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The Status of Arabic Social Psychology: A Review of 21st-Century Research Articles
Abstract
This article explores the current state of Arabic social psychology through a selective review of articles written by Arabs, on Arabs, in Arabic (144 articles, published between 2000 and 2015), a basic profiling of first authors, and a regional mapping of graduate social psychology programs. The Levant emerged as the most productive subregion. The most studied topics overall were “the self” and “social adjustment.” Most articles relied primarily on regional references. Furthermore, articles were mostly empirical, correlational, with adult samples, particularly university students. Most first authors were males and very few were specialized in social psychology. Finally, very few graduate social psychology programs were found. We discuss some ways forward for addressing the seemingly marginalized state of social psychology in the Arab region.
... Given past and ongoing conflicts and economic instability in many regions covered here, mental health and well-being have been important topics of investigation. For example, reviews from the Arab region show that social adjustment is studied frequently (see Basurrah et al., 2021;Saab et al., 2020) and that mental health publications tend to center on mood, anxiety, substance use, and childhood disorders (e.g., Zeinoun et al., 2020). Mental health problems in relation to poverty, unemployment, and debt have been examined in various regions (e.g., Islam et al., 2022;Lund et al., 2018;Rihmer et al., 2013). ...
... Unfortunately, limited funding impacts the availability and quality of research training (e.g., see Saab et al., 2020). Lack of financial resources also affects salaries which can force academic psychologists to juggle multiple jobs (e.g., additional teaching jobs) or seek jobs in western regions. ...
... Doğan & Selenica, 2022;Hanafi, 2016;Hawi et al., 2022). Hence, questions concerning intergroup relations and political psychology, for example, that are crucial for understanding these regions' most pressing problems can receive comparatively less attention than questions posing less threat to the status quo (e.g., Saab et al., 2020). However, recent years have seen a promising increase in the scale of social/political psychological research conducted in some of these regions (e.g., Hawi et al., 2022). ...
How can psychology transform itself into an inclusive science that engages with the rich cultural diversity of humanity? How can we strive towards a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior that is both generalizable across populations and attentive to its diversity? To address these major questions of our field, relying on scholars from different world regions, we outline first the opportunities associated with conducting psychological research in these and other majority world regions, highlighting international collaborations. Cross-cutting research themes in psychological research in the majority world are presented along with the urgent need to adopt a more critical lens to research and knowledge production within psychology. Indigenization, critical, transformative and liberatory approaches to understanding psychological phenomena framed within the decolonial imperative are presented as future options for a more diverse and equitable psychological science. Next, we address challenges, including limited institutional research infrastructure, limited national investment in research, political and social challenges these regions face, and the impact of imported (rather than locally produced) psychological knowledge. We conclude by offering recommendations to enable psychological science to be more representative of the world’s population. Our aim is to facilitate a broader, better-informed, and more empathic conversation among psychological scientists worldwide about ways to make psychological science more representative, culturally informed and inclusive.
... Academic institutions in the region are mostly teaching-focused. The number of graduate programs in psychology has been increasing, yet PhD programs in the field remain relatively scarce and are unevenly distributed (Saab et al., 2020), with most located in North Africa, particularly in Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan, followed by universities in the Levant. In the Arabian Peninsula, only Saudi Arabia and Yemen host a doctoral psychology program. ...
... Informal organizations also exist in the form of listservs (e.g., Arab-speaking neuropsychologists listserve and Arab Psychological Network listserve) (Zeinoun et al., 2020). Most national or regional associations and journals specialize in clinical branches of psychology (Saab et al., 2020). ...
... Reviews of research published in Arabic indicate that Egypt was historically seen as the largest producer in this language (Ahmed & Gielen, 1998), but it is also a significant producer of research in English. According to reviews on psychological research across subfields such as social psychology (Rabah, n.d.; Saab et al., 2020), and mental health (Zeinoun et al., 2020), Egypt may be the most productive of the North African countries, although Algeria is also a significant player, particularly in Arabic. The most research productive countries in the Levant are Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, while Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, are the most productive in the Gulf region. ...
How can psychology transform itself into an inclusive science that engages with the rich cultural diversity of humanity? How can we strive towards a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior that is both generalizable across populations and attentive to its diversity? To address these major questions of our field, relying on scholars from different world regions, we start by highlighting the diversity present in six world regions that are under-represented in psychological science, and follow with an overview of psychological research and education in these regions. Next, we outline challenges and opportunities associated with conducting psychological research in these and other majority world regions, and finish by offering recommendations aimed at making psychological science both more broadly representative of the world’s population and attentive to its diversity. Our aim is to facilitate a broader, better-informed, and more empathic conversation among psychological scientists worldwide about ways to make our science more representative, culturally informed and inclusive.
