Psychological Science Is Not Race Neutral.

TL;DR: In their analysis in a previous issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Roberts and colleagues argued that the editors, authors, and participants throughout subfields of psychological science as mentioned in this paper were biased.

Abstract: In their analysis in a previous issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Roberts and colleagues argued that the editors, authors, and participants throughout subfields of psychological scien...

Summary

The Problem of Racial Ignorance

• This reality clearly reveals one fundamental challenge facing.
• White authors, editors, and participants in the study of race: Racial ignorance.
• Beyond segregation, motivational factors heighten racial ignorance.
• White people to, across many contexts, deny racial privileges that they incur as a function of their elevated status (Lowery, Knowles, & Unzueta, 2007) .

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 6

• Together, these structural and motivational conditions produce a veil of ignorance among.
• White researchers, editors, and participants that stands in the way of scholarship "tackl[ing] diverse questions from diverse perspectives" (Roberts et al., 2020, p. 9) .
• White authors from seeing the relevance of race to a myriad of social and psychological experiences; it prevents Ultimately, this veil of ignorance produces research that reinforces the notion that psychological processes are race-neutral-a self-perpetuating cycle of racial ignorance.

The Problem of Belonging

• Racial inequality in psychological science undermines the ability of underrepresented minority scholars of color to feel a sense of belonging within their field.
• Belonging is a fundamental human need (Baumeister & Leary, 1994; Edmondson, 1999) , and social psychologists have long studied the importance of belonging for underrepresented minorities in higher education (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012; Steele, 1988; Walton & Cohen, 2007) .
• The vast underrepresentation for scholars of color in their field has negative interpersonal, cognitive, and institutional impacts on these scholars as they attempt to conduct research.
• Interpersonally, stereotypes continue to depict Black Americans as socially (Dupree et al., in press; Lei & Bodenhausen, 2017) or biologically (Williams & Eberhardt, 2008) inferior.
• Cognitively, Black scholars must contend with additional cognitive demands that stem from deciphering whether the behavior of others is benign, or motivated by racial animus (Trawalter & Richeson, 2006; Shelton & Richeson, 2006) .

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• Structurally, research on tokenism highlights how being the only member of a social identity group leads to inferences and observations suggesting that institutions are hostile toward members of that group (King, Hebl, George, & Matusik, 2010) .
• Their typical work activities are overloaded by service requests as universities attempt to make good on promises of campus diversity (Rodriguez, Campell, & Adelson, 2015; Syed, 2017) .
• Moreover, tokenism on journal editorial boards means that scholars of color face additional burdens in their editorial and reviewing responsibilities, sometimes being called upon to prevent the publication of scientific racism within their journals.
• Together these conditions threaten a sense of belonging for scholars of color, preventing retention and full participation in their field.
• Importantly, the problem of belonging constitutes both a cause and cost of the racial inequality in psychological science.

The Problem of Assumed Racial Progress

• The magnitude of racial inequality described by Roberts et al., (2020) in psychological science was undoubtedly shocking to many readers.
• Sustainable racial justice and diversity among tenured psychological scientists will mean explicitly contending with a history of racial inequality within their field-whose spaces, canon, and methods have all been exclusionary up to this point in history.
• Continued belief in the natural and automatic unfolding of racial progress makes authentic and effective embrace of diversity in their field impossible.

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• To summarize, racial ignorance among White scholars (due to structural and motivational factors), a lack of belonging among scholars of color (who are subject to additional interpersonal, cognitive, and institutional demands), and a presumption of automatic racial progress all conspire to create and maintain racial inequality in their field.
• This means increasing the number of editors, reviewers, authors, and participants that hail from under-represented groups.
• Because people of color are less subject to racial ignorance and the presumption of racial progress, diversifying the editors, reviewers, authors, and participants involved in such work will attenuate the systemic inequality in psychology research.
• Any combination of these concrete steps can reduce the racial inequality pervasive in their science and departments.

Conclusion

• The authors field has two choices in interpreting the scholarship the authors have outlined here:.
• The authors can continue with business as usual, ignoring the evidence suggesting that the racial inequalities outlined by Roberts et al., (2020) represent a significant and problematic organization of their subfields and its practices.
• Or, the authors can proceed as scientists, taking to heart the available evidence suggesting that these conditions damage their collective capacity to understand the psychological experiences of people throughout the world.
• As two people who see the inherent value and importance of psychological approaches to the study of race and racism, the authors urge the field to take the latter path, for it is one that takes us all toward greater equity and justice.

