Gonzalo Guerrero and the Psychology of Identity

Historiographic analysis is underused in academic psychology. In this expository essay, I intend to show that historical events or persons can be described with reference to theory and research provided by empirical psychology. Besides providing evidence-based grounds for a more penetrating historical account, the conclusions drawn from a historiographic analysis may feedback into psychological theory by generating new testable hypotheses. Whereas standard empirical research is focused on statistical associations among quantitative variables obtained in random samples, historiographic analysis is most informative with the use of extreme cases, that is, by asking and showing the limits of what is possible. This essay focuses on the story of Gonzalo Guerrero to explore psychological processes involved in identity transformation.

The Aging, Transformative Self

The transformative self is not just for the young. This chapter focuses on the aging self and how the person who has a transformative self interprets growth throughout the adult years. The chapter starts by debunking the popular belief—in both popular culture and academic psychology, despite the research evidence—that growth is just for the young. Research shows that older adults hold at least as many growth-oriented concerns as decline-oriented concerns, both in their memories and in their goals. However, growth is not a Pollyanna concept; eudaimonic growth is not easy. The chapter shows what young growth versus mature growth sounds like in personal narratives. Young and mature growth are examined in terms of concerns for self-identity, relational intimacy, and generative concern for future generations—and then in relation to well-being and wisdom.

Gender and geographical disparity in editorial boards of journals in psychology and neuroscience

While certain metrics of diversity have seen great improvement in recent years in academic psychology and neuroscience, unequal representation remains for many positions of power. Here, we reviewed publicly available information in order to infer the proportion of editors by gender and their country of affiliation in the top 50 journals worldwide in each of the two fields. The sample included a total of 2,864 editors for psychology journals and 3,093 editors for neuroscience journals. There was a statistically significant difference in the proportion of male and female editors in both fields, both across editorial roles, and within various role categories, including editor-in-chief and their deputies at neuroscience journals, associate and section editors in both fields, and editorial and advisory board members in both fields. The only category in which there was not a significant imbalance of male and female scholars was the editors-in-chief of psychology journals and their deputies. Geographically, USA-based academics significantly outnumbered those from other countries as editors in both psychology and neuroscience. Results also indicated that over three quarters of psychology journals (76%) were comprised of more than 50% male editors, while only 20% had a similar proportion of female editors. In neuroscience, 88% of journals were comprised of more than 50% male editors, while only 10% of journals included a similar, proportional majority of female editors. Findings suggest that editorial positions in academic journals, possibly one of the most powerful decision-making roles in academic psychology and neuroscience, are not balanced in gender or geographical representation.

The dangerous tendency to essentialize cultural categories in academic psychology

This commentary welcomes Held’s (2020) article on epistemic violence in psychological science. When psychologists employ social categories, such as “Black people” or “the Japanese” as “fixed factors” in their experiments, they may ignore the social construction of these categories within a cultural context. This can lead to cultural conceptions being enshrined in a methodology that has a tendency to essentialize social categories, with their inferred psychological attributes simply becoming a question of their “accuracy” or “inaccuracy” and not about the history and ideologies within which they are formed. Cultural psychology and Indigenous psychologies challenge this ideological neutrality of social categories, which is illustrated by Hinton’s cultural model of stereotypes. Ignoring the evidence that traditional academic psychology is a cultural psychology (rather than an objective science) simply maintains the dominant ideological structures of epistemic violence within it.

The Intuitive Anthropologist: Why “Intuitive Psychology” Falls Short for Making Sense of Those Who Are Different

We humans are not very good at understanding people who are different than ourselves. Academic psychology reflects this bias. Historically, most of our research has been on undergraduates at elite western universities. This bias has also influenced our concept of the “intuitive psychologist,” which is the way we typically describe how one person understands the mental life of another. However, if we want to understand how people make sense of those who are different than themselves, it is perhaps worth noting that the field which is most invested in understanding people from different backgrounds is not psychology. It is anthropology. In this paper, I present the idea of the Intuitive Anthropologist. I argue that what is important for understanding people with different worldviews isn't a bunch of fancy mental gymnastics for mentalizing, theory of mind, or “putting yourself in their shoes.” Rather, what matters is getting better data about other people’s milieu and their experience of it. While a willingness for deep thinking is necessary, what really matters for this process is the motivation to gather and evaluate these data. While empathy works fine between people of similar demographics with a mostly shared worldview, if we want to be better at understanding people from a range of backgrounds we need to develop a broader theory of what it means to make sense of those who are different.

Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants: A Quest for Disconnected Academic Psychology

In current academic psychology, scholars typically develop their research and ideas by drawing on the work of other contemporary and preceding psychological scientists and by following certain conventions of the field. I refer to this variant of psychology as connected because the emphasis is on connecting various research findings and ideas generated by different scholars (e.g., by showing how they are related to each other via referencing). In this article, I argue that, although connected psychology advances psychological knowledge, it restricts the total amount of knowledge that could eventually be produced and therefore limits the potential of the discipline to improve the understanding of psychological phenomena. As a solution, I propose that, alongside the currently existing connected psychology, disconnected psychology should be established. In disconnected psychology, researchers develop their ideas by following the main principles of psychological method, but they are disconnected from a “field” consisting of other psychologists and therefore do not follow the discipline’s norms and conventions. By drawing on one of the core constructs from information theory—information entropy—I argue that combining the two streams of psychology would result in the most significant advancement of psychological knowledge.

Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out the dramatic challenge neuroscience is taken to issue to our sense of who and what we are and to our responsibility for our choices and for our actions. Neuroscience is seen as the newest of a series of challenges issued to the criminal law, retributivist punishment, moral blameworthiness, and the common-sense psychology all of these presuppose. Backed by a better science of the human brain, neuroscience reissues the challenges to responsibility that have long been issued by academic psychology, be that psychology introspectionist, Freudian, behaviorist, genetic, or whatever.