More Bias in Psychology

Source: Neosha Gardner/Create HerStock

As a research psychologist, I receive many requests to do “peer review” for academic journals. Peer review is a high standard that generally means that a research article has been read an approved by two or three qualified scholars before publication, and also cleared hurdles with editors on the front and back end of the process. This is what helps to maintain scientific integrity for the discipline and provide some assurance that when we cite a published journal article, even though not all scholars may agree, at the very least it is not junk science.

There are, however, a few otherwise decent journals that will publish unscientific racist nonsense. I know at least one of these articles recently slipped into the journal Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), but was later retracted as it used a flawed data source ("Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ.") Articles are only as good as the gatekeepers, and sometimes editors are asleep at the wheel or even have their own agenda.

Peer-reviewers may be ignored

As an example, I received an invitation to review an article by Personality and Individual Differences (PAID) that intended to ascribe genetic causes to differences in adoption rates by race and socioeconomic status. I spent a great deal of time carefully reviewing the methodology and references, documenting the unscientific assumptions, biased processes, outdated sources, and far-reaching conclusions.

In my review, I noted of the 6 studies utilized, “…one was over 40 years old and can hardly be considered relevant today (Bonham, 1977), and another used datasets as old as 1973 (Chandrea et al, 1999), which is also questionable as it fails to account for the severe racial problems of the civil rights era and changes in attitudes since then. Another was 20 years old (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, 1997) and not a published peer-reviewed analysis. Another more recent paper (Kreider & Raleigh, 2016) only appeared as a conference proceeding, and Raleigh (2012) uses the same sample and is not even listed in the references at all. So, in the end, we have not a single source of data that is both current and published. This makes the entire analysis questionable due to data age and validity.”

Nonetheless, the paper sailed through the peer-review process — despite my thorough debunking. I was never sent a notice from the editor about the final disposition of the paper, and I assumed it was rejected. Imagine my shock to come across it in print a year later, with only some minor alterations from the version I originally reviewed.

Even this year, when visiting the PAID homepage, under “most downloaded,” the very first article listed was a 2012 paper entitled:

Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals? — Open access
J. Philippe Rushton | Donald I. Templer

When I clicked on it, it said: “…darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity (and also lower IQ).” (Translation: Black and Brown people are more physically dangerous, more promiscuous, and less intelligent.) I could only wonder if any other archaic stereotypical notions were thrown in as well — perhaps something as antiquated as head circumference? Well, that was in there too. I was pleased to see a retraction notice when I checked again for this article, but not before the paper had been cited 17 times. If not for current events around racial justice and Black Lives Matter, the paper might still be out there today.

Another anti-scientific tome, entitled "Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability," was published in the journal Psych — an article intended to show that “European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomic status (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color.”

The journal Intelligence routinely publishes junk science like this as well. "The Decline of the World's IQ" is one of these gems — it seems that all the wrong people are reproducing these days. Likewise, Mankind Quarterly is well-known for poor science to prop up racist notions, including "Effects of Sex, Race, Ethnicity and Marital Status on the Relationship Between Intelligence and Fertility," which used datasets as old as 1979 and some groups with very small n’s to support its sweeping conclusions.

These papers do harm

This would all be amusing if it wasn’t so terribly harmful. Every neo-Nazi and White supremacist probably has these journals bookmarked on their computers. As conscientious and ethical people, we cannot afford to ignore this. I wish the public knew just how much of this junk science is out there, the very sort of thought that was used to justify Hitler’s genocidal agenda. One wonders if the publishers, despite a stated commitment to inclusion and diversity, are aware of the processes that continue to prop up some scholars’ bizarre racial obsessions.

You can imagine how mortified I was to see some of these same papers cited in a textbook I was using to teach cross-cultural psychology. The problem is that the papers were cited not as examples of bad research, but as legitimate works. The textbook authors presented the matter of Black intellectual inferiority as two balanced sides of a reasonable discussion as if the perspectives were equal in weight. This creates the illusion that either belief is acceptable and overlooks the fact that the field of psychology as a whole rejects the notion of racial intellectual superiority.

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One must also wonder how instructive this "debate" is in cross-cultural psychology anyway. What are the authors hoping students will learn? These messages are particularly harmful to students of color. I once got an email from a distressed college student who couldn’t stop crying because her psychology professor said that science proves Black people are less intelligent.

I now give these racist articles to students in my culture and diversity courses and ask them to analyze them for scientific soundness. They are stunned that the papers are even in print. To my relief, even the undergraduates are able to identify the methodological problems once they have the articles in hand. So, there may be hope yet for our future.

Make these -isms into a teaching tool

We educators have a duty to call out junk science when we see it in order to protect the scientific process. Here is a sample list of articles professors can use in the classroom to illustrate the limitations of peer-review and problems with racism, nationalism, and colorism in science:

• "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans." Population and Environment, 2002; 23, 365–375.
• "African–White IQ differences from Zimbabwe on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised are mainly on the g factor." Personality and Individual Differences, 2003; 34(1), 177-183.
• "Performance on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices by African, East Indian, and White engineering students in South Africa." Intelligence, 2003; 31(2), 123-137.
• "New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States." Intelligence, 2004; 32 (2), 193-201
• "Biogeographic Ancestry, Cognitive Ability, and Socioeconomic Outcomes." Psych, 2019; 1(1), 1-25.

This post is part of a three-part series. Read Part 1: Racism in Academic Publishing