In Defense of SPSP - and of its Dissenters

Anne Wilson's Talk at SPSP's Symposium on "Is SPSP a Healthy Organization?"

Anne Wilson is a Social Psychology Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University whose work explores identity, motivated reasoning, subjective perceptions of inequality, and political polarization. Although personally left of center, she has been a quiet but consistent advocate for open inquiry, academic freedom, and good-faith debate across political divides.

Note: SPSP refers to The Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This is the text and slides of one of the talks presented at the panel on “Is SPSP a Healthy Organization?” If you prefer video, you can find videos of all four talks here

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Anne Wilson’s Talk

Most of the transcript comes direct from what I said in the posted video but I have lightly edited for wording and elaborated slightly on a few points. [Elaborated asides that add minor points to the original talk are in brackets]. Video and slides can be found here. I have included screenshots of slides below only where the visual adds something beyond the text of the talk.

So, you might notice that I’m the only panelist in this symposium arguing that SPSP is largely healthy. You might even be wondering whether I’m really here to defend SPSP. You’re right to wonder. My abstract signaled something more equivocal.

Well, I am here to defend SPSP, but I’m also here to valorize dissent.

Ingroup dissent is costly and courageous, and it’s motivated by care— in this case, I think, for the discipline.

We know from the research that in-group dissent is really valuable, because it helps groups to think critically, and sometimes to course correct. It’s also dangerous for the person doing the dissenting because, especially when groups feel under threat, in-group dissenters are often seen as disloyal and as betrayers.[1]

So, the first three speakers in this symposium are dissenters, and I want to start by saying that I think it’s not out of disloyalty. Also - I think they have a real point. They may represent a minority view in this organization, but it’s a view (about universities more generally) that is increasingly evident in society.

It’s also not clear that all of their perspectives are minority views even within our organization. We don’t know how common these views are, because we know that people self-censor for both pro-social reasons, out of care and kindness, and out of fear.[2] I know I have done both. This means that we don’t really know how many people share some of the concerns that these speakers have highlighted.

Why platform this symposium? Some of you may feel that at this moment in time, when academia feels under political attack – and some of our members may be feeling that threat quite personally, that even hosting this symposium is inappropriate – that it gives ammunition to that threat.

I feel that concern quite deeply.

But my view is that even in times of threat, and perhaps especially in times of threat, we need to examine the issues that could be weakening our organization, our knowledge production, and we need to understand the reasons for rising grievances and public mistrust.

So, what I’m going to try to do in the time I have is to articulate what I think was strongest in the criticisms that we’ve heard so far. I’ll focus on content, not on tone. I acknowledge that some of the tone was quite prickly. I also want to highlight where I think these criticisms overreach or miss the mark.

I won’t spend a lot of time talking about all of the things that I love about SPSP, and there are many. I’ll focus primarily on the criticisms that have been at issue in this symposium.

This slide represents what I consider to be the biggest criticisms from Luke, Nate, and Lee. I’m going to try to go through and address each theme.

So the first critique that I want to highlight is one from Luke. He argues that the scientific method is not racist, and it’s worth defending.

At its core, is the scientific method a valuable tool? Absolutely, I agree with him entirely. However, the scientific method, and how it’s practiced, is also worth critiquing. It’s worth recognizing that neutrality and objectivity are often claimed on the basis of using the scientific method. Those claims can obscure how bias can enter through many of the decisions we make – our choice of questions, our samples, our interpretations, the gatekeeping at journals, whose work is considered valuable and impactful enough to publish, and so on.

[section edited slightly for clarity] All researchers have biases that might shape the choices they make in their scientific methods and how they interpret results. In unequal societies, however, biases in the application of the scientific method can be tilted in ways that end up benefiting those who already hold power. For example, historically, the scientific method has been used to claim the superiority of white people or men. These conclusions received insufficient scrutiny when the discipline was made up mostly of white men! One of the best protections against this is the viewpoint diversity of scientists. When people from different demographic groups, lived experiences or ideological perspectives scrutinize scientific findings, they’re better able to collectively identify biases that might go undetected in a homogenous group of scientists.

So - I agree with Luke that the scientific method is worth defending. But that also means ensuring equal access to these tools, and treating with sufficient scrutiny claims of objectivity of the results that we get from using the scientific method.

