I am interested in receiving RG members' answers to the question:
Is the discipline of Psychology racist? Please give reasons for your answer.
In my opinion no. I believe that no field of knowledge or scientific discipline is, and even less should not, promote or suggest discrimination of any culture, value, social group, community, etc.
Best regards,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
It is! Probably because most of scientific research, not just psychological sciences, are dominated by paradigms, which have been developed and legitimised in European and North-American contexts. Since I am working in Brazilian academic institutions, this issue emerges evidently, as lusophonic scholars themselves usually do not consider national studies, specially those published in Portuguese. Actually for this reason, I focused a systematic review of scientific literature, recently published in the J. of Health Psychology, specifically on studies realised in Latin America, South Europe and East-Asia...other examples are Black feminist scholars in South America, Africa and the middle East, accusing their occidental colleagues for being ethnocentric, consequently colonising the world with a hegemonic and western-driven vision of gender, race and class.
Alexander Hochdorn what you describe has nothing to do with the discipline of psychology itself, as asked by David F Marks , but with the behavior of specific people or even groups. As you write yourself, most pradigms and theories have been developed in Europe and NA, where there exists a longer formal scientific tradition. Therefore, it is absolutely comprehensible that most of the theories rely on prevailing traditions, culture etc. This does not decrade other cultures or achievements from other countries (even if it would, this would strictly speaking not be "racist", since culture is different to race). I would agree that we need to take into account even more different cultural influences and contributions to get more global applicable psychological theories and to incorporate the moderating influence on culture.
But for me it is not racist, to focus mainly on the cultural environment where you are coming from. If your lusophonic scholars, which are themselves from South America I guess, prefrer theories developed in other cultures, i.e. Europe and NA, what is this then in your view: "racism" against their "own race"? This does not sound convincing to me, but even if they would be racist, this would be the specific people acting racist and not the field of psychology itself.
Psychology is a broad discipline, and who counts as a psychologist varies (e.g., see which faculties Freud is discussed in). It might be more useful to talk about more specific areas. For example, this question is often discussed with psychometrics and test creation (where the answer would be 1) that the measures created have been unfair/biased [see fairness discussion in the "Standards" ... the APA, AERA, NCME guide on measurement), and more recently there has been work on this, but problems still exist, and 2) some of the people in the discipline have been racist, e.g., Galton). Since I know the questioner knows about the varieties of psychology, I would be interested in what @David Marks thinks about the differences. David?
Good point Daniel Wright about bias/fairness. Research about bias in psychological testing already gained broader attention in the late 60's and 70's with seminal works from Cleary; Darlington; Hunter & Schmidt, and others and more recent works by Meade and colleagues. That there exists whole research area about bias and how to overcome it, is more an argument against psychology being racist in my opinion.
I think it is optimistic to say the methods can overcome it, Rainer Duesing . From psychometrics, I think bias begins in deciding what is important enough to measure and continues without how the results are used. Psychometricians often focus on the parts between these two (and there are arguments they should do more), and some with things like differential item functioning can tweak things (and test item writers also play a role), but it is difficult to overcome biases and difficult to create alternatives within the testing/psychometrics arena. NCME (the main education measurement group in the US) had a lot of very interesting discussions/webinars on that this summer.
Uh, I didn't mean that we already accomplished it, but more in the vein that there is a sensitivity for this topic in general and some proposed procedures to detect bias, e.g. DIF, DTF, measurement invariance, and external methods like Cleary's regression model. When bias is detected, one may think about possible remedies, which does not account for sources of bias, which haven't been detected, yet. And you are right, decision based bias, what to assess and what not, cannot be overcome by statistical techniques.
this just showed up on my twitter feed: https://cla.umn.edu/psychology/news-events/story/psychology-must-reckon-its-racist-past-and-present
Psychological research has a racism problem, Stanford scholar says
Across five decades of psychological research, publications that highlight race are rare, and when race is discussed, it is authored mostly and edited almost entirely by white scholars, according to a new Stanford study. https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/24/psychological-research-racism-problem-stanford-scholar-says/
Racial makeup among editors-in-chief also varied among different areas of psychology. For example, there has never been a POC editor in either of the journals about cognitive psychology, a subfield that studies mental processes such as perception, memory, thinking, attention and language. https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/24/psychological-research-racism-problem-stanford-scholar-says/
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