicalization of the American academy. Substack. https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-radicalization-of-the-american

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning. New York: Nation Books.

Kendi, I. X. (2018, March 27). ‘When I See Racial Disparities, I See Racism.’ Discussing Race, Gender and Mobility. New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/reader-questions-about-race-gender-and-mobility.html

Kuncel, N. R., & Worrell, F. C. (2022). What Was Not Said and What to Do About It. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17456916221100461.

Loury, G., & Sandel, M. (2020, December 16). The question of affirmative action: An interview with Glenn Loury. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2020/12/16/the-question-of-affirmative-action-an-interview-with-glenn-loury/

McBrayer, J. P. (2022, May 23). Diversity statements are the new faith statements. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-statements-are-new-faith-statements-opinion

Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D., & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1295-1309.

Rozado, D. (2019, August 5).   What do universities mean when they talk about diversity? A computational language model quantifies. Heterodox Academy. https://heterodoxacademy.org/diversity-what-do-universities-mean/

Small, A. (2021, June 30).   Diversity, equity, and inclusion statements: Compassion filter or ideological test?. Heterodox Academy. https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statements-compassion-filter-or-ideological-test/

Sowell, T. (2019). Discrimination and disparities. New York: Basic Books.

Stanovich, K. E. (2021). The bias that divides us: The science and politics of myside thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Thompson, A. (2019, December, 19).  The university’s new loyalty oath: Required ‘diversity and inclusion’ statements amount to a political litmus test for hiring.  Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oath-11576799749

Woessner, M., & Kelly-Woesner, A. (2009). Left pipeline: Why conservatives don’t get doctorates. In R. Maranto, R. E. Redding, & F. Hess (Eds.), The politically correct university (pp. 38-59). Washington DC: AEI Press.

Bernhard Hommel

Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

Faculty of Psychology, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Abstract

The increasing use of political activist arguments and reasoning in scientific communication about diversity is criticized. Based on an article of Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, and Mortenson (2020) on “Racial inequality in psychological research”, three hallmarks of activist thinking are described: (1) blindness to the multidimensional nature of diversity; (2) the failure to distinguish psychological mechanisms with the impact of moderators; and (3) a blindness to agency as an explanation for psychological observations.

One of the strongest arguments for diversity can be derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution: if we would all be the same, think the same, and do the same, our species would be extremely vulnerable. Every slight change in our environment might be a potential threat, as it might render our strategy to deal with life ineffective and useless overnight. Accordingly, it is important that we are different, we think differently, and we do things differently. Appreciating that is hard, because it is much easier to communicate and get along with people like us than with people who are different, and this also holds for science. Accordingly, it is important to keep emphasizing the importance of diversity, and so we all should welcome the recent increase in interest in diversity and its importance. Yet, discussions about the importance of diversity in science is often penetrated by ideology and activist thinking which is more interested in the benefit of one particular minority group than in diversity as such. An example in case is the recent article of Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, and Mortenson (2020) on “Racial inequality in psychological research”. As I will explain, this article shows three of the most frequent and most worrying signs of ideological thinking and social justice activism that has made its way into science. That this is no exception is witnessed by the fact that all three signs are favorably echoed in the comment on this article by Dupree and Kraus (2022).

Blindness to the multidimensional nature of diversity

Activist groups commonly focus on the one personal feature their members share, such as gender/sex, race, or sexual orientation, and try to attract societal attention to it. That seems effective and understandable, the more so as the same individual might be involved in different activist groups to attract societal attention to other possible features whenever needed. But if the same happens in science, justification is due. It is true that scientific research is always necessarily selective, and so one can always wonder whether that selectivity matters and perhaps limits possible theoretical insights and conclusions (Haeffel, Thiessen, Campbell, Kaschak & McNeil, 2009). But people, including potential participants in psychological studies, differ with respect to hundreds, if not thousands of features. Many of them have been demonstrated to affect human cognition and behavior: sex/gender, race, culture (Arnett, 2008), religion (Hommel & Colzato, 2017), socioeconomic background, political orientation (Duarte et al., 2015), intelligence, motivational structure and needs (McClelland, 1988), learning history, upbringing, educational style, experience, personality and traits, body size, body weight, handedness, various kinds of disabilities, cognitive styles, to name just a few. Some of them are likely to be interrelated in complex ways, such as race, economic background, and culture/country (e.g., racial differences correlate with economic differences in some countries more than others), while others may operate independently. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possibility that some of these features, or their interrelations, affect behavior in a way that is of theoretical relevance (Stroebe & Nijstad, 2009), perhaps even to a degree that would call for an adjustment or extension of theoretical models. Which has been done in many studies, even though the type of features seems to underlie some seasonal changes, if not fashions, such as the great interest in societal background in the 1960s, the increasing interest in gender/sex in the 1970s, the increasing interest in ecological conditions in the 1980s, with a strong emphasis on race since the 2010s. One could always do more, so that it makes sense to keep emphasizing further variables that might be interesting to study.

