The Singeing of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's Beard

We Tried to Warn Them

Four of us went to the conference hosted by what I am pretty sure is the largest social psychology organization in the world — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (hence, “SPSP”) — to tell warn them that the politicization of the society is either a disaster area (me), not yet a disaster area but at risk for becoming one (Luke, Nate), or not really even close to being a disaster area but if they want to prevent it from becoming one they might want to take these criticisms seriously (Anne).

This post includes videos of each of the four talks. To understand the commentary after the talks, you need to have first listened to them. Introductions to the speakers below, but first…

The Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard

Amidst rising tensions that are way beyond the scope of this little corner of academia, the Spanish decided to build their Great Armada to invade England. They had begun preparations in 1586. Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, got wind of the plan and, in 1587, sent Sir Francis Drake, with a small fleet of four ships, to disrupt those preparations. Drake had become “Sir Francis” because of a slew of stunning accomplishments, including as a privateer plundering Spanish treasure ships (the Spanish considered him a pirate, which I enjoy mentioning).

Drake sailed his four ships right into the Spanish port of Cadiz, where the armada was being prepared. He spent three days there, wreaking havoc, destroying about 30 ships, capturing four more, and plundering many of the rest. Drake named this “The Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard.”

This does not depict the Battle of Cadiz because I could not find a good painting doing so. It does capture the vibe though.

This did not prevent the Spanish from sending their Armada. But it did set them back a year and that was an extra year for England to prepare its defenses. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There were four of us. We sailed into the progressive heart of one of psychology’s major professional organizations — and raised a bit of Hell by telling them their politicization was leading them to go off the rails.

---

Is SPSP a Healthy Organization? The Panel

Four of us presented a panel titled “Is SPSP a Healthy Organization”? To SPSP’s credit, as both Luke and Anne correctly pointed out, they accepted our proposal to hold this panel (led and organized by Luke and Nate, who were the Sir Francis Drakes of this expedition).

Who Are We?

Lucian (Luke) Gideon Conway, III is Professor of Psychology at Grove City College. Luke was one of the first academics to break through social psychology's denial of the existence of left-wing authoritarianism. His most recent book is Liberal Bullies, and you can follow him on his Substack The Apologetic Professor.

Nathan Honeycutt is Manager of Polling and Analytics and a Research Fellow at FIRE. Nate studies higher education, often involving surveys or experiments with university faculty on topics including expression, political bias, and the evaluation of DEI statements. His recent work provides the first empirical evidence that such statements can function as ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring.

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.

And of course, me.

Setting the Stage

It was held in a medium size auditorium style room. I estimate the crowd was at least 200, which was about 5 times what I expected. SPSP notables, including their Past President (capitalized because this is an official position) and current President were there. I am pretty sure, but not certain, that at least a few current or former members of some of its other major committees were also there. My sense of the rest of the crowd was this: overrepresentation of those harboring dissatisfaction with SPSP as well as a good hunk of folks not exactly dissatisfied but genuinely willing to listen to and consider the critiques.

We were all on edge going in. Quite a few SPSP bigwigs participated in The Attack of the Racist Mule. As Luke, Nate and my presentations documented, SPSP, like so much of academia, is infatuated (and that is putting it kindly) with “social justice.” Social justice types have a long and ugly track record of intolerance, demonization, and censorship. And they have a unique form of defense against criticism; to find out more about this, you are just going to have to see Anne’s talk below.

We were all concerned about interruptions, outright protests, and insults. But none of that happened. No protests, no interruptions, no insults. The audience sat through the panel like they would do at any normal academic panel. The Q&A at the end was completely reasonable. There was some counterpoints, but that was completely reasonable too. Considered argumentation and disagreement is “academic normal” — healthy even (while we are on the topic of SPSP’s health…).

SPSP did not record the session. So what you will find here are us giving the nearly the same talks, but not to an audience. I was in my home office and I suspect Nate, Luke and Anne did more or less the same. The slides are mostly identical to those at the actual panel. One or two have been improved subsequently with slight changes. There is probably some minor deviation in the specific words we used because none of us spoke from a script.

The Talks

Each talk is about 14 minutes. This makes them easy to watch and listen to in small bites. I like things written down, though. You can read them and come back to them. You can more easily track down something that struck you later. So I am planning a second post that presents each of my slides one at a time, surrounded by text that explains anything that is not self-explanatory. Luke has already done this for his talk (and I have an invitation out to Nate and Anne to do the same here with their talks).

SPSP is Not Healthy: My Talk

I focused exclusively on ways SPSP has gone wrong, all of which stemmed from its overt embrace of political ax-grinding. I argued that it promotes:

• Attributions of “White supremacy” to innocuous behaviors

• Demonization rhetoric

• Racial/ethnic/national discrimination

• Progressive virtue signaling

• Denunciations & censorship

I ended by pointing out that nobody actually needs SPSP and invited all those so interested to “step outside.” Here is my talk:

What Makes a Scientific Society Healthy: Nate’s Talk

The centerpiece of Nate’s analysis was a large language model content analysis of the political valence and activist orientation of 26 years of abstracts of presentations at SPSP. He ended his talk with this question: “What does the decline of neutral framing and the rise of progressive framing say about SPSP’s intellectual trajectory?”