It’s also worth highlighting here that this symposium is fundamentally about viewpoint diversity. I strongly support that principle, but principles only have integrity when they apply symmetrically. So here’s where I challenge Luke on this criticism.

If we’re defending viewpoint diversity, it includes perspectives that we agree with, but also those we don’t.

And if SPSP is going to be pluralistic – in its methods and its epistemologies and its perspectives, then asking “which is it -- the scientific method or not?” I think that misses the mark.

If conservative critiques belong at the table, then so do critical theory critiques, even those that criticize the scientific method.

So I’m suggesting that critical theory gets a seat at the table. That’s part of viewpoint diversity.

Now, I have a caveat here, and it’s an important one.

No perspective, including critical theory, should be insulated from scrutiny.

And I say this because sometimes there is a move within critical theory—some critical race theorists sometimes cast disagreement in itself to be an indication of racism, or of bad faith, or of white fragility.

Now, of course, people do get defensive when their identities are threatened. This is not unique to white people, even though it can certainly also apply to white people. They might well sometimes find critical race theory claims threatening.

However, you can’t reliably reason backwards. Even though defensiveness sometimes fuels disagreement, we can’t always assume that disagreement is due only to defensiveness. Disagreement can sometimes come from principled reasons unrelated to defensiveness.

And I think this is important, because if we too automatically dismiss CRT criticism as ill-intended and bad faith, these ideas are insulated from taking critique seriously, which can ultimately weaken this framework.

Now, Luke’s critique seems to resist some of these implications of viewpoint diversity. Psychology has historically privileged more quantitative approaches, and we have been expanding our approaches to a wider range of methods and epistemologies. I think that’s worthwhile.

But another note of caution, and this one is for the epistemological pluralists. Sometimes I encounter the perspective that that different groups need different ways of knowing -- different epistemologies.

I personally reject that perspective. I hope that we can expand the toolbox of accessible tools for everyone, but that we resist epistemic fragmentation where different groups start to rely on incommensurable tools. I think that’s a real recipe for talking past each other. And this practice – different groups using different tools - may not empower underrepresented scholars but isolate them from arenas where policy, funding, and institutional decisions are made.

Okay, the second critique that Luke, as well as Nate, were making, at least implicitly, has to do with politicization of our organization and how this can threaten institutional trust. These graphs show polling (compiled by Nate Honeycutt in his role at FIRE) revealing the decline of public trust in universities.

There are likely multiple reasons for the loss of public trust. But there is something real happening. Institutional trust, it can be slow to build, and it can be very easy to lose. And I think that Luke has a point, that overtly political stances do risk of undermining public confidence. When an organization is ideologically aligned, the public may wonder if evidence is going to be weighed fairly and communicated accurately and honestly. In other words, if political bias is going to shape what we tell the public.

Now, there are a number of things we can do to protect against that.[3]

But one place that I differ from Luke and Nate is that their implication that activist research is the problem, and it should be discouraged.

As a strong supporter of academic freedom, I simply don’t think that’s a tenable solution. We can’t protect some scholarly inquiry and disallow others. Progressive and activist research is part of the diversity we need to protect with academic freedom. I also don’t think it’s feasible to be determining what is activist research and what is not. Who decides? I think that most research is for something, and the idea that we could have a binary distinction (of activist or not) is not really feasible. [added note: it should also be acknowledged that this symposium would likely fall into the category of activist scholarship].

Science vs activism -- this is a debate that’s been had for a while. People like Jonathan Haidt have argued for that activist norms can undermine good science, and that you simply can’t have both at the same time.[4] I disagree with that view, and align more with Alice Dreger’s perspective. She says that science and social justice require one another.[5] Ultimately, social justice is best served when we know the truth. We just have to remain committed, even while doing research with social justice goals, to insist on seeking the truth, not what we would prefer to be true.

So, shifting to some of Lee’s criticisms. So, Lee takes issue with the expansive labeling of white supremacy in some of the language that SPSP is using.

So first, I want to start with the defense.

Whiteness.

In critical theory, this doesn’t refer to white people.

It refers to a historically constructed system of norms and assumptions and power relations that are treated as neutral or universal in a white dominant culture.[6] This isn’t my expertise, but this is my basic understanding of what it means.

Now, I recognize that this can be confusing, because the analytical concept here, structural power, is going to be heard rhetorically by many people as a claim about individuals. And I understand that it can sound pretty hypocritical when people like us, social psychologists, who often warn against essentializing or generalizing about groups, appear to be doing exactly that when we’re talking about white people.