But this is not what Roberts et al. (2020) advocate. They instead focus on one single feature: race. They report data showing that this feature has been rarely addressed in developmental and social psychology, and almost neglected in cognitive psychology; that most publications were edited by White editors; that most publications highlighting race were authored by White scientists; and that these employed fewer participants of color. It must be said that most of these findings are trivial: given that the authors only consider journals from North American or European publishers with authors mainly stemming from North America and Europe, the observed percentage of Black editors and editorial board members either corresponded to the percentage of Black citizens in these areas or, in case of the board members, over-represented Black scientists. Moreover, given that White authors are more likely to come from countries with a very small percentage of Black citizens (<1% in Germany, 1.3% in Europe), it is not overly surprising that Black participants are rare in their studies. And yet, the authors conclude that strong efforts need to be made in order to increase racial diversity “in editing, writing, and participation”, so to achieve a more representative distributions of race with respect to editorial positions, reviewers, authors, and participants.

It is not so much the unfounded nature of this request (given that the distribution is representative already) that concerns me here, but the fact that the call for diversity was restricted to just one of more than 100 possible personal features of already demonstrated psychological relevance. If we are to report the race of editors, reviewers, authors, and participants, as Roberts et al. demand, should we not also report their cultural, religious, and economic background, their political orientation, intelligence, motivational structure, needs, learning history, experience, personality and traits, their body size, handedness, disabilities, and cognitive style? If not, why not? What is so special about race that does not apply to any of these other features? And if race is a social construct, as Roberts et al. assume, how can they be sure that this construct is comparable across cultures? How do we know that, say, a Black individual raised in the US is more similar to a Black individual raised in South Africa, Brazil, and China, say, then it is to a white individual raised in the US? Is there any evidence supporting this assumption? I’m afraid that a closer look does not leave any scientific justification for the exclusive focus on race.

Failure to distinguish mechanisms from effect moderators

Another flaw of the reasoning offered by Roberts et al. is the failure to distinguish between the mechanisms underlying a particular effect and the moderators of the size of this effect. While it is true that many features relating to individual differences were demonstrated to have an impact on human cognition and performance, including race, differences in effect sizes do not necessarily indicate different kinds of processes. For instance, there is evidence that religious faith has a systematic impact on the size of experimental effects in cognitive tasks that are considered to be indicative of basic processes: members of individualistic religions tend to show less distraction in tasks that rely on attentional focusing than members of collectivistic religions (Hommel et al., 2011), whereas tasks that require integration of information show the opposite pattern (Colzato, Hommel & Shapiro, 2010). On the one hand, this clearly shows that religion does impact cognitive performance, and it may well be that race can also be shown to have an impact of that kind. On the other hand, however, that does not necessarily imply that the mechanisms at work are any different. Indeed, current theorizing assumes that societal factors can systematically increase or decrease effect sizes in basic tasks without any impact on the actual cognitive mechanisms (Hommel & Colzato, 2017). Given that cognitive sciences are interested in the mechanisms, but not in absolute effect sizes or modulations thereof, it comes with little surprise that, as Roberts et al. observe, the cognitive sciences care less about social/ demographic diversity of the investigated participants. Even if they do, it is hard to see why and how that should limit the mechanistically relevant conclusions drawn from investigating participants without fully representative biographies. We do need to worry if there would be evidence that, say, Black and White participants differ systematically with respect to how they process distracting information, retrieve memories, and plan their actions. But not any such evidence is mentioned by Roberts et al.