... Despite the risk of reproducing linguistic hegemony in scientific production (Hanafi & Arvanitis, 2014), we restricted the sample to English-speaking scholars for two reasons. First, we were interested in examining problems in publication and representation specifically in mainstream social psychological literature, which is Anglophone dominated (see Keim, 2008;Gingras & self-identified social psychologists to avoid sampling biases from restriction to academic social psychologists holding formal positions at universities, because many social psychologists work as general psychologists, in other academic departments, or without formal links to an academic institution (e.g., producing grey literature in NGOs; Saab et al., 2020). Mosbah-Natanson, 2010). ...
... We see this as a pragmatic coping response (even if not always a conscious one) to a complex mixed-motive situation. This response requires conformity in some situations and resistance in others (see also Hodges & Geyer, 2006), as researchers attempt to balance goals that biased systems place in opposition-a no-win situation that imposes disadvantages whichever of their goals they might choose to pursue (see also, Saab et al., 2020). ...
... On one hand, they face lower career incentives, limited institutional support, and lesser international recognition for local work. On the other hand, they face less local recognition and relevance, and greater research resource deprivation, biases, and other (e.g., linguistic) difficulties in publishing internationally (see also, Hanafi & Arvanitis, 2014;Saab et al., 2020). Thus, while the goals of publishing locally and globally are not inherently mutually exclusive, the processes embedded in the contexts of our work place them in opposition in some contexts. ...
Modern systems of knowledge production reinforce inequalities and coloniality, especially in the Global South. We investigated whether this was the case in contemporary social psychology. We examined manifestations of coloniality of knowledge (in the form of internalized Global North standards and practices) and critical awareness and reflection (historic and systemic attributions for collective disadvantages) in a survey of social psychologists in 64 countries (N = 232). Although colleagues in the Global South and Southern and Eastern Europe adopted Global Northern publication standards and tendencies, their compliance seemed motivated by institutional demands and pragmatic concerns rather than internalized inferiority or principled conviction. Regarding international mainstream publication practices, participants from all regions (most prominently outside the Global North) reported biases, under‐representation, lack of relevance, and structural disadvantages. Participants offered mainly systemic attributions for these and other disadvantages. These findings suggest that social psychologists engaged with the international publication system are caught in a double‐bind between collective systemic disadvantages and coerced compliance, especially outside the Global North. Discussion focuses on the mixed‐motive tensions these social psychologists experience in publishing internationally under these conditions, and the implications of this status quo for knowledge production in the discipline.
... This led to an attempted rupture with theories imported from the US by those who defended a science more focused on the local problems and independent of the US dominance. Thus, the lack of publications by Latin American psychologists in international journals was fostered partly by a greater focus on their own social context, with a large chunk of the literature from the region being published in Portuguese and Spanish (see Chaudhary &Sriram, 2020, andSaab et al., 2020, for similar arguments on psychology in India and the Arab region). ...
... HHN (and others, e.g. Hruschka et al., 2018;Saab et al., 2020) already pointed out that an international research community is necessary, to help solve the WEIRD problem. But we still lack a truly international research network, where the same papers are, for instance, published in more than one language, and academics can have a more equal share in the distribution of their ideas and projects. ...
... On an individual level, WEIRD researchers could choose to engage more often with researchers from other communities as equals, and not only as collaborators in their own leading projects (Saab et al., 2020). As editors and members of editorial boards they could push for a more stable representation of non-WEIRD researchers, not only in special issues (and, as I have shown, those may not be that diverse either). ...
... psychology on the Arab region from 1960 till mid-2020 2 . More recently, a selective review of literature between 2000 and 2015 found that out of 144 social psychological articles published in Arabic and on the Arab world, a small minority were related to political psychology (Saab et al., 2020). ...
... The majority of these studies have focused on a select number of countries only 3 , most likely corresponding to the presence of social/political psychologists based there and the differential emphasis on basic research of multiple different academic systems and languages (e.g., American, French). 2 A significant number of these papers have been authored by scholars from fields outside of psychology, particularly political science (e.g., Jamal & Tessler, 2008), and/or work on topics related to the field, such as military psychology (e.g., Mironova, 2019). 3 The PsycInfo review mentioned above shows that most research has been conducted in the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq), and English publications were especially concentrated in Lebanon (see also, Saab et al., 2020). This is not to say that the study of Arab populations in general is uncommon; on the contrary, we would likely find double the amount of papers on or related to Arabs or the Arab region outside the region itself (e.g., Kteily et al., 2016;Kteily & Bruneau, 2017). ...
