Psychology's Contributions to Anti-Blackness in the United States Within Psychological Research, Criminal Justice, and Mental Health

The mass incarceration of Black people in the United States is gaining attention as a public-health crisis with extreme mental-health implications. Although it is well documented that historical efforts to oppress and control Black people in the United States helped shape definitions of mental illness and crime, many psychologists are unaware of the ways the field has contributed to the conception and perpetuation of anti-Blackness and, consequently, the mass incarceration of Black people. In this article, we draw from existing theory and empirical evidence to demonstrate historical and contemporary examples of psychology's oppression of Black people through research and clinical practices and consider how this history directly contradicts the American Psychological Association's ethics code. First, we outline how anti-Blackness informed the history of psychological diagnoses and research. Next, we discuss how contemporary systems of forensic practice and police involvement in mental-health-crisis response maintain historical harm. Specific recommendations highlight strategies for interrupting the criminalization of Blackness and offer example steps psychologists can take to redefine psychology's relationship with justice. We conclude by calling on psychologists to recognize their unique power and responsibility to interrupt the criminalization and pathologizing of Blackness as researchers and mental-health providers.

Teleological Perspectives in Child and Adolescent Development

The way adults think about children is of enormous consequence. Around the world, adults are "in charge" of children, claiming responsibility for their safety and lives. This may seem natural and intuitive, but adult concepts of youth, including in the sciences of development, can lead to a worldview in which the adult is seen as better, more important, more complex, and more valuable than the child.1.

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach

Our particular concern here is with how decolonising psychology is interpreted (or misinterpreted) as well as its implications for making our discipline a truly liberating enterprise. We make three related arguments here: first, colonialism was a joint project between the colonisers and the colonised instead of being a one-way imposition of the worldviews of just the colonisers. Second, the constellation of the values of the colonised societies (before their colonisation) that facilitated the fruition of colonialism continues to be a part of the culture of these societies even after their freedom from colonial rule. Third, a version of indigenous psychology that is based on simplistic binaries such as Indigenous vs Western, Local vs Global, or Self vs Other is bound to fail in achieving the goal of substantive decolonisation. Moreover, there is a politics of indigeneity too as Edward Said in his classic Orientalism (1978) has argued that the concept of the orient itself was a construction of the West for an ideological purpose. Therefore, it is ultimately argued that the project of true or substantive decolonisation can be accomplished only by attaining a proper understanding of self and culture and this goal can be achieved by collaborating with others. Further, the culture of a society may be viewed as a set of disparate, often contradictory values which help to keep a check on the excesses of certain cultural tendencies by offering an internal critique of it. This way of looking at culture calls for viewing it as a dynamic process and necessitates a dialectical approach to examine the nature of the relationship between contradictory values of a culture. In this effort, the methodology of critical cultural psychoanalysis helps us to recognise the dialectical relation between the conscious and the unconscious/repressed aspect of the culture of the societies of the coloniser and the colonised and work through them to expand their consciousness by recovering/owning the repressed/disavowed aspect of their self. Finally, it is argued that like colonisation, substantive decolonisation will also involve a collaborative process between the colonisers and the colonised whereby they can recognise and own their selves in entirety.

Is There Such a Thing as a Hate Crime Paradigm? An Integrative Review of Bias-Motivated Violent Victimization and Offending, Its Effects and Underlying Mechanisms

Despite the growing number of bias-motivated violence studies, the evidence available remains limited, and there are several gaps in our understanding of the complex relationship between negative attitudes and biased violence. In addition, the literature on this topic has many facets and nuances and is often contradictory, so it is difficult to obtain a clear overall picture. Research has made good progress in this area, but it still suffers from a lack of systematization and from a highly segmented approach to victimization and offending. To contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the subject, this integrative narrative review provides a critical reappraisal of the theoretical, methodological, and empirical research from a systemic perspective. To this end, 134 academic publications on personality and social psychology, clinical psychology, sociology, criminology, and related disciplines were examined. The evidence suggests that although bias-motivated violence shares characteristics with other types of offensive behavior, it is actually a unique phenomenon due to its background rooted in prejudice, identity, and attitudes in which the intersection of individual, psychosocial, and ecological factors is especially relevant. The impact on the victim and their community is diverse, but it has a series of distinctive severe psychological consequences that significantly reduce the probability that incidents will be reported. Here, we present a series of findings and reflections on bias-motivated violence and provide recommendations for research, practice, and policy.