However, it’s also arguably defensible.

One argument for using this kind of terminology is that white people who live in majority contexts often don’t have to think about the ways in which their racial identity shapes their experience, and – it can be valuable to name that.

I sometimes think about this as the iceberg problem.

When people within a particular theoretical expertise, like critical race theory, talk about a term like white supremacy, it’s kind of like the tip of the iceberg. They’re using the term as shorthand to refer to historical patterns of oppression, systemic power structures, intergenerational transmission of wealth and opportunity, implications of over-incarceration, and so much more in a rich historical analysis.

And this deep knowledge base under the surface – these are the reasons why, the terms, whiteness and white supremacy – from their perspective - is appropriate to be using.

Now, outside of that theoretical discourse, though, we know that when people hear the word white supremacy, they think KKK, or racial hatred.

And so there really is a disconnect, and communication can be a problem here. The term is understandably going to land with many people quite differently from how it is meant by those intellectual insiders.

And I think it’s worth reflecting on, that yes, we can defend the use of these terms, but we also might consider whether there is some privilege in using language, at least in public discourse, where the defensibility of the term depends on the depth of knowledge in a very specific intellectual tradition.

I didn’t talk much about this next slide. This is Tema Okun, who is the originator of this “white supremacy culture” list. I encourage you to look into it, if you don’t know about it.[7]

[my brief added aside: Lee’s takedown of this unevidenced opinion piece by Okun was snarky, and these Okun claims were likely not immediately recognizable to everyone in the audience. But the core criticism was warranted. Okun lists qualities of rigid organizational cultures that she does not like and calls them white supremacy culture. Many of the features – when taken to extreme – may well be undesirable! Labeling them symptoms of whiteness is an opinion. In my opinion, SPSP should not promote unevidenced claims about white supremacy culture, then also ask the public to trust our scientific integrity. We have the capacity to course correct and this is a good place to demonstrate that.]

Lee’s next critique was about denunciation and censorship culture. First, there is a defense. On one hand – denunciation is a normal human impulse, and sometimes a really functional one for societies. We set social norms as a group by signalling our rejection what falls outside of what is acceptable. Also – on the same hand - criticism is part of free speech. As a defender of free speech, I must say, if you have criticisms, make them.

Now, on the other hand, I acknowledge that internet-fueled cancellation campaigns really don’t elevate the kind of critical thought and meaningful speech that I think, as an organization, we should be valorizing.

And it also does contribute to self-censorship, and I think that goes well beyond the target of the cancellation.

Lee’s next point was about the demonizing and catastrophizing language that sometimes occurs in these discourses. Specifically, Lee presented some data about how if you describe a society in these expansively racist, white supremacist terms, it has real implications for the judgments people make under attributional ambiguity. Specifically, if people perceive that racism is the norm, they may perceive racism even in places where there’s no evidence that it has occurred. This brings to mind other past research on diversity norms and how what we believe about a group (that the norm is to appreciate and welcome diversity) can potentially shape our reactions to ambiguous situations in more prosocial ways.[8]

So I think that Lee’s data makes an interesting point, and one that needs further research. I don’t find the research to date convincing enough to draw a firm conclusion about it. [though, as an aside – I imagine it would count once again as activist research!]

I also want to point out to Lee, though, that demonization and catastrophizing is not a one-sided phenomenon. I have heard Lee do it! And, more generally, I’ve heard plenty of catastrophizing in conservative and anti-woke amplification of woke campus controversies, where a single vivid instance is held up as evidence that this is happening constantly on campuses. I think that is also worth reflecting on, because it too might contribute to conservatives opting out of college or university (or fields like ours), and to the declining institutional trust in universities.

Alright, his last critique was about Diversity by discrimination.

Lee makes a long case about the Bakke decision. I’m really not going to address that. I think that that might not be the strongest basis for the critique that he has, given how contested that decision was across the political spectrum.

So I want to just articulate his core concern, which is that discrimination against one group to the advantage of another group can be a difficult principle to defend on its face.

That’s not a trivial objection.

