Four of us presented talks at SPSP on whether it is a healthy professional organization. I went first, so I am presenting it here first. The other three are coming soon. If you prefer video, you can find videos of all four talks here. I am posting the full slides here because, for some purposes, a written record is better than video. I only add text when the slides are not self-explanatory, and, occasionally to expand on stuff I did not have time for in the actual talk.
SPSP Is Not Healthy Talk
Title slide:
Main themes:
The next slide is titled Delusions of White Supremacy. It is a screenshot of something that can be found on the SPSP website, in its Diversity and Inclusion section. The “delusions” will be identified forthwith.
When one clicks the link for White Supremacy Culture, one finds a link to Okun’s completely loony tunes list. The list on the left of the slide below are some of the examples of supposed “White Supremacy” that you will find there. They are so bizarre that I felt it necessary to remind an audience of people with PhDs what the term “White Supremacy” refers to.
This did not appear in my talk:
Back to the talk:
But it gets worse. SPSP does not act like it believes its own Okun rhetoric. I mean, its one thing to be wrong, but people often sincerely hold those wrong beliefs. Not SPSP. Not only is the list bonkers, even they do not believe it.
For those not in the know… Academic publishing goes like this. At some point, some articles are accepted for publication. This often takes months, sometimes years. But after acceptance at a print journal, the last step pre-publication involves the publisher drafting a near-final version in the journal’s format. These are called “proofs.” Typically, and at all SPSP journals as far as I know, authors are typically given 2-3 days from receiving the proofs to respond to the publisher with any final editorial changes.
Put differently, this policy instills “time urgency” in everyone who publishes in SPSP journals. If time urgency is White Supremacy, then, despite their pronounced dedication to anti-racism and diversity and inclusion, SPSP, by its own standards (not by mine), is implementing White Supremacy. If SPSP believed its own rhetoric, it would change this policy to give authors more time. That might be a good idea on its merits, but that is not the point. The point is, rather, that, if those in charge at SPSP do not think giving authors 2-3 days to return the proofs is actually White Supremacy, then we know even they do not believe the rhetoric promoted on their website that time urgency is White Supremacy Culture.
Calling objectivity “White Supremacy” is probably even worse, at least for an ostensibly scientific organization. If objectivity is White Supremacy, and if SPSP rejects White Supremacy (which it clearly does), then they do not believe the research extolled on their website is objective because that would be White Supremacy (which they reject). If the science they promote is not objective, then it is subjective — which means no one needs to take it seriously as anything other than opinion.
Of course, they are constantly promoting the research of their members, as if the SPSP notables take it seriously and think you should too. But the only reason to take any research seriously is if it is at least mostly, approximately and reasonably objective. So either SPSP is a White Supremacist organization (by its own standards, not by mine) for promoting research that, in fact, it believes is valid and credible (which kinda subsumes objective) or it is entirely disingenuous when it promotes Okun’s White Supremacy Culture’s claim that objectivity is White Supremacy. White Supremacy for thee but not for me.
Brief Orwelexicon Detour
None of this was in the talk, but I can’t resist presenting it here. I did not have time for all of this, but Okun’s list of features of White Supremacy Culture is much longer than my slide and includes:
perfectionism, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, “I’m the online one,” progress is bigger and more, right to comfort.
The Orwelexicon, (a sort of Devil’s Dictionary for the 21st century) really had much of the Okun nonsense covered.
And of course:
End Detour, Back to Talk
“Ok,” you might think. Maybe it was just some oversight. Some extremist/activist thought it was a good idea, got Okun’s White Supremacy Culture on the website, and no one else was paying much attention. Perhaps.
But then there is this 2024 official report by a special SPSP appointed committee, that appeared in an SPSP journal:
As I have pointed out in a paper in press, in a section on anti-racist extremism:
This report cited many articles in support of their claims. None, however, constituted empirical evidence that, all else equal, research or people are excluded or discriminated against in academic publishing because they are not White, English-speaking, from particular countries or cisgender. Such evidence is widely available in the broader discrimination literature, such as in audit studies, which examine whether identically qualified Black and White (or male and female) job applicants are treated similarly
Regardless, the report has some pretty intense demonization rhetoric:
Interestingly, about the time SPSP was publishing this report, we were conducting studies on the effects of extremist anti-racist rhetoric. We purposely focused on Rutgers college students, because this sort of rhetoric was all over academia for a long time.
