Giving Compass' Take:

• Melissa De Witte summarizes a recent study analyzing the inherently racist nature of psychological publications, which almost neglect race altogether.

• Almost all editors of psychological publications are white. How is this reflected across other disciplines? What will it take to undermine the current structure of racism in psychology and other sciences? What are you doing to address this issue?

•  Learn about how the lack of psychological research regarding race impacts the mental health of Black men.

The new study in Perspectives on Psychological Science finds that prominent psychological publications that highlight race are rare. And when race is discussed, white scholars write most of the literature and edit almost all of it.

“Psychologists are supposed to know about racial bias and how to prevent it from stratifying the world,” says Steven O. Roberts, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, “but if we, the so-called experts, have a problem, then society really has a problem.”

To examine racial representation in psychological research, Roberts and his research team looked at more than 26,000 empirical articles published between 1974 and 2018 in top-tier academic journals for three major areas of psychology: cognitive, developmental, and social.

Of the journals that Roberts and his team surveyed, they found that of the 60 editors-in-chief between 1974 and 2018, 83% were white, 5% were people of color, and 12% were unidentifiable because the researchers were unable to code their race.

Racial makeup among editors-in-chief also varied among different areas of psychology. For example, there has never been a POC editor in either of the journals about cognitive psychology, a subfield that studies mental processes such as perception, memory, thinking, attention, and language.

The data also revealed that an editor-in-chief’s race predicted the publication of research that highlighted race. When editors were white, 4% of all publications highlighted race. When they were POC, the publication rate almost tripled to 11%.

Roberts’ paper includes a set of recommendations to help journals and authors make psychological science more equitable.

“Our discipline is supposed to know how racism works. If we are to eradicate racism from our society we need to eradicate it from our science,” Roberts says. “We need to put anti-racist systems in place.”

Read the full article about psychological publications by Melissa De Witte at Futurity.