Blindness to agency

A particularly salient feature of political activism in the recent years is the equation of non-representative statistical distributions of features over positions or resources on the one hand and social injustice on the other. If, thus, the distribution of race over editors, say, would really not match the distribution of race over the relevant societal reference group (which Roberts et al. fail to define), it is concluded that this reflects an inequality calling for societal worry. Interestingly, this does not apply to all possible positions or resources: few complain about the preponderance of females among hairdressers and of males among garbage disposers, but the more attractive, lucrative, and influential particular positions are, the more representativeness and participation becomes an issue. If then a particular position is particularly attractive, lucrative, and influential, and if the feature under discussion is not distributed representatively, the conclusion is that this must be due to structural societal obstacles, which need to be actively removed. This is indeed the idea that underlies the recommendations of Roberts et al., who (despite their data indicating racial representativeness) call for various kinds of actions to remove the assumed obstacles to Black researchers.

Interestingly, this kind of reasoning reflects a strong bias towards one of (at least) two possible factors that decide whether an individual will occupy a particular position or indeed carry out any kind of action: intent (s/he wants it) and circumstances (which can enable or block the agent)—factors that roughly correspond to Heider’s motivation and capacity (1958) and Kelley’s (1973) personal and circumstance attributions. Unfortunately, the racial distribution analysis of Roberts et al. considers only circumstances as possible factors for uneven or non-representative distributions, while intent is entirely dismissed. This seems to deny any possible impact of intent, any possible role of free choice. How do they know? Is it logically and empirically impossible that individuals growing up under special conditions, as members of a sizable minority in the US (the country/culture Roberts et al. focus on almost exclusively) that were discriminated by law until the mid-1960s, develop different needs and interests than studying task-switching or the automaticity of flanker processing in artificial laboratory experiments? Would that constitute a societal problem? Would that problem need to be resolved? Are there any data or observations that encourage Roberts et al. to question that the selective engagement of Black individuals in science, in psychology, and in the various psychological subdisciplines reflects anything but individual preferences? While such data may exist, the authors failed to present them, and yet jump from seemingly non-representative distributions to the assumption that there is something wrong with how psychological science is organized. Can that be considered a sufficiently balanced view?

Conclusion

It is important for science to be responsible and responsive to societal needs and developments. Therefore, studying political activism can be as useful as being stimulated by it (Conde, 2014), and by addressing questions that political activists are raising. And yet, uncritically accepting activist claims, demands, and reasoning, and translating them into scientific practice creates a potentially toxic mix of science and ideology that is likely to damage scientific freedom and independence.

References

Arnett, J. J. (2009). The neglected 95%, a challenge to psychology's philosophy of science. American Psychologist, 64(6), 571–574. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016723

Colzato, L.S., Hommel, B., & Shapiro, K. (2010). Religion and the Attentional Blink: Depth of faith predicts depth of the blink. Frontiers in Psychology, 1:147.

Conde, N. (2014). Activism mobilizing science. Ecological Economics, 105, 67-77.

Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430.

Dupree, C. H., & Kraus, M. W. (2022). Psychological science is not race neutral. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(1), 270–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620979820.

Haeffel, G. J., Thiessen, E. D., Campbell, M. W., Kaschak, M. P., & McNeil, N. M. (2009). Theory, not cultural context, will advance American psychology. American Psychologist, 64(6), 570–571. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016191

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons Inc. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000.

Hommel, B., & Colzato, L.S. (2017). The social transmission of metacontrol policies: Mechanisms underlying the interpersonal transfer of persistence and flexibility. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 43-58.

Hommel, B., Colzato, L.S., Scorolli, C., Borghi, A.M., & van den Wildenberg, W.P.M. (2011). Religion and action control: Faith-specific modulation of the Simon effect but not stop-signal performance. Cognition, 120, 177-185.

Kelley, H.H. (1973). The process of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28, 107–128.

McClelland, D. C. (1988). Human motivation. Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D., & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1295–1309. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620927709

Stroebe, W., & Nijstad, B. (2009). Do our psychological laws apply only to Americans? American Psychologist, 64(6), 569. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016090

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Double-100 Talent Grant of the Province of Shandong, China to the author.

