The Review: A Shameful, Useless, Counterproductive Dispute in Psychology

No one looks too good here. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. In his classic Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard makes a claim that may have been startling to his audience at the time but that will seem common-sensical now. He is describing the work of a generation of thinkers who preceded him, major figures in anthropology, psychology, and sociology responsible for early and influential social-scientific ideas about the religious systems of tribal peoples. To understand these thinkers, Evans-Pritchard says, one must “enter into their way of looking at things, a way of their class, sex, and period.” What’s more, one needs some sense of their religious training and inclination: “Tylor had been brought up a Quaker, Frazer a Presbyterian, Marett in the Church of England, Malinowski a Catholic, while Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, and Freud had a Jewish background; but with one or two exceptions, whatever the background may have been, the persons whose writings have been most influential have been at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists.” To emphasize such personal contingencies in this way is to suggest that the study of religion is a special kind of science, one in which the values and biography of the scientist have a more than usual importance. They might be distorting, leading thinkers to overemphasize, for instance, specious continuities between primitive sacrifice and the story of Christ. Or they might be enabling. Of Émile Durkheim’s definition of religion — “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … which unite, into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them” — Evans-Pritchard says “Durkheim’s Hebraic background comes out strongly, it seems to me, though not inappropriately.” As our Tom Bartlett [reports]( perennial questions about the relationship of a researcher’s identity to the subject of research have exploded into view again in the field of psychology, riven at the moment by an ugly dispute over diversity and racism between the now-former editor of a major journal and a Stanford faculty member. Here’s the story, in brief: In 2020, the Stanford psychologist Steven O. Roberts published, as lead author, an [article]( in Perspectives on Psychological Science called “Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future.” The article seeks to give a quantitative picture of the lack of racial diversity among editors, authors, and research subjects across several decades of work “in top-tier cognitive, developmental, and social psychology journals"; to speculate about the stakes of diversity for knowledge production, especially knowledge production about the psychology of race; and to offer prescriptions for diversifying the field, including describing and justifying the demographic composition of samples and, most controversially, requiring “positionality statements” from authors, which would render “transparent how the identities of the authors relate to the research topic.” Things went wrong when Klaus Fiedler, who became editor of Perspectives of Psychological Science in 2021, attempted to organize a series of responses to Roberts’s article, including highly critical pieces by Bernhard Hommel and Lee Jussim. Hommel argued that for a great deal of fundamental research into cognitive and psychological mechanisms, the race of participants and researchers is simply irrelevant. And both authors accused Roberts and his co-authors of sneaking what Hommel [called]( “political-activist arguments” into science. As Bartlett summarizes, “Jussim employs an analogy, drawn from a quote in Fiddler on the Roof, about a horse and a mule. He writes that mixing science and ideology is like selling someone a mule when what you promised was a horse. Because Roberts’s paper is both scientific and ideological, according to Jussim, it is a rhetorical hybrid — i.e., a mule.” SPONSOR CONTENT | University of Virginia [UVA Marks Progress, Momentum as Strategic Plan Passes Three-Year Mark]( Roberts felt ganged up on — all of the response essays were critical, and no one sympathetic to his approach had been invited. More worryingly, Fiedler insisted on having Hommel vet Roberts’s response; he referred to Hommel as a “consultant for quality control.” Roberts [published]( his response on PsyArXiv, complete with records of his correspondence with Fiedler. Plausibly, he accused Fiedler of shoddy editorial conduct. Implausibly, he accused Jussim of racism over the Fiddler-derived “mule” metaphor, which, he claimed, “explicitly parallels people of color with mules (i.e., the sterile offspring of a horse and a donkey), which is a well-documented racist trope used to dehumanize people of color.” An [open letter]( denouncing Fiedler’s “racism” and demanding his resignation was sent to the Association for Psychological Science, which publishes Perspectives. (Roberts told Bartlett that he endorsed the letter’s call for Fiedler’s