Our Long-Term Goals for Changing Exclusionary Academic Culture
Last Update: October 18th, 2021
Planned Follow-Up: January 2022
We believe that our lab’s efforts towards changing academic culture should be public, collaborative, regularly reviewed, clearly defined, and keep us accountable for our progress. This page is therefore available not only to all lab members, but is publicly viewable, as well.
We have two kinds of documents - Long-Term Goals (defined here), which outline the major targets that we have, but do not define the specific initiatives we are taking to meet them. Separately, we have a list of Current Initiatives (https://cogdev.atlassian.net/l/c/uP1xku8c), which outline the specific targets and actions we are taking to meet the Long-Term Goals. Both of these pages should ideally be reviewed and updated twice a year.
Our Current Long-Term Goals
We recognize that traditional psychological science overwhelmingly relies on the labour of volunteer undergraduates, and that it fails to sufficiently compensate research assistants, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows for much of the work they actually do. This culture also frequently excludes students who cannot volunteer or afford to go to graduate school. We are working on finding solutions to reward all of our lab members for the work they do, as well as finding a more diverse set of opportunities for those interested in joining our lab.
For example, as of July 2020, we have updated our lab policies to allow undergraduate research assistants to work on non-independent projects for course credit. (Our previous lab policy only allowed course credit for student-led projects, which may have unfairly benefited those students who had more time, energy, resources, etc. to devote to independent studies.)
We believe that psychologists are not sufficiently trained on the long history of exclusion within our field - e.g., in the historically unethical treatment of many participants in psychological research, the ongoing problems in the homogeneity of our research samples, and the ways in which psychology often props up oppressive government and social policies that continue to exclude people from science. We want to play an active role in educating our lab members on these issues, as well as using this knowledge to make changes in how we recruit lab members and participants more broadly.
As one example, as of June 2020, we now provide a collection of articles and resources on the topic of widespread discrimination in academia, and schedule a minimum of two lab meetings each year to discuss them (they are viewable here: https://cogdev.atlassian.net/l/c/5NL4Lrpb ).
We recognize that the long-term goal of working with under-represented populations must fundamentally include us not thinking about community testing as somehow inherently focused on ourselves and what we gain, but instead primarily on how we can give back to communities in which we are situated even without getting anything in return.
Psychological science often creates silos that reward a very small subset of psychologists - most often those who are male and white. We want to spend more time engaging with and rewarding the excellent contributions made by a wider, more diverse group of psychologists.
As an example, effective June 2020, we collect information on the gender and race/ethnicity of authors that we read during our lab meetings, working to make sure that in our future readings we do not overly skew towards primarily white, male authors.
In order to make sure that we are holding true to our values, we want to build communication systems that can allow both lab members and members of the broader community to hold us accountable, knowing that there will be no retaliation of any kind.
As one example, as of August 2020, our lab provides online and posted resources on contact information for various places where members can communicate any thoughts, concerns, or issues without having to go through the lab directly.