Most recently, among other things, he was on the editorial board of Perspectives on Psychological Science (PoPS), which was the setting for a major meltdown in Psychology that included allegations of editorial misconduct on the part of Klaus Fiedler, Editor-in-Chief, as well as charges of racism leveled against him, me, and several other authors.

PoPS is run by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The meltdown included the organization of a mob of almost 1400 academics who denounced all of us as racists and called for APS to summarily execute an order to dismiss Fiedler. They obeyed. Days later, Fiedler was gone.

As of this writing, five of six PoPS associate editors resigned in response to this meltdown. About 1/3 of the members of the consulting board also resigned. Dr. Krueger was one of those members. He has resigned both his membership in APS, and his consulting board positiong with PoPS. His letters of resignation are published here with his permission.

Resignation from APS on Dec 6 (Alison refers to Alison Gopnik, then Wendy Wood & Jennifer Eberhardt)

Dear Alison, Wendy, & Jennifer,

When the feeling of righteousness glows through the mind it may not be the case that justice has been served. I have followed the rapidly unfolding story of the dismantling of Professor Klaus Fiedler’s reputation. I am telling you that I am appalled because I cannot think of a stronger word. This morning I shared this epic story of a breakdown of professionalism with my students to warn them of the kind of world they now live in. I told them that the concept of justice rests on notions of ‘vengeance,’ ‘due process,’ and ‘goodwill.’ I told them that the thirst for vengeance is part of our human nature, and that the ideas of due process and goodwill have been hard won against this paleolithic background. You are well aware of what due process means. We study this as psychologists. I do not have to lecture you. I must lecture you, however, on your lack of wisdom, your inability to let this sink in, your helplessness in the face of instinct, your surrender to a mob, your lack of goodwill. You are at fault!

I have known Klaus Fiedler for decades. He is one of the most fair-minded people I know. If indeed he has been a closet racist all these years, he’s royally fooled us. And if so, you failed when appointing him. Now you say ‘oops’ for appointing him, and ‘here’s the bus, Professor Fiedler, please let yourself be thrown under it.’ But Professor Fiedler isn’t a racist, and an allegation does not make it so. Proper review would reveal this.

But no, you let your amygdala do your thinking. How very sophomoric of you. For shame!

I am a charter member and a fellow of the APS and a former member of an APS Task Force. I herewith resign. I am not on Twitter, so please grant me one last favor: put this letter on the APS Twitter feed.

Sincerely,

Joachim Krueger

Professor of Psychology

Brown University

Resignation from the PPS editorial board on Dec11; Amy is Amy Drew.

Dear Amy,

I herewith resign from the editorial board of Perspectives on Psychological Science. It was a pleasure to serve under the guidance of Professor Klaus Fiedler and to work with the exceptional team of colleagues he assembled. Please remove my name immediately from the list of board members on the PPS website. If you do not, visitors of the site might get the false impression that I endorse the recent political and non-judicious practices displayed by the APS. I urge the APS to apologize publicly to Professor Fiedler and to make amends for the frivolous damage they have done to his reputation.

What may be less obvious to the APS leadership is that the damage it has done to itself is far greater than the damage visited upon individuals. Science is about truth, and truth can inform and guide the way we live. The APS, however, has placed ideological mandates before science, and has thereby begun to throttle it. I do not know how you might recover from this. The public may come to see you as a gang of garden gnomes with axes to grind, axes too heavy for you to lift. It is a pity.

I love psychological science, and over a century of toil we have learned much about the behavior of groups, crowds, and mobs as well as about self-satisfied and moralistic decision-making. In time, someone will write the story of these recent events, and the APS leadership is not likely to star in a heroic role.

Best,

joachim

PS: Please forward this mail to Mr. Gropp, whose email address I was unable to find. 

Joachim Krueger

Professor of Psychology

Brown University

This short entry has a single purpose: to communicate that the authoritarian mob-like behavior of academics in psychology was completely predictable. No, its not just hindsight. The reason I characterize the behavior as “predictable” is because I predicted it. Not exactly, of course, because the form is too idiosyncratic to each mobbing. It was predictable, because it has become endemic to academia.

