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The Review

Understand the big ideas and provocative arguments shaping the academy. Delivered on Mondays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

December 12, 2022
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From: Len Gutkin

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

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.”

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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.”

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.

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  • “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

Len Gutkin
Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review and the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present (Virginia). Follow him at @GutkinLen.
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