However, I want to point out that, there’s sometimes more agreement between pro- and anti-DEI perspectives than it sometimes appears on the surface. Most pro-DEI people are anti-discrimination, and this is an anti-discrimination stance. Moreover, most pro-DEI policies are motivated by fairness, by a desire for equal opportunity and merit *with an awareness that disadvantage can sometimes obscure genuine talent, so we should try to have a more expansive understanding of what merit means.

Even in a case of preferential selection. One can argue that the intuition behind that in a lot of cases is that it’s selecting for high merit candidates whose credentials don’t quite match their potential because of the cumulative disadvantages that they face.

So I think that, in principle, many of these intuitions are fairness intuitions, and would be shared by pro- and anti-DEI, proponents even if we disagree on specific policy approaches.

Now, when Lee criticizes DEI, is he saying that underrepresented scholars don’t belong at SPSP?

I’m arguing no.

I won’t read through all of these, but these are things that I have heard him endorse in other places and times.

And a lot of these things are highly consistent with many DEI principles, including reducing socioeconomic barriers, for example, for low-income students, which he recognizes would disproportionately, although not solely, benefit historically disadvantaged racial minorities.

There’s a lot of common ground, I think we have with our harshest opponents, and we often miss that in these kinds of debates.

Wrapping up. So, my argument here is that SPSP is a largely healthy society on both science and justice fronts.

And that the kinds of mechanisms that it has in place for establishing and scrutinizing the scientific process, I think, bode well for its continued health.

Part of that health is reflected in a continued willingness to listen to dissenters and – I hope - to engage seriously with their criticisms.

To loop back to what I said at the beginning, why should we do this now, in the current political context? Well, I think that especially now, when we feel under threat, we need all perspectives at the table.

We have made science better many times over by incorporating methods that can build trust and capture the perspectives and lived experiences of many underrepresented groups. We’ve made real progress on this in recent years.

One group that hasn’t had that treatment, though, is conservatives. So we’re stuck right now trying to understand the current political moment with a woefully one-dimensional understanding of half the country.

So I’ll leave you with this.

Dissent is an epistemic resource.

And science is a collective process. We all bring our own biases, so science works best when multiple perspectives are at the table, and this includes demographic and viewpoint diversity.

When all claims can be challenged, and no idea is insulated from criticism.

When standards and principles are applied symmetrically, and when no one is pressured to self-censor.

I don’t think we protect science by protecting ourselves from these kinds of disagreements, but by protecting the conditions under which disagreement can occur.

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[1] Adelman, L., & Dasgupta, N. (2019). Effect of threat and social identity on reactions to ingroup criticism: Defensiveness, openness, and a remedy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(5), 740–753. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218796785

Hornsey, M. J. (2009). Resistance to group criticism and recommendations for change: Lessons from the intergroup sensitivity effect. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(3), 275–291. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00178.x

Packer, D. J. (2014). On not airing our dirty laundry: Intergroup contexts suppress ingroup criticism among strongly identified group members. British Journal of Social Psychology, 53(1), 93–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12017

Shahar, E., Hameiri, B., Bar-Tal, D., & Raviv, A. (2018). Self-censorship of conflict-related information in the context of intractable conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62(5), 957–982. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002716680266

[2] Clark et al. (2023). Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda. PNAS. 120(48), e2301642120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301642120

[3] Al Gharbi, M. (2024). Human nature is our problem. Inquisitive Magazine. https://inquisitivemag.org/articles/theme-essay/human-nature-is-our-problem/

[4] Haidt, J. (2016). Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice. https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/one-telos-truth-or-social-justice-2/

[5] Dreger, A. (2015). When science and social justice collide. https://psmag.com/social-justice/science-social-justice-activism-alice-dreger-galileo-middle-finger/

[6] “White supremacy and whiteness.” Summary and some citations can be found here: https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cld/unleading/systems-oppression/white-supremacy

[7] Grim, R. (3 February 2023). “Deconstructed Podcast: Tema Okun on Her Mythical Paper on White Supremacy”. The Intercept.

Yglesias, M. (2021). Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” work is bad.

Tema Okun's "White Supremacy Culture" work is bad

[8] Isenberg, N., Brauer, M. Diversity and inclusion have greater support than most Americans think. Sci Rep 14, 28616 (2024).

Murrar, S., Campbell, M.R. & Brauer, M. Exposure to peers’ pro-diversity attitudes increases inclusion and reduces the achievement gap. Nat Hum Behav 4, 889–897 (2020).

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