Here is Nate’s talk:

The Scientific Method is Not Racist: Luke’s Talk

Luke argued that SPSP is a two-headed beast. One head is strong science, objectivity, and rigor. The other is politics, especially the type of radical politics that makes claims such as “the scientific method is White supremacy,” a claim that has been endorsed and advanced in some official SPSP sources. He argued that the second, political head is corrosive to the scientific head but that SPSP is on sound footing when it sticks to science. He concluded with this: “SPSP you have to choose, you cannot have this both ways…you can either put the scientific method back in its proper place as the central guiding principle by which this organization makes its judgments or you can prepare for irrelevance.”

Here is Luke’s talk:

The one thing this misses because it is Luke redoing his talk rather than the original before the audience is this. I do not want to spoil it for those who have skipped ahead. His whole talk is excellent, but from about 10:40 to 11:41 Luke got on a wicked good roll — and got a spontaneous round of applause from the audience for it. Must listen stuff…

In Defense of SPSP — and Its Dissenters: Anne’s Talk

Anne’s talk was the most nuanced of the four, and it’s hard to capture her points in a soundbite, or, the Substack equivalent, a brief thematic excerpt. But this slide, while not summarizing her talk, captures some of that nuance:

Here is Anne’s talk:

Anne’s talk was a (partial) defense of both SPSP and some of the ideas of its most progressive members. If you are tempted to bristle at any of it, consider this: you do not need to agree with every thing in her talk (or in any of our talks), but what Anne did was tactically, politically, and interpersonally brilliant. By affirming some of SPSP’s progressive values and policies, she got through (at least some, I am pretty sure) of their defenses. I am pretty sure some in the audience actually heard and were, perhaps, more receptive to the many criticisms (which she also affirmed, and added some of her own) because of her talk. She wrapped the bitter pill in, if not sugar, at least a coating that made it easier to go down.

Aftermath

A pretty lively, constructive and most of all, reasonable Q&A session then ensued. Except for a question about how to limit partisan/political biases in one’s own work, which I responded to with a mini-presentation that I will upload at Unsafe Science separately, it is now a blur to me (we were all pretty fried after the panel, Luke and me for at least a couple of days). Then Q&A was over, but tons of people came up to each of us and all sorts of lively (and pleasant in that intellectual academic way) conversations took place.

What Changes I Expect to Occur at SPSP Because of Our Panel

I am speaking only for myself, but here is my full list of expected changes:

So Why Did I Do This?

Two main reasons and a distant third:

1. The best way to protect the right to dissent is to publicly dissent. This presentation was one way I did my part to implement that. As Anne’s talk correctly pointed out, one effect of the rise of progressive academics engaging in denunciation and cancelation attacks directed at dissenters is to risk creating a great deal of self-censorship; others with doubts similar to those of Luke, Nate, and me may well keep quiet, not because they support developments at SPSP (and really, throughout academia) but out of fear. If my talk encouraged even one member of SPSP to publicly dissent in the future, a person who otherwise would not have done so? It would be enough for me. Anything beyond that is gravy.

2. I do not know how many folks were there harboring their own reservations about SPSP or academia, let alone how many did not come in with reservations, but left with food for thought that they would chew through over the next weeks and months. My presentation said (implicitly but clearly) to those folks, “if you ever want to talk about any of this, you know where to find me.”

3. Maybe I’m Wrong

Maybe my deep pessimism that anything will change is wrong. You never know.

Here are the most likely changes to occur (keeping in mind that “most likely” is not remotely synonymous with “likely”):

Trivial Window Dressing

Note: You really have to listen to our talks first to understand this section.

Maybe they will remove the ridiculous Okun White Supremacy “resource” from their website. Maybe they will revise their Editorial Fellowship policies so they appear less discriminatory (but still implement discrimination in practice). Maybe their website and official reports will use more “science” words, while they stay focused on political goals.

This would be in some ways worse than doing nothing, because it would create the appearance, but not the reality, of change at SPSP.

Real Change

This is from one of my backup slides that I did not actually present (I confess to revising it after the conference).

And just in case you, gentle reader, see point 4 as “affirmative action for conservatives” (a comment heard in the Q&A), feel free to interpret it as follows: “Develop a serious plan for creating an environment welcoming to scholars, regardless of their politics. Being that you have failed so miserably on the political front for anyone but progressives, you have some compensatory work to do — not by favoring non-progressives, just by treating them the same as you treat progressives.”

Hell, if SPSP did any one of those things in my “True Reform” list above, I’d feel like our panel did some good in the world. But I won’t be holding my breath.

---

Related Post

From the post:

This post documents the extent to which we warned you, over and over for at least 25 30 50 100 years. At the end, it presents over 50 (update) 70 80 90 100 115+ and still counting² references documenting the historical attempt of dissident academics to warn the rest of academia that this could come if they did not get their house in order.

---

Commenting

Before commenting, please review my commenting guidelines. They will prevent your comments from being deleted. Here are the core ideas:

1. Don’t attack or insult the author or other commenters.

2. Stay relevant to the post.

3. Keep it short.

4. Do not dominate a comment thread.

5. Do not mindread, its a loser’s game.

6. Don’t tell me how to run Unsafe Science or what to post. (Guest essays are welcome and inquiries about doing one should be submitted by email).