... Furthermore, most Arab academic institutions are teaching-focused, and across all Arab states, only seven universities offer Master's degrees and four offer doctoral degrees in social psychology (Saab et al., 2020). This translates to less institutional support for research, particularly ones involving intricate theories, methodologies, and analyses, in terms of funding, time, incentives, or RA's, while still pushing scholars to publish (preferably in international outlets). ...
This chapter examines the history, challenges, and future of political psychology research in the Arab region, and argues that lack of attention to such regions is detrimental not only for these regions, but also for Western research and for the discipline as a whole.
... As with measurement quality, sample diversity is a recurrent concern in psychological research Rad et al., 2018;Saab et al., 2020). Most psychology research nowadays emerges from convenience samples of undergraduates and Mechanical Turk workers. ...
... These samples are fine for some purposes, quite limited for others (Gaither, 2019), and are known to depart from representativeness (Callegaro et al., 2014;MacInnis et al., 2018). While our nationally representative sampling allows us to generalize beyond samples, we can access for free (in lab) or cheap (MTurk), even a large nationally representative sample barely scratches the surface of human diversity Rad et al., 2018;Saab et al., 2020). As such, we encourage similar analyses across different cultures (Willard & Cingl, 2017). ...
Widespread religious disbelief represents a key testing ground for theories of religion. We evaluated the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches—secularization, cognitive byproduct, and dual inheritance—in a nationally representative (United States, N = 1,417) data set with preregistered analyses and found considerable support for the dual inheritance perspective. Of key predictors of religious disbelief, witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment was the most potent, β = .28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β = .13, and less advanced mentalizing, β = .05. Low cultural exposure predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection, and cognitive reflection only predicted disbelief among those relatively low in cultural exposure to religion. This highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and transmitted culture and emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning in the cultural transmission of disbelief (preprint https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/ ).
... In the current psychological science landscape, samples are overwhelmingly nonrepresentative of our species and many papers do not even bother to identify or justify the nationality of their samples (Cheon et al., 2020;Rad et al., 2018)-a practice now recommended but not required at our flagship journal (Bauer, 2020), a step that alas is progress. Underrepresented samples are tough to gather and then largely overlooked (Gaither, 2019) or shuttled to "specialty" niche journals (Gaither, 2020;Saab et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, there are genuine risks inherent to metascientific projects that might easily be takengiven how they are directly presented and promotedto mean that people are essentially interchangeable and sampling diversity and inclusion are redundant at best. ...
... Against this backdrop, there are genuine risks inherent to metascientific projects that might easily be takengiven how they are directly presented and promotedto mean that people are essentially interchangeable and sampling diversity and inclusion are redundant at best. This threatens to further compound the WEIRD-people problem, which after all is not a mere sampling issue-it reflects and reinforces deep inequities in our field (Saab et al., 2020), further disincentivizing work on all but the most convenient of convenience samples and further distorting our science's representation of human nature. ...
In the face of unreplicable results, statistical anomalies, and outright fraud, introspection and changes in the psychological sciences have taken root. Vibrant reform and metascience movements have emerged. These are exciting developments and may point toward practical improvements in the future. Yet there is nothing so practical as good theory. This article outlines aspects of reform and metascience in psychology that are ripe for an injection of theory, including a lot of excellent and overlooked theoretical work from different disciplines. I review established frameworks that model the process of scientific discovery, the types of scientific networks that we ought to aspire to, and the processes by which problematic norms and institutions might evolve, focusing especially on modeling from the philosophy of science and cultural evolution. We have unwittingly evolved a toxic scientific ecosystem; existing interdisciplinary theory may help us intelligently design a better one.
... Two studies explored beliefs about the other's God in individual economic interactions. Study 1 was a field experiment with Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank, a group that is underrepresented in the psychological literature (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010;Rad, Martingano, & Ginges, 2018;Saab, Ayanian, & Hawi, 2020). Religious Muslim Palestinians predicted how much money Jewish Israelis would keep or give away to either Jewish Israelis or Muslim Palestinians in a dictator game. ...
How does religious belief influence intergroup conflict? Research addressing this question generally focuses on
how individuals’ own beliefs influence intergroup behavior. However, intergroup cooperation may also be
influenced by second-order beliefs; in this case, perceptions about how outgroup members’ religious beliefs
influence their intergroup behavior. Indeed, across different domains, intergroup conflict is often driven by
inaccurate and negative intergroup perceptions and predictions. If true of religion, such negatively biased predictions
may independently hinder intergroup cooperation by reducing the extent to which individuals see
religious outgroup members as cooperative partners. Contrary to this hypothesis, three preregistered studies (N
=1081) provide consistent evidence that Palestinians and Israelis predict that belief in God motivates outgroup
members to give more money in intergroup exchanges (Studies 1 and 2) and to place a greater value on outgroup
members’ lives (Study 3). Results have important implications for policymakers’ and the public’s understanding
of religion’s role in intergroup relations.