Almost six months ago, I characterized Fiedler’s invitation of articles critical of academia’s diversity rhetoric as “dangerous” on political grounds, which was my way of saying “bigtime elevated risk.” Here is the text from my article, Diversity is Diverse (with emphasis added for this essay):

The Epistemic Consequences of Politicizing Psychological Science

Just as manifestly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, Hommel’s point about agency2, however valid, is often on very dangerous political grounds, at least within academia. Even considering the possibility that underrepresentation in some desirable attribute stems from something about group differences (choices, culture, attitudes, skills etc.) rather than their victimhood constitutes grounds for social justice academics to denounce, mob, and ostracize (Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020; Stevens, Jussim & Honeycutt, 2020). If it is viewed as legitimate to only attribute gaps to discrimination, and, within academia, some sort of sacrilege to view them as resulting from other sources (except when those other sources are flattering to groups social justice academics deem worthy of favor), our “scientific” literature will be compromised to the point of uselessness.

[After some points about the dangers of this to psychology’s ability to distinguish fact from politically popular fancy, which I may delve into more in a subsequent essay, it then continues]:

Referring to the modern development within academia of denouncing claims that gaps and inequalities result from anything except oppression (and not referring to the Roberts et al, 2020 article per se, which did not denounce anyone3), suppression is often something sought by political activists seeking power (Stevens et al, 2020); but it is terrible for science…

[end excerpt]

That was only slightly revised from my review of Hommel’s paper, which was written in June, 2022. It is cold satisfaction to have been proven right. That academia is this predictable to anyone paying close attention testifies to how extreme the intolerance in academia has become.

For more on this general topic, see Anna Krylov’s excellent essay, “From Russia with Love.” Anna is an emigre from the Soviet Union, and a chemistry professor at USC. In the essay, she describes modern developments in the academy as echoing her experiences growing up under a totalitarian communist regime.

If you are not familiar with this event, you find a chronology spanning over two years here. In this essay, I am not re-reviewing the whole event, and, instead, focus on my experience within it. Ready for a wild ride?

My Original Sin: Contesting “Social Justice” Claims

I recently wrote a paper titled Diversity is Diverse, which can be found here. The paper was written as a response to a critical commentary by Hommel (2022) of a published paper by Roberts et al (2020) titled Racial Inequality in Psychological Science. The journal is Perspective on Psychological Science, of whom Klaus Fiedler was the editor. Three other critical commentaries were also accepted for publication (I predict all will be “unaccepted” though as of this writing it has not happened).

The general topic was diversity and racism in psychology. Oversimplifying only slightly, Hommel argued that Roberts et al: 1. Overstated the extent of racism in psychology, and this was demonstrable from their own data; 2. the scientific justifications Roberts et al gave for advocating for more focus on racial diversity applied equally well to a myriad of other forms of diversity:

Hommel wrote:

• … the call for diversity was restricted to just one of more than 100 possible personal features of already demonstrated psychological relevance. If we are to report the race of editors, reviewers, authors, and participants, as Roberts et al. demand, it seems logical to also demand reporting their cultural, religious, and economic background, their political orientation,…[list continues for 2 lines]…, in addition to tens, if not hundreds of other personal features that might have affected the measures of interest in past studies

Among Hommel’s conclusions:

• uncritically accepting activist claims, demands, and reasoning, and translating them into scientific practice creates a potentially toxic mix of science and ideology that is likely to damage scientific freedom and independence.

The preface to the denunciation for using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof begins with an exchange of ideas among many papers and the way in which that exchange was handled by a journal editor, which I am not revisiting here. All original sources involved in what was to become a hunt for (metaphorical) witches supposedly cavorting with (ideological) demons, can be found here. Go there to do a deep dive on who said exactly what and when and about whom.

Let’s get right to the Witch Hunt. Suffice it to say I mostly agreed with Hommel (but feel free to read my whole paper) that the original Roberts et al paper is more propaganda than science. As you will see, I had yet to learn just how expert he was at such rhetoric.

My Depravity Began with Fiddler on the Roof

My commentary mostly concurred with Hommel’s analysis, but took it one step further. My paper led off with this quote from the Fiddler on the Roof song, Tradition (which begins at 5:50 in the clip shown above):

“Of course, there was the time he sold him a horse, and delivered a mule.”

