Thread by @saltypsych

🧵Ok so I went to the annual SPSP Convention over the weekend, the largest in social/personality psychology. I took some notes on things I observed and thought I’d share here for anyone interested (I know I said I would post this earlier, my bad!)

To summarize, psychology is not letting go of woke (obviously). Much of this probably won’t be surprising for some, but I saw a good amount of doubling down on woke in addition to calls for a change in focus/execution (e.g., shifting towards an “empathy” focus in antiracism efforts, sustainability).

Keep in mind this is just coming from me, a singular grad student who 1) hates the heavy political bias in my field, generally, 2) hates woke - left or right - and would love for it to die permanently, and 3) hates large networking events, especially the Society for Pretentious Sissies and Posers Convention. So make of my anecdote what you will.

I’m sure many in attendance were not so obnoxiously woke and I'm sure plenty had a great time this weekend for reasons I don't share (I am mostly grateful I did not have to use an “all gender” restroom this year, so that was nice).

First, of the ~550 SPSP symposia, my cursory (but conservative) estimate was that about 1/5 were explicitly woke based on the titles or what I heard/saw in-person. In this count I’m not including the thousands of posters, professional development sessions, etc. nor am I including symposia I thought were more ambiguously titled (e.g., I’m not including every symposium that included race- or gender- or LGB-related topics)

Some examples of obviously woke SPSP symposia/events this year:

Queering Madness: A Gender-Expansive, Decolonized
Perspective of Madness 💀

Insight in Inclusivity: DEI in Well-Being Research

Participation in Digital History Mobilizes People for Justice and Democracy

Standing in our Scientific Power: An Indigenous Perspective

Distance from Whiteness as a Predictor of Marginalization Experiences

Bypassing Backlash to DEI Trainings with an Allyship Focus

Unpacking White Fragility: An Emotion Regulation Lens (lol)

Growing Together: Trans Joy as a Function of Meaningful Connections

etc.

*eyeroll x 9000*

There were of course a metric ton of woke posters, as expected (they’re more often presented by students and early career researchers, who have more of an activist bent than those older/tenured).

My favorite grad student poster from last year highlighted the results of an intervention specifically aimed at Republicans - the goal was getting them to agree that CRT wasn’t being taught in schools (lmao).

Anyway, I witnessed some insane doubling down of woke this year - a notable favorite:

A symposium (which began with a land acknowledgement 🤡) justifying cancel culture while demonizing @PsychRabble, Klaus Fiedler, et al. as racist, pseudoscience-loving bigots for the “PoPs affair” from a few years ago (apparently people are still butthurt about it).

For those unfamiliar, I recommend checking out Lee Jussim’s substack on the Klaus Fiedler/Perspectives on Psych Science ordeal:

unsafescience.substack.com/p/1200-academi…

The speaker claimed that @psychrabble, Fiedler, and co. made “racist and unscientific claims” in their commentaries wherein they critiqued (fairly, imo) a paper by Roberts et al. (2020) titled "Racial Inequality in Psychological Science" which essentially called for more DEI efforts in psych to combat the field’s racism.

For those unfamiliar, Roberts made the ridiculous claim that the critiques of his paper and Fiedler’s handling of the commentaries/exchanges were “racist,” eventually resulting in 1400 professional crybabies signing a petition denouncing the commentary authors and calling for Fiedler’s removal as Editor of PoPs (which was ultimately successful).

Anyway, the speaker defended Roberts' claims of “racism” and (quite pretentiously) justified the resulting mob attack on the commentary authors and Fiedler, but didn’t at all sufficiently explain how Fiedler was racist or how Jussim & co.’s critiques were “racist and unscientific” (but of course the entire room nodded along in agreement). Apologies for the fuzzy pic.

The thesis of her talk: Cancel culture is beneficial for society because it socially validates marginalized individuals “harmed” by the individual/group deserving of cancelation. She argued that canceling promotes “collective social validation” which in turn empowers people to engage in collective social action.

Essentially, cancel culture = good because it reinforces and encourages extreme and illiberal tribal behavior. The room seemed impressed by the talk.

These are the people who think they’re smarter and more sophisticated than you lol

Side note: I attended a talk about celebrity admiration, political ideology, and trust in science. At one point the speaker displayed some data on conservatives' "diverse range" of favored celebrities. He pointed out how unexpected this was, noting that "conservatives might be more nuanced and complex than we thought," followed by a room full of laughs.... wtf?