... Despite greater inclusion over time, the US remains overrepresented in scientific research (Thalmayer et al., 2021), while researchers from the Global South remain underrepresented (Macleod and Howell, 2013;IJzerman et al., 2021;Bernardo et al., 2022;Hattery et al., 2022;Lin and Li, 2022). This may partly be due to the relative marginalization of subdisciplines in some regions outside the US and Western Europe (e.g., social psychology; Saab et al., 2020). There is therefore an important opportunity and urgency for greater collaboration between scholars in the Global North and those in the Global South to advance psychological theories 2fold: by increasing the visibility of disciplines through collaborative work, and the progression of scientific theory through more inclusive investigations of phenomena. ...
... " The logic of using an English-only survey was that we were interested in examining problems in research production specifically for mainstream social psychological literature, which is Anglophone dominated (e.g., Gingras & Mosbah-Natanson, 2010). We recruited selfidentified social psychologists because -particularly outside the GN -many social psychologists work in a variety of departments or without formal links to an academic institution (e.g., in NGO's; Saab et al., 2020). ...
This paper offers an exploration of research production in social psychology as a global endeavor from the point of view of Anglophone social psychologists (N = 232) across 64 countries. We examine social psychologists’ beliefs regarding the difficulties in conducting research in social psychology and the inequalities that they report between the Global North, South and East Europe, and the Global South. Across all regions, we found pervasive critical awareness of obstacles to conducting research – including underinvestment in the field, precarious and counter-productive labor conditions, and excessive and biased disciplinary standards. However, we also found that colleagues outside the Global North reported quantitatively and qualitatively larger obstacles to research. These included well-known historically-rooted inequalities but also contemporary systemic procedural and distributive injustices in material, human, and social-political capital. Non-Northern colleagues in particular critically reflected on how these inequalities and injustices are amplified by Northern hegemonies in social, institutional, disciplinary, economic, and political systems. Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for social psychologists, social psychology as a discipline, and its situation within broader hierarchical systems and their intersectionalities.
... By imposing Western etics in cross-cultural research, researchers miss important dimensions of variation, thus leading to an uneven and incomplete understanding of human psychology. Furthermore, the methods of imposed-etic research can problematically assume a reality that is not characteristic for the majority world and, at worst, may be experienced as a kind of scientific colonialism (Adams et al., 2015;Galtung, 1967), reducing the role of majority-world collaborators to data collectors (Saab et al., 2020) on projects that were fully designed before their inclusion. ...
Personality is a broad concept used to organize the myriad ways that people differ psychologically from one another. There is evidence that such differences have been important to humans everywhere, in that personality-relevant terms appear in all known languages. Empirical attempts to identify the most useful individual differences and their structure have emphasized cross-cultural evidence, but rigid adherence to a Big Five model has sometimes meant ignoring heterogenous results. We start with a framework for more precisely defining the universality versus cultural-specificity of personality concepts and models in order to better assess cross-cultural evidence. As this 50th anniversary of the IACCP is also the 50th anniversary of the first large lexical study of personality and more or less of the Big Five model, we take the opportunity to explore both how personality has been studied across contexts using the lexical method, and in 100 articles on personality topics (most using questionnaires) that were identified in the pages of JCCP. Personality articles in JCCP, classified into three types based on their balance of emic and etic components, illustrate larger trends in personality psychology. With the benefit of hindsight, we reflect on what each type has to offer going forward, and we encourage cross-cultural personality psychologists to go beyond imposed etic studies that seek primarily to confirm Western models in other contexts. The kinds of insights that more integrative emic and etic approaches can bring to the study of psychology across cultures are highlighted, and a future research agenda is provided.
... We do not expect SIPS to enact every single one of these suggestions; any action should of course take into account the organization's values and available resources. Regardless of the specific response to this report, however, it will be important for scholars from geographically diverse regions to be intentionally sought out as collaborators and leaders (Saab et al., 2020), whose perspectives on how psychological science can improve are valuable but often overlooked. Historically, our field has not valued researchers or participants who fall outside mainstream perspectives (Bulhan, 2015;Clark, 1989;Ryan, 1976), and the impacts of this practice are still felt today, inside and outside of academia. ...