  The Oxford Languages Dictionary provides two definitions of diversity:

1.      The state of being diverse, variety.

2.      The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.

Inasmuch as “the state of being diverse” is not very helpful for understanding the meaning of “diversity,” I looked up “variety.”  The same dictionary defines “variety” as “the quality or state of being different or diverse; the absence of uniformity, sameness, or monotony.”  The first definition is clearly the broader of the two and subsumes the second definition. This risks creating confusion about what is being discussed. If someone promises “diversity” interpreted in the broader sense, but delivers “diversity” in the narrower sense, that person is plausibly interpretable as having, metaphorically, sold a horse but delivered a mule.

The point of this was the disingenuousness of much modern academic discourse around issues of diversity. Agree or not, the point was obvious. It was also obviously a point about ideas and rhetoric around diversity. What are often presented as scientific arguments for diversity (which are often well-justified and apply to the wide range of human experience described by Hommel), in academia, often boil down to calls for practices that implement far left visions of social justice and reparations. In addition to failing to include myriad forms of human diversity other than those progressives care about, they exclude the vast majority of Americans who are unwilling to conform to progressive dogmas. As such, academia is in the midst of a political purity spiral that looks like this (for data on which Figure 1 below is based go here):

I then used the Fiddler horse/mule metaphor throughout the paper to capture the disingenuousness of various claims about diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Here is another excerpt:

• “However, if one takes a political activist lens, one demanding reparative social justice rather than a scientific one, to atone for historical discrimination, “inclusion” must be satisfied by biases favoring those historically marginalized groups. Similarly, when using that same political activist lens, “representation” does not mean statistical representation in proportion to the population, it means overrepresentation (in order to provide reparations for past bias). Inclusion and representation, too, then, can constitute (political social justice) mules delivered when (scientific) horses were promised.”

Again, its completely obvious that this passage refers to the disingenuous manner in which words like “representation” are used in psychology and academia. It does not refer to any particular identifiable group of people.

Roberts was given a chance to reply to the exchange (which included two other articles on the Roberts-Hommel exchange). He first presents this extended quote from my paper (the quote is accurately excerpted):

• To be sure, if some psychologists in some fields wish to devote extra effort and attention to samples of color, I have no objection. Special attention to samples of color1 deserves a place in psychological science. Let’s not pretend, however, that such samples are somehow inherently scientifically more rigorous than ones that more closely approximate the demographics of the underlying population. Scientists who wish to plow their fields with mules should permitted to do so; they should not, however, pretend that those mules are horses or suggest that, unless others give up their horses, they are doing something scientifically suboptimal.

Did you think I was simply carrying through my horse/mule metaphor to encapsulate the disingenuous hypocrisy of diversity rhetoric? Of criticizing the idea that a special emphasis on particular groups is somehow scientifically superior to work on broadly more representative samples? You are so naive.2

“The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.”

Roberts reveals the “truth” (emphasis mine, Appendix III presents a screenshot in full of Roberts’ text):

• …this metaphor… explicitly parallels people of color with mules…which is a well-documented racist trope used to dehumanize people of color. As one historian put it, “mules and African Americans shared close ties in the minds of white southerners,” who conceptualized and portrayed them both as unintelligent, inefficient, and inferior “beasts of burden” that belonged in the field and away from their masters (Ellenberg, 1998). Again, I grant Jussim (forthcoming) the benefit of the doubt, but given the present question of the intersection between ideology and science, it is important to make crystal clear that the scientific consensus is that racial categories are social categories, not animal categories, and that conceptualizing racial categories as if they were animal categories is an essentialist worldview that predicts (and is predicted by) stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and a decreased interest in contact with individuals from diverse racial backgrounds… Depicting people of color as mules is a historically outdated, inaccurate, and dangerous concept that reflects and reinforces the belief that White people are better, purer, and more productive (Davis, 1991; Ellenberg, 1998; Roberts et al., 2022). People of color are not mules, and they are no longer required to plow fields.

“The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.”

This is a brilliant piece of rhetoric. Effective propaganda stokes emotions and outrage and short-circuits thinking. He claims to be giving me the benefit of the doubt while simultaneously damning me as the worst sort of 19th century racist. The best propaganda builds on things people can see for themselves to craft falsehoods and mobilize behavior. Every statement in Roberts’ analysis is true, except for one lie.3 There are two big lies here:

1. 1. it “explicitly parallels people of color with mules.” I did no such thing, of course. But you would need to have read my paper to understand that the source of the horse/mule metaphor was not 1880 Mississippi, but a 1970s play about early 20th century Jewish life in Russia.