Making sense of charges of scientism in psychology and beyond: Logical and epistemological implications

Charges of scientism in mainstream psychology are on the rise among theoretical psychologists, yet not much attention has been paid to the diverse meanings and applications of the term “scientism.” In examining scientism’s relation to such contrast classes as pseudoscience, bad science, and antiscience, I focus on whether allegations of psychology’s scientism are made with the goal of supplementing mainstream ontological and epistemological frameworks and their methodological implications, or supplanting them altogether. The former suggests supplying a mainstream that is seen as thinly conceived with essential missing nutrients, whereas the latter suggests overturning a mainstream that is seen as irreparable and/or irredeemable in its disregard of lived experience. In light of the scientific reform sought by theoretical psychologists, many of whom now turn to the humanities for remedy, I question whether applying the term “scientism” to mainstream psychology is likely to help in achieving theorists’ disciplinary goals, and I suggest alternatives.

Liberating Data: Politics of Reality in Interdisciplinary Social Psychology

This paper draws attention to the meaning of data, politics and reality in social psychology. Since social psychological data matters, critical reflection on data handling and interpretations expands the horizon of social psychology beyond the cause-effect nexus. Social psychological enterprise is a political field where the role of structure and power give meaning to the data, and hence construct the reality. This can be further situated in the institutions and the dominant paradigm which regulates the structuring of data and interpretations. The current paper debates the politics of data, human agency, and the way data in social psychology has the potential to be liberating and change-oriented.

Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

What does a name mean in translation? Quine argued, famously, that the meaning of gavagai is indeterminate until you learn the language that uses that word to refer to its object. The case is similar with scientific texts, especially if they are older; historical. Because the meanings of terms can drift over time, so too can the meanings that inform experiments and theory. As can a life’s body of work and its contributions. Surely, these are also the meanings of a name; shortcuts to descriptions of the author who produced them, or of their thought (or maybe their collaborations). We are then led to wonder whether the names of scientists may also mean different things in different languages. Or even in the same language. This problem is examined here by leveraging the insights of historians of psychology who found that the meaning of “Wundt” changed in translation: his experimentalism was retained, and his Völkerpsychologie lost, so that what Wundt meant was altered even as his work—and his name—informed the disciplining of Modern Psychology as an experimental science. Those insights are then turned here into a general argument, regarding meaning-change in translation, but using a quantitative examination of the translations of Piaget’s books from French into English and German. It is therefore Piaget who has the focus here, evidentially, but the goal is broader: understanding and theorizing “the mistaken mirror” that reflects only what you can think to see (with implications for replication and institutional memory).

Taking the Humanities Seriously

As the humanities suffer decline in the academy, some psychologists have turned to them as an especially apt way to advance a psychological science that reflects lived experience more accurately and robustly. Disciplinary psychology’s adoption of the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of the natural sciences is often seen as a misapplication that has resulted in a science that diminishes if not demolishes subjectivity and misrepresents many. By contrast, the humanities are taken to be well positioned to infuse scientific psychology with myriad aspects of lived experience. I applaud all efforts to take the humanities seriously, by incorporating the theories, methods, and observations of the humanities in psychological science; the question is, how best to do this. On what understanding of the humanities should scientific psychology proceed? With these questions in mind, I review arguments about how psychological science can benefit from attention to the humanities. I also consider worries about a scientistic turn within the humane disciplines themselves, which turn mirrors worries about scientism in psychology. Contemporary examples of scholarship on the origins of ancient Greek philosophy and depictions of Christ in Renaissance art illustrate how the wars over truth and evidence that plague psychology are no less fierce in the humanities. I conclude that if psychologists apprehend the humanities with the critical understandings called for in psychological science, we may not only appreciate their contributions more completely and accurately, but may also deploy those contributions more substantially, in working to broaden and deepen psychological science.