They think conservatives are aliens lol

Aside from the doubling down of woke, I noticed in several talks and posters (even those not explicitly “woke”) a focus on the growing public distrust in institutions, especially academia and gov. Unsurprisingly, I did not hear a single acknowledgement of academia’s major hand in this trend.

The reasons I heard most often included: 1) conservatives extreme and dumb, 2) we don’t know, it’s complicated, and 3) mis/disinformation and/or too much access to information

However, several talks were concerned with how to increase collective trust in institutions, especially given the “increase in global crises,” which will, according to the experts, require more top-down, cross-national interventions (how convenient).

Many agreed, for example, that we need more research on how to decrease ingroup favoritism based on national identity while increasing trust in institutions (and their international focus) and find ways to get people to extend their trust across national borders and towards “strangers.”

Even worse was the focus on “sustainability” across various areas of study. Based on what I can recall from the previous two conferences, the “sustainability” buzzword was nearly always connected to climate, environment, agricultural practice.

This year I heard about “sustainability” in areas unrelated to environmental/climate issues and in talks that did not have an explicit “sustainability” focus. I heard sustainability pop up in research on emotion regulation, motivation science, parenting, self-control, dyadic relationships, wellbeing, and education.

For example, I learned from a speaker that “sustainability” in education looks like “positive student psychological outcomes,” which should be prioritized over “objective student performance.”

I’m sure there’s more I missed.

There were also calls made (by several major journal editors) to shift the field’s focus on individual processes/traits in understanding outcomes/behavior towards a focus on structural factors that lead to certain individual human choices and impact overall sustainability.

IOW, “sustainability” is concerned with collective over individual outcomes – the “synchronicity of units” - and thus psychology should shift from an individual psychology “towards a collective psychology”.

I don't think this should be surprising to anyone, but it still stood out to me this year.

An example: During a panel discussion in the area of motivation science, there was nearly unanimous agreement that the field needs to move away from concepts such as willpower, “grit” and perseverance, self-determination, etc. (which stand out as defining American features) and instead shift focus to understanding the structural causes of outcomes related to self-control, self-regulation, etc.

The discussion about the nature of self-control, resisting temptation, etc. turned to relativism – One speaker claimed and others agreed that these things are “neither good nor bad” at the individual level and shouldn’t be moralized due to the fact that they are direct products of structural forces.

Instead, psychologists need to start thinking of self-control at the collective level, with a focus on how to optimize macro-environments and their interactions with meso- and micro-environments to influence individual units and ultimately produce sustainable outcomes (i.e., sustainable outcomes = achieved when units are “synchronized”)

Importantly, the “structural” focus seemed to emphasize material and economic conditions in particular. While there I was reminded of a conversation I had with @HideYourKids0 recently wherein we briefly discussed how we’re expecting to see an increased shift away from the emphasis on identity-based oppression and towards emphasis on class-based oppression

(you should follow her, btw, if you’re not already).

One of the panelists commented, after jokingly asking “is anyone recording this right now?” that self-determination (referring to people’s natural orientation toward and need for individual autonomy) is the psychological equivalent of "neo-liberalism”

Based on the context of the conversation, this word was used as a pejorative referring to free-market capitalism, and deemed inherently incompatible with this psychological approach towards sustainability. What a surprise!

There was a serious level of skepticism expressed towards the idea of individual autonomy because, due to structural factors, “some people do not have individual autonomy”

Probably the most egregious thing I heard: A panelist asserted that convincing anyone experiencing poor material conditions that they have any real autonomy is “baseless” because they “objectively” do not have autonomy.

Apparently, if you’re poor and struggling under “capitalism” in America, you actually have no will of your own to exercise – it’s an illusion and not based in evidence. Wtf

For anyone who hates the sound of this, like I do, you can feel better knowing that SPSP was granted special consultative status for the UN Economic and Social Council in 2023, joining SPSSI (a smaller, even more woke psychological org) and the APA. They met in Geneva for the first time last year to talk about psychology’s role in helping the UN achieve its 17 Sustainable Development Goals and are currently working towards partnering with even more UN-affiliated agencies in the coming years.

How nice. Psychologists are dedicated to our collective sustainability <3

Anyway, I could add more but this is already long. Keep in mind that these professional societies and organizations largely determine where the field is headed – they manage journals, award grants, create guidelines on “best practices,” advocate for research funding and public policy, etc.

@josephhmanson But that's all I noticed. If there were more dissenting opinions, I didn't see them, but it was a huge conference to be fair. But I wouldnt expect it anyway - every year and every conference it's like witnessing the Borg in action. Rooms full of heads nodding at idiotic ideas.