2. There is no racist mule trope.

As (the Black linguist) John McWhorter has pointed out:

• In today’s America, to be called a racist is almost equivalent to being called a pedophile.

However true that may be in general, it is even more true among regressively “progressive” academics. Each of these features of leftwing authoritarianism was on full display during the mobbing:

Roberts weaponized a 19th century racist trope that disappeared by 1950 according to his own source (Ellenberg (1998), which concludes with this:

• “But by 1950 one thing was certain, the real and symbolic marriage of mules and African Americans was ending as the mule South bowed to the machine.”

This trope had disappeared three generations ago. Few Americans, I suspect, had even heard of it, until Roberts dredged it up in his masterful denunciation. So far, I have found no one who says they knew of the trope before Roberts revived it.

There was no racist mule trope in my paper.

The Mob

Nonetheless, Robert’s framing of that section from my paper quickly got picked up by academics on social media who proceeded to immediate outrage with no fact checking. The move was to link to Roberts paper and also to excerpt just the Roberts denunciation. None linked my paper, showed any sign of having read it, any knowledge about it other than Robert’s out of context excerpt. There was no evidence of knowledge that its metaphor originated, not in 19th century racist tropes, but in Fiddler on the Roof, a 1960s era play about early 20th century Jewish life in Russia:

Within hours of my first seeing this hit social media, an online open letter was organized, petitioning for redress of the injustices inflicted on Roberts. It opened with this denunciation:

• “The racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power enacted against one of our colleagues (detailed here) is atrocious…”

It also included demands for Fiedler to be fired as editor, for blocking publication of our accepted papers, and, instead, publishing Roberts’ rhetorically brilliant propaganda hit piece. Within days, it had almost 1400 signatories. Fiedler was given no chance to explain or defend his actions, but he was given an ultimatum by APS (the professional organization overseeing the journal) to resign or be fired. He resigned.

In contrast to, I suspect, nearly all of the ~1400 academics, Fiedler actually read both my comment and Roberts’ reply. And this is what he wrote to Roberts (go here for source materials):

• I read your article with great interest, and I must say I really liked it for the most part, maybe with one exception, namely the passage on mules (vs. horses). I found this was polemic, because every reader understands that the way in which Jussim meant the analogy is misrepresented here…

Yes, Klaus, every reader who actually read my paper would understand that. But that is not how Outrage Mobs work. It is not how radical dogmatic political movements work. It is no longer how much of academia works. Actually read the paper? How quaint.

Postscript: Some Interesting Conversations

Nonetheless, several people have told me something along the following lines:

• “I think you have been mistreated but I disagree with your use of the horse/mule metaphor.”

Combining several such conversations, these have usually continued something like this:

Me: Had you ever heard of the mule trope before Roberts denounced me with it?

Them: Uh, no.

Me: Me either. Did you read my paper?

Them: Uh, no.

Me (voice raised, agitated): Then how the fuck can you “disagree” with my use of the metaphor if you haven’t even read my fucking paper?

Them: Uh, mmm, errr, [other incoherent gutteral sounds, when face to face. Discussions via email/dm were slighly different but not much].

Me: Would you mind reading the first page of my paper?

Them, uncomfortable now: Sure.

[I show them the first page, displayed earlier in this essay. They read it].

Me: What is the origin of the horse/mule metaphor?

Them (kinda stunned): Fiddler on the Roof.

Me: Is there anything racist about Fiddler on the Roof?

The tension then drops a few hundred decibals. Sometimes they even smile.

Appendix: Screenshot of Roberts “Deconstruction” of My Horse/Mule Metaphor

Full paper here.

Narrative Description

Over the last few days a Black professor at Stanford, Steven Roberts, denounced as racist his treatment at the hands of Klaus Fiedler, the former editor of Perspectives in Psychological Science (PoPS), a major psychology journal, and the four critics of one of his earlier papers published there. I was one of the critics who Roberts particularly singled out to smear as racist with an outright lie that I will address in a subsequent essay. A good short overview of these events can be found here.