Full text

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 1
Psychological Science is Not Race Neutral: Comment on Roberts et al., (2020)
Cydney H. Dupree1 and Michael W. Kraus1,2
Yale University, School of Management1 and Department of Psychology2

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 2
Abstract
In their analysis, Roberts and colleagues (2020) argue that the editors, authors, and participants
throughout subfields of psychological science are overwhelmingly White. In this comment, we
consider some of the drivers and consequences of this racial inequality. Drawing on race
scholarship from in and outside the field, we highlight three phenomena that create and maintain
racial inequality in psychology: (1) racial ignorance, (2) threats to belonging, and (3) racial
progress narratives. We close by exploring steps that journals and authors can take to reduce
racial inequality in our field, ending with an appeal to consider the experience of scholars of
color in race scholarship and in psychological science more broadly.
Keywords: inequality, race, psychology, meta-science

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 3
Psychological Science is Not Race Neutral: Comment on Roberts et al., (2020)
“If psychological science is to tackle diverse questions from diverse perspectives, it must
diversify.” (Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, & Mortenson, 2020, p. 9)
In Roberts et al., (2020), the authors marshal an impressive collection of evidence that
describes the overwhelming Whiteness of psychological science. The work reveals that race
scholarship is exceedingly rare in our field, and those who participate in it—including authors,
editors, and participants—are all overwhelmingly categorized as White. In this comment, we
draw on the available evidence from race scholarship to help us understand the drivers and costs
of the racial inequality that permeates the field of psychology.
Racial inequality is a defining challenge of both society and our field. We acknowledge,
however, that our own sense of urgency will not be shared by many. Because psychological
science has connections to disciplines that vary from computer science to sociology, some may
view race scholarship as peripheral to our discipline—a sort of niche research area (or “me-
search”), with little bearing on the complex cognitive and affective processes that guide human
psychology. Those who do see race as more central to the field may, nevertheless, view work
from White authors, editors, and participants as just as informative as that produced by scholars
and participants of color—or even more so due to its supposed objectivity (King, Avery, Hebl, &
Cortina, 2018; Torrez, Kraus, & Dupree, 2020; Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008).
Here, we turn to scholarship on race and racism to highlight established societal and
psychological phenomena that call into question these assumptions and reinforce that our field
does indeed face an urgent need to overcome the racial inequality that is deeply embedded within

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 4
it. Ultimately, research on racial ignorance, threats to belonging, and the assumption of racial
progress all suggest that racial inequality will continue to stand as a significant and sustained
barrier in the study of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. We end by highlighting
promising recommendations made by Roberts et al., (2020) that call for our field to deeply and
explicitly consider author, editor, and participant race in its research practices and organizational
structure.
The Problem of Racial Ignorance
Researchers are, in fact, people first. This reality clearly reveals one fundamental
challenge facing White authors, editors, and participants in the study of race: Racial ignorance.
Racial ignorance, a concept long explored in sociological traditions, refers to a general lack of
knowledge about how race shapes the experiences of people in society (Mills, 2014; Mueller,
2020)—and it serves as both driver and consequence of the extreme Whiteness in psychology. A
combination of structural and motivational factors conspire to heighten racial ignorance among
White people relative to people of color. In structural terms, the US context is set up so that
racial segregation is the rule (Massey & Denton, 1993). Americans—White Americans
especially—grow, live, and work in racially homogenous neighborhoods, schools, and
workplaces, spending relatively little time in integrated contexts. When integration is proposed
(or even passed) as law, White people tend to resist these policies through collective action
(DuBois, [1899], 1973; Ewing, 2018; Shedd, 2015). The segregation that characterizes much of
the US context obscures the magnitude of racial inequality in society, allowing White people to
go about much of their everyday lives without confronting racial privilege (Shedd, 2015).
Segregation therefore constitutes a significant barrier to the understanding of race and racism.

Psychology is Not Race Neutral 5
Critically, for White people, this segregation means that a fuller understanding of racism
must be discovered in books rather than through lived experience. This challenge must not be
minimized. Personal experiences can be particularly informative for rejecting dominant
narratives of race and racism in the context of social science (e.g., Dubois, 1903; Hill Collins,
1991) and for learning how race shapes seemingly neutral or objective scientific practices,
including the methods used to collect data for our studies (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008).
Beyond segregation, motivational factors heighten racial ignorance. One such factor, as
social psychological research reveals, is the tendency to deny racial privilege. Specifically,
White people benefit from obscuring the existence of the racial inequality that they benefit from
(Mueller, 2020). This creates a motivated tendency among White people to, across many
contexts, deny racial privileges that they incur as a function of their elevated status (Lowery,
Knowles, & Unzueta, 2007). For example, White parents tend to avoid mentioning race in
conversations with their children because they view such conversations to be negative or
unnecessary (Abaied & Skinner, 2020; Perry, Skinner, & Abaied, 2019).
We see a similar pattern with adults: White people tend to discount their racial privileges
and endorse more meritocratic conceptions of society except in very specific circumstances
where for example, their personal characteristics are affirmed (e.g., Knowles & Lowery, 2012;
Phillips & Lowery, 2018). This pattern of racial ignorance aligns with research demonstrating
that White people underestimate racial inequality’s magnitude in society (Kraus, Rucker, &
Richeson, 2017) and in the institutions that they are a part of (Boykin et al., 2020; Ray, 2019).
Those who are more likely to underestimate such inequality are also less likely to hire racial
minorities or support equity-enhancing policies (Dupree, Torrez, Obioha, & Fiske, in press).