I had the honor to deliver the opening address to the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science on June 22, 2023 in Padova, Italy, in my capacity as president. The following are my prepared remarks. (I also have a version of this on PsyArXiv.)
Something they don’t tell you about presidential addresses is that they’re a little bit self-serving. I get to stand up here and say what I want without any peer review or oversight. So much power!
I guess the responsible thing to do would be to tell you all about the awesome things SIPS is responsible for, like PsyArXiv, Collabra, our grants in aid initiative, our registered report grants, and so on… and why you should join or renew your membership and donate if you can, because we can’t do any of those things without your support. All of that is true. Just ask Katie Corker, who does all our finances. Sorry Katie.
I won’t do that. Not because it’s not true. We’re an awesome organization, and we do need money, practically speaking, to provide a lot of the support we provide to our members. None of this stuff is free.
But a lot has happened to me over the last several years. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been spending a lot of time asking myself why I do the things I do. Why I am involved in the projects I’m involved in. Why I donate the time or money I donate. Why I don’t shut up about the things I don’t shut up about. Why did I agree to become SIPS president? If you know me, it wasn’t exactly on my bucket list. I’m an introverted person by nature, and I’m just as happy helping someone build their website as I am getting up to talk to a bunch of people, most of whom don’t know me.
And to be fair, I have cut out a lot. My husband might not agree, but I have! I stopped paying dues to organizations I wasn’t getting anything out of. I have tried my damnedest to write fewer papers and go to fewer conferences. I review less — sorry, editors. I say no to a lot of opportunities, especially when those opportunities are just going to make money for people who are only really lining their own pockets.
But the thing I have always said at the end of the day, without exception, is that SIPS stays. And when it came time to start seriously thinking about what I wanted to say to you all today, I asked myself why? Why have I stayed?
As a community psychologist, my first thought was: why does anyone stay in any community? I could get into the theory from my field, but I’ll spare you, and focus on just one thing: it’s because you all make me feel like what I do matters. Like I matter.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect at my first SIPS conference. I was used to traditional conferences where people take turns standing at the front of the room talking about themselves — I mean, their work — and then other people in the room take turns talking about themselves — I mean, asking questions. I had also had the experience of talking about open science at these conferences. I was met either with blank stares by people who didn’t know about it, or I was met with people scoffing about the idea qualitative research had anything to say about transparency and rigor. I’d been to conferences where people looked at my name tag, squinted at my university (I could tell, because they were mouthing along as they read), and after seeing where I was from, turned to talk to someone else. I was also used to hearing people who could walk down the hall to consult with a statistician hired specifically for their grant tell graduate students with no resources what they should be doing with their research lines. You can probably tell I didn’t super love conferences. I went out of obligation, because that’s how you “make it” in academia.
So here I was driving an undergraduate student to a conference that might have been filled with the scoffers, that might have been filled with the kind of people who judge you if you’re at the smallest state school in a US state that doesn’t give a shit about higher education. I made a strong first impression by asking Dan Simons of “invisible gorilla study” fame what he studied. Truly, my difficulty remembering names never ceases to amaze me. I remember his name now! But instead of laughing at the loser who didn’t know this big-name psychologist, Dan smiled at me, and we kept talking. I honestly don’t remember what we talked about. I just remember feeling… safe.
And that’s how I felt the rest of the conference. I didn’t have to spend time thinking about whether someone was going to take me seriously. I didn’t have to wonder if going to Grand Rapids was a mistake. I didn’t worry about whether my student was going to get yelled at by some asshole full professor, as I’d personally witnessed at another conference when I was in graduate school. Despite having only reviewing experience, I was encouraged to participate in an unconference session around editorial practices, and people happily explained things when I had questions. And we actually accomplished things during that conference.
I remember thinking to myself at the end of it, this is how it should be. I should feel happy to have attended a conference. I should feel accomplished. I shouldn’t feel like all I did was listen to people talk about themselves all weekend.
I know that not everyone has always felt this way about SIPS, or the open science movement generally. Sometimes the two get conflated, for better or worse. But we are the society for the improvement of psychological science, not the society for open science. Not all ideas that come from the open science movement will improve our field — some might actively harm it — and not all improvements to our field will come from open science.
I would say that we are at our best when we acknowledge that open science, and the people who practice it, don’t have all the answers. It’s one thing to sketch out a utopia. It’s another to implement it. Not to mention that one person’s heavenly vision of academia might make another person’s life hell. We can’t just think about the intent of our actions, but also their potential impact.
Stafford Beer once said, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” A system can only do what the people in that system decide it can do. If we want the system to be better, we have to be better. Collectively, we have to decide what is acceptable, and we have to be willing to back that up with action, even if it doesn’t benefit us immediately. If we only opine about the state of the field and fail to take action, the field will never change.
I feel like SIPS is moving into its preteen, or maybe teenage years, as an organization. First, we focused on easier problems. I say easier, not easy (or unimportant), because to me it feels easier to develop a new form for preregistration than it is to solve the problem of discrimination or exclusion in our field. Both are incredibly important and necessary. But as our organization develops, I see more people asking big questions, like how do we get our government funders to fund international collaborations, how do we share power among different groups, and how do we ensure a variety of research epistemologies are respected in our initiatives. In addition to doing the necessary groundwork around open science practices, we are asking bigger questions, about inclusion, about belonging, about justice. We are asking what our system does, and what it should be doing instead.
These are exciting questions, but they’re also scary questions, especially given what is happening politically in many of our countries. And to answer these questions, to the extent we can answer them, we have to work together. Slapping text on our website that says that all are welcome does not build community if that’s all you’re doing. You have to make the effort. You have to reach out to people and offer to listen. You have to give a shit when they tell you what is important to them. And importantly, you have to follow through. You have to make them feel like their contributions matter. Like they have something to contribute in the first place.
It is this feeling — feeling like I have something to contribute, like what I say actually means something to someone — that keeps me involved with SIPS. And it’s that feeling that guides my interactions with other people. I want you to feel like you matter to the other people here. I don’t care if this is your first SIPS or your eighth SIPS — yes, this is the eighth one. I don’t care if you’re from psychology or another field, whether you’re here over Zoom or in person, whether you’re an academic or not. I don’t care if you’re completely new to open science principles or really bad at statistics or not that strong of a writer. We all have strengths and weaknesses and it’s important to know where our expertise ends. I don’t care where you are in your career or where you went to school or who your advisor is or was. (To be honest, even if they are a big name, I probably don’t know who they are anyway.) If you’re here to work together to improve the field, you’re welcome here, and I want to know what you think.
It is my sincere hope that you come away from this year’s conference feeling the way I felt coming away from Grand Rapids, the way I often come away from working with SIPS members and attendees. There are so many talented people at this conference, and we would be weaker without your involvement. There are also people who cannot or do not want to be involved with this conference this week, or at all. Their perspectives are also valuable, and we should seek them out. We should give a shit when they tell us what is important to them. And we must follow through. We also need to acknowledge those who have helped us improve our initiatives through constructive feedback. To do anything less, to me, is a betrayal of our values as an organization.
We benefit from having a broad range of perspectives involved in the work we do. As you run from workshop to hackathon to unconference session over the next few days, I hope you ask yourself: Who is at the table? Who is not? How can I reach the people who aren’t here? How can I invite them to the table, and most importantly, am I pulling up a chair for them when they get here?
SIPS is at its best when we work together, with respect, with empathy, and with intention. Let us move our mission forward with those values in mind and let us not let it end here.
Thank you.