This triggered a social media shitstorm and mobbing directed mostly at Fiedler and me. Fiedler is not on social media. The purpose of this post is JUST to orient you to the major events, and not to analyze, characterize, evaluate them or debunk the worst of the nonsense.1

Timeline as I Understand It

Dates are approximate as I was not privvy to all that happened. Even when they involved me, older events are time approximate.

2020. Roberts et al publish a paper in PoPS on “Racial Inequality in Psychological Science.”

Jan 1, 2022, Fielder becomes editor at PoPS. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) celebrates his appointment, on grounds of his support for intellectual pluralism, scientific rigor and international diversification. (I will not comment here further on this, but I do urge you to keep this in mind).

Spring 2022:

• Hommel submits a commentary critical of Roberts et al (2020) to PoPS.

• Fiedler sends the commentary out for review. I am one of the reviewers.

• After receiving the reviews, Fiedler accepts Hommels’ paper for publication, and requests commentaries on Hommel’s paper from two psychologists plus me.

• We provided them, and each is accepted:

  • Mine is here.

  • Stanovich’s is here.

  • Stroebe’s is available here.

Fiedler, Stroebe and Hommel are all European. This is worth mentioning because it may be that many European academics do not share the sensibilities or values common among American academics and this could be relevant to understanding the entire affair.

Spring/Summer/Fall 2022:

Exact sequence and nature of events is not completely clear here, because only partial information is available to me. Here is what I do understand, but it is not necessarily in exact chronological order:2

• Fiedler invites Roberts to reply to the commentaries thus far. He provides one.

• Fiedler requests Hommel’s input on Robert’s reply. Its role in further events is not clear to me.

• Fiedler gives Roberts’ reply a conditional acceptance. Fiedler asks Roberts to remove a section that Fiedler describes as an unfair characterization of my commentary. Roberts characterized my commentary as drawing on 19th century racist tropes and claimed that I drew parallels between Black people and mules (which of course I didn’t but more on this in the next essay). Fiedler asks, but explicitly does not require, Roberts to remove this section. Fiedler’s expresses his view that Roberts commentary on my section is so obviously a misrepresentation that it will make Roberts look bad, and Fiedler is trying to prevent that. (In light of the actual course of events, this is also worth keeping in mind).

• Hommel provides his reply to the commentaries, which can be found here.

• Roberts pulls his paper from consideration for publication to protest what he claims is the unfair treatment at the hands of Fiedler and that the entire episode to this point reflects the systemic racism endemic to psychology.

December 2, 2022. Roberts posts what would have been his reply paper online (available here) with two additions:

1. A new introduction outlining his view of how he was treated in an unfair, racist manner. For example, part of the complaint is that Fiedler, Hommel, Stroebe, Stanovich and I are all senior White men.3

2. He also posted email correspondence between Fiedler and himself about the status of his second paper.4

December 2, 2022, ongoing as of this post: A social media shitstorm ensues. Some examples appear at the end of this chronology. Fiedler and I are denounced as racists; PoPS procedures are denounced as racist. Fiedler is accused of using unethical procedures for the manner in which he invited the commentaries and responses (this would be a good time to re-read the APS headline about him at the top of this essay).

December 2nd or 3rd: An online petition and open letter is organized. Within 3 days, it gets 1200+ signatories. Its substance is shown here:

December 5, 2022:

• An alternative open letter is posted, raising questions about the demands in the original, denunciatory letter, and calling for a thoughtful, careful collection and evaluation of all relevant information before granting their demands.

• Without discussing the events with Fiedler, and without investigating whether the story Roberts posted online is the whole story, and without verifying that the email exchanges between Roberts and Fiedler that Roberts posted were complete, APS issued Fiedler an ultimatum: Resign or be fired.

December 6, 2022. Fiedler resigned.

December, 9, 2022, Statement of the German psychological society, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie issued upbraiding APS for violating procedural justice in its execution of an order to summarily dismiss Fiedler.

• "…it is not our understanding of procedural justice to condemn a person without giving him or her an adequate hearing.”

December 15, 2022. The Association for Psychological Science issued this explanation for its actions.

By December 20, 2022, the entire set of associate editors at PoPS resigned. About 1/3 of the consulting editors (those tasked with reviewing many papers) has also resigned.

Additional essays will follow this report.

Here are few drops from the raging flood of social media outrage over this:

Footnotes