Here are excerpts from the essays we had students read (each went on for three paragraphs in the same vein).
After reading whichever essay they were assigned, they then read the following scenario (this is the entire scenario):
We only had 14 minutes for our entire talk, so I only presented two outcomes (more details are here). The students were asked to state how many microaggressions the admissions officer committed and to rate how biased he was.
So it is reasonable to believe that SPSP’s rhetoric likely leads at least some people to “see” prejudice where none exists. Which is probably how you get moral panics over things like The Attack of the Racist Mule.
Not surprisingly, one downstream consequence of this sort of demonization rhetoric is censorship. Shown below is a poster that was presented at SPSP. On the right, you will find a tweet by an attendee denouncing it. SPSP, in its infinite wisdom, took down the poster (a fuller story can be found here).
Another unsurprising (at least to those of us who have studied leftwing and academic extremism) consequence of this type of demonization rhetoric is discrimination. If, as per the 2024 SPSP report:
Mainstream academia’s scientific culture, institutions, and practices originated in a system created by, for, and about wealthy, white, non-disabled, English-speaking, straight, cisgender male scholars from a small subset of countries
then what is reasonable is not policies to mitigate against (largely undemonstrated) biases in modern science and its institutions, but vengeance. Thus no one should be surprised to find SPSP adopting policies that explicitly engage in discrimination — you know, the type of “reverse” discrimination that, for decades, academics have denied even exists (often accompanied by attempts to taint as racists and sexists anyone who claimed it did).
Well, then. If discrimination for “social justice” reasons is illegal, how was it even possible that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the use of race in admissions in its 1978 Bakke decision? That turns out to be a question with a very interesting answer:
Bakke slide 1:
Bakke slide 2:
Bakke slide 3:
Some academics are now trying to rewrite history, claiming literally that “viewpoint diversity is a MAGA plot.” That is the actual title of an article you can find here:
Putting the lie to the MAGA plot claim, SCOTUS justified using race as one factor in admissions in the 1978 Bakke decision on viewpoint diversity grounds, maintaining that racial discrimination for social justice reasons (e.g., to compensate for past discrimination) remained illegal. Had institutions of higher education actually implemented policies to advance viewpoint diversity rather than just admitting more and lower qualified Black students with no assessment of whether their viewpoints brought any diversity, it is possible that the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions case (the one that led SCOTUS to ban use of race in admissions altogether) would never even have been brought, and, if it had, it might have been decided differently.
Regardless…
So, what should social and personality psychologists do about this? Well, it depends on their “values” now, doesn’t it? I raised three possibilities:
Postscript
I can’t resist adding a few slides from my backups, even though they were not presented at the actual panel.
Ok, that is sorta tongue-in-cheek because its not like they are going to do any of that, though it is the kind of stuff they’d need to do if they were to take their own rhetoric seriously. What about something that, however unlikely, is in the realm of possibility?
Rumors have it that these proposals (and others not listed here) for reforming SPSP are being taken up at its next executive council meeting. I am not expecting anything to come of it, but you never know. Usually, when you beat your head against the wall all you get is a headache. And if you keep doing it, the only thing that happens is the headache gets worse. But, once in a while, not often, but not never either, you bang your head against the wall and you get a headache and you keep doing it and the headache gets worse and worse, and then, all of a sudden, the wall comes crashing down. I did not say I am expecting that. But you never know.
Coming soon: The full sets of slides by the other three presenters at The Singeing.
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THE SPSP IS AN ANTI-RACIST EXTREMIST ORGANIZATION
It's not really anti-racist, though. The SPSP is a race-believer organisation; it is "anti-racist" only in its own preening view of itself. It would be closer to the truth to say that the SPSP is a racialist organisation that attaches moral and spiritual excellence to non-white merely in virtue of them being non-white. At the same the SPSP holds white people as being morally and spiritually inferior to non-whites. In other words, the SPSP is addicted to anti-whitism.
I've always been impressed by your patience in debunking bad science. I don't know anyone else with that patience.