SPSP Abandons Mandatory DEI Statements
Victory Lap
In a major (albeit partial) victory against the increasingly authoritarian and oppressive norms within academia, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) recently announced that it is abandoning its requirement of a DEI statement for proposals for presentation at its annual conference. Many of us have argued that such statements constitute a modern version of loyalty oaths, but to a particular progressive worldview rather than to a nation or government.
Diversity and Inclusion Can Improve Scientific Quality, But No DEI Statements are Needed
To be sure, scientific quality and rigor are sometimes enhanced by some things that fall under the heading of “diversity.” For example, a nationally representative sample is of higher quality (and likely vastly more demographically diverse) than a convenience sample of introductory psychology students. Work on difficult-to-study populations can also provide added scientific value (that some would consider to fall under “diversity” or “inclusion”) by filling in gaps in what we know about the human condition. But if the research makes these sorts of contributions, it will be obvious from the description of the research itself — one needs no extra DEI statement to evaluate such work on its merits.
DEI As Actually Practiced Induces Ideological Conformity
Even if DEI statements are not used as loyalty oaths and even if they might hypothetically be implemented without being compelled speech, they are, at best, a collosal waste of time and effort that have never been demonstrated to produce anything of value other than conformity to progressive values. Of course, if you are a progressive academic, that may be value enough. If you have any doubt that DEI is used to induce ideological conformity, see the recent derailing of Yoel Inbar’s application for a job at UCLA by a DEI-crazed mob of graduate students; or you could look up Dorian Abbot’s deplatforming at MIT for having the unmitigated gall to express … wait for it … ready? opposition to the preferential selection forms of affirmative action — which have just been outlawed by the Supreme Court as a type of discrimination (exactly as Abbot argued); or you could look up how a racist mule from Fiddler on the Roof got Klaus Fiedler ousted from a major psychology editorial position.1 All this sanctioning (and much more like it well beyond the scope of this essay) produces a climate of fear and self-censorship, specifically around issues related to DEI.
I Did Not Resign from SPSP
I have recently discovered that people often assume (erroneously) that I resigned from SPSP over this. I did not. Jon Haidt did so. People often see Jon and me as comrades-in-arms, and there is some truth in that, though perhaps not as much as they assume (we mostly work pretty independently on very different types of projects). Also, Jon and I had a pretty testy exchange with then-SPSP-President Laura King in which (in our very different ways) we both took her to task for implementing mandatory DEI statements for presenting at SPSP. I found her “look I am so calm and reasonable while I institute authoritarian policies such as compelling loyalty to progressive sacred values without admitting anything of the kind” demeanor particularly abrasive and my contribution to that conversation was pretty sharptongued. So I can’t blame anyone for thinking I resigned.
I am Still on the SPSP Email List and Look What I Found in my Inbox
But I didn’t resign. I did, however, let my membership quietly lapse. I did not plan to renew it because I will not belong to any society that compels speech — even speech that I agree with. But nor did I feel the need to make a big public display about it.
Nonetheless, I am still on the SPSP mailing list. In the context of an email that reported the results of an internal study of how their mandatory DEI statement program worked, they mostly did a victory lap themselves, about how great their DEI program is and I almost did not read it to the end. However, I am glad I did, because, at the very end, I found this delicious little tidbit quoted directly here:
Based on the findings of this report, we are making the following adjustments to this process:
[list of stuff irrelevant to this essay, and then…]
Require statements only for submissions that authors indicate do advance DEIA2 goals.
This is still not perfect, because having any blatantly political display as part of a scientific process is almost guaranteed to corrupt the science. But at least it eliminates the most onerous aspects of SPSP’s prior DEI mandate — it created substantial social pressure to proclaim one’s dedication to DEI and, as such, flirted with or even crossed the boundary into compelled speech AND it was a collossal waste of time.
So its only a partial victory. And of course, I have no idea whether I, or Haidt, or anyone else who raised objections had anything to do with SPSP’s decision to retreat from the DEI mandate. But these sorts of victories are few and far between in academia, so I am happy to take the victory, no matter how it came about, and the victory lap, even if I do not deserve it.
And I might even re-up my membership in SPSP.
Footnotes
DEIA. A for anti-racism.
Diversity Inclusion Equity is not merely the triumph of Theory over evidence, it also demonstrates how effective simply playing to bureaucratic pathologies (hoarding authority, spending resources on themselves, protecting against the complexities of competence) can be.
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