The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) is an organization whose mission focuses on bringing together scholars who want to improve methods and practices in psychological science. The organization reaffirmed in June 2020 that “[we] cannot do good science without diverse voices,” and acknowledged that “right now the demographics of SIPS are unrepresentative of the field of psychology, which is in turn unrepresentative of the global population. We have work to do when it comes to better supporting Black scholars and other underrepresented minorities.”
The purpose of the Global Engagement Task Force, started in January 2020, was to explore suggestions made after the 2019 Annual Conference, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, around inclusion and access for scholars from regions outside of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (described in the report as “geographically diverse” regions), a task complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest in several task force members’ countries of residence. This report outlines several suggestions, specifically around building partnerships with geographically diverse open science organizations; increasing SIPS presence at other, more local events; diversifying remote events; considering geographically diverse annual conference locations; improving membership and financial resources; and surveying open science practitioners from geographically diverse regions.
In a time where new research methods are constantly being developed and science is evolving, researchers must continually educate themselves on cutting-edge methods and best practices related to their field. The second of three volumes, this Handbook provides comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a variety of issues important in developing, designing, and collecting data to produce high-quality research efforts. First, leading scholars from around the world provide an in depth explanation of various advanced methodological techniques. In section two, chapters cover general important methodological considerations across all types of data collection. In the third section, the chapters cover self-report and behavioral measures and their considerations for use. In the fourth section, various psychological measures are covered. The final section of the handbook covers issues that directly concern qualitative data collection approaches. Throughout the book, examples and real-world research efforts from dozens of different disciplines are discussed.
Rapid changes in technology have contributed to making globalization a reality, in spite of it being criticized for imposing Western cultural values on the world. Globalization embeds a neoliberal ideology where productivity, competition, and profit prevail. This paper posits that neoliberalism has enabled the persistence and further spread of coloniality in the field of psychology, both as a research enterprise and practice. The production of psychological research, the diagnosis of psychological disorders, and the prescription of Western therapeutic packages all follow the neoliberal profit-making paradigm which commodifies the field of psychology. The underrepresentation of Global South research is discussed, as well as the over-emphasis on individuality in the conceptualization of well-being and success. The call for a decolonial perspective is underlined, advocating a perspective from within, as opposed to a perspective from above, that critically and selectively integrates indigenous knowledge and practices with what is relevant from the West.
Conversations about the internationalization of psychological sciences have occurred over a few decades with very little progress. Previous work shows up to 95% of participants in the studies published in mainstream journals are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic nations. Similarly, a large proportion of authors are based in North America. This imbalance is well-documented across a range of subfields in psychology, yet the specific steps and best practices to bridge publication and data gaps across world regions are still unclear. To address this issue, we conducted a hackathon at the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science 2021 conference to develop guidelines to improve international representation of authors and participants, adapted for various stakeholders in the production of psychological knowledge. Based on this hackathon, we discuss specific guidelines and practices that funding bodies, academic institutions, professional academic societies, journal editors and reviewers, and researchers should engage with to ensure psychology is the scientific discipline of human behavior and cognition across the world. These recommendations will help us develop a more valid and fairer science of human sociality.
سعت الدراسة إلى استقصاء جهود توطين علم النفس في الكويت، مبتدئة بشرح مفهوم
التوطين ومتطلباته والجهود التي تمت في هذا الشأن، والعقبات التي تحول دون تمكينه. ولإتمام
ذلك، قامت الدراسة بفحص خطة التنمية لدولة الكويت 2035 ، والأولويات البحثية لقطاع
الأبحاث بجامعة الكويت، والقوانين والتشريعات الكويتية ذات المجالات النفسية، كما فحصت
دراسات في علم النفس منشورة في مجلات مجلس النشر العلمي بجامعة الكويت، أعدها باحثون
كويتيون. وتوصلت إلى أن جهود توطين علم النفس غائبة في خطة التنمية وبرنامجها المرحلي، وفي
الأولويات البحثية لقطاع الأبحاث بجامعة الكويت، لكنها أكثر وضوحا عند فحص التشريعات
ذات العلاقة بالخدمات النفسية والاجتماعية. وعند مراجعة 55 دراسة منشورة خلال السنوات
العشرين الماضية في أربع من الدوريات التابعة لمجلس النشر العلمي بجامعة الكويت، أعدها باحثون
كويتيون كطرف رئيس، نجد أن حساسية هذه الدراسات للجوانب الثقافية، ووعيها بمستلزمات
التوطين منخفضة إلى متوسطة على أكثر تقدير. لاحظت الدراسة أنه على الرغم من بعض
المبادرات الواعدