Scientific experts and their mindset:
This open letter has been sent to aps@psychologicalscience.org
It was open for signatures from Dec 2, 2022 - Dec 6, 2022 (it received 1375 signatures)
December 2, 2022
Dear APS Leadership:
The racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power enacted against one of our colleagues (detailed here) is atrocious and completely at odds with APS’s stated commitment to
diversity, equity, and inclusion and ostensible commitment to “
building an inclusive, connected, and meaningful global science.” We demand immediate, meaningful, systemic change from APS leadership that at minimum includes:
The resignation of the current Editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Conduct an audit of Dr. Fiedler's editorial decisions and correspondence (given that other
marginalized scholars may have met with similar racism, incompetence, and/or abuse of power at his hands). Make a report of this audit public.
Empower and fund your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to recommend and enact meaningful policy changes to address
racism and intersecting dimensions of exclusion throughout the entire society, including in decisions about future APS journal editors.
Draw on the many available recommendations for
disrupting racism in publication practices (e.g., Buchanan et al., 2021; considerable work already conducted by task forces at SPSP and APA) to improve representation, create accountability metrics, provide editor and reviewer guidelines to avoid
common racist practices, develop feedback systems for when those guidelines fail, and practice and communicate inclusive journal values.
Conduct
remedial training for all editors on editorial ethics and
anti-racism.
Give Dr. Roberts the option to have his outstanding and important commentary published in PoPS, with the 4 other articles in question available only as supplementary online material for context, and grant him any additional reparative action he might deem necessary.
Signatories:
1375 names
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1O212esQJDYVuiuvN3OQLg7YOD58PbhlmFjfYV3nR...The twiggew?
The furore erupted when University of Heidelberg psychology professor Klaus Fiedler, the then-newly installed editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, set out to publish an article by cognitive neurophysiologist Bernhard Hommel, critiquing a 2020 article by Stanford University psychology professor Steven Othello Roberts. Following on his oft-stated belief that the discipline of psychology is systemically racist, Roberts had argued that journal editors should track the race of their contributing authors with a view toward enforcing diversity targets, while authors should similarly track (and be made to justify) the racial composition of their research samples. Hommel, by contrast, shares our own belief that focusing closely on skin color in this way represents an intrusion of political activism that compromises scientific freedom and independence.
If Fiedler had left it at that, he might still be the editor of Perspectives. But he was so impressed by the critical commentary supplied by the three peer-reviewers to whom he’d sent Hommel’s article—Rutgers University psychologist Lee Jussim, Utrecht University emeritus psychology professor Wolfgang Stroebe, and University of Toronto emeritus psychology professor Keith Stanovich—that he decided to commission these responses, in adapted form, as stand-alone articles themselves. This was an unusual editorial decision. But Fiedler also invited Roberts to respond to all four critics as part of a larger “discussion forum.”
Fiedler and Roberts then engaged in a lengthy and complicated exchange of emails that lasted for months. We know this because Roberts, having lost trust in the process, decided to upload a manuscript describing the affair earlier this month, complete with a lengthy appendix that contains abundant excerpts from his correspondence with Fiedler. In the accompanying text, Roberts accuses not only Fiedler, but also Hommel, Jussim, Stanovich, and Stroebe, of militating against his work in a manner that is “unsound, unscientific, ad hominem, and racist.”
https://quillette.com/2022/12/12/a-rush-to-judgement-in-psychological-science/?r...With links.
This is the state of academic, scientific 'debate'. The Mothras, the Tut-tutsie Bbwians, the Tujds, the Mustaphakens - in short, the Performatively Aggrieved are everywhere, in massed numbers.
The science is settled. Listen to the experts, innit. Well, nuts to that when these are he scientists and experts.
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