firing.) A few days later, with the panicked rapidity characteristic of these episodes, the association’s board forced Fiedler to quit. Errors were committed on both sides. Fiedler’s handling of the editorial process was high-handed and arrogant, and his giving Hommel something like review capacity over Roberts’s response was odd and potentially culpable. But Roberts’s attempt to seize the moral high ground by tendentiously misreading Jussim as deploying a racial insult did no one any favors. The open letter demanding Fiedler’s firing, and the firing that immediately followed, were both very unfortunate; such mob action cannot be the right way to adjudicate these disputes. Fiedler, at the very least, deserved the opportunity to try to explain himself. The whole thing is a particular shame because the basic disagreement between Roberts and his critics had the potential to raise and treat questions of profound interest. Can the vectors of a researcher’s identity be formalized — incorporated systematically into scholarship — or is this a fool’s errand? Can psychologists and social scientists range their objects of study along a spectrum, from those for which race and other currently salient identity characteristics are least relevant to those for which they are most? My own intuition is that fields like psychology, anthropology, and sociology would benefit from more robust attention to their own disciplinary histories; a debate between Roberts and his critics might have been a good opportunity for such attention. But instead of debate that informs, we got controversy that obscures. It would be good, both for scholarship itself and for its reputation with the public, if scholars could handle these disagreements in a less spectacular fashion. Read Tom Barlett’s article about the fracas [here](. And read Roberts’s 2020 paper [here]( Hommel’s response [here]( Roberts’s response to the response [here]( and the open letter calling for Fiedler’s resignation [here](. ADVERTISEMENT REGISTER NOW [Join us January 9-27]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs]( By Kevin R. McClure [STORY IMAGE]( Colleges have done a spectacularly bad job of managing talent. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [How FIRE Actually Defends Free Speech]( By Nico Perrino [STORY IMAGE]( An essay promising better criticism of the group’s work misses the mark. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Higher Ed Is a Public Good. Let’s Fund It Like One.]( By James Nguyen H. Spencer [STORY IMAGE]( What if colleges paid students’ tuition upfront? THE REVIEW | OPINION [A Rankings Revolution? Hardly.]( By Jelena Brankovic [STORY IMAGE]( Law schools’ squabble with U.S. News is not a serious threat to the rankings regime. Recommended - Jeffrey Friedman, who argued that “radical ignorance afflicted expert decision-making on public policy, and conventional social scientific analysis,” has died at 63. Read Ilya Somin’s [remembrance]( in Reason. - “Debussy wrote pieces inspired by images; in this case, he took inspiration from the legend of a drowned cathedral which emerged from the sea on clear days.” In The Paris Review, Helen DeWitt on [learning to play]( Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie.” And here’s Walter Gieseking’s [recording of the piece]( discussed in the essay. - “There are printing blocks, binding tools, ink brushes, paper samples, printer’s proofs, strange contraptions and of course plenty of books, from an ancient Sumerian tablet to a replica eighth-century Japanese Buddhist sutra to a dinged-up copy of Madonna’s ‘Sex.’” In the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler [writes]( about “[Building the Book From the Ancient World to the Present Day]( at the Grolier Club in New York until December 23. - “I am not talking about culture wars or canon wars or method wars or theory wars — there’s no real controversy among literary scholars about whether Ulysses is worth reading and teaching. Those wars are mere skirmishes compared to a larger struggle about the future of literary studies. Will it survive other than at the most elite institutions?” In the Boston Review, Johanna Winant on [the myth and the meaning]( of modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. And read one of Winant’s sources, George Steiner’s 1978 essay “On Difficulty,” [here](. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | New Jersey Institute of Technology [Can a generational infrastructure investment take us from a C- to an A?]( Much needed reinforcements are coming to bolster U.S. roads, bridges and much more with the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion bill — described as a “once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure”. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Diverse Leadership for a New Era - The Chronicle Store]( [Diverse Leadership for a New Era]( Diversity in leadership can help support colleges’ mission as enrollments of low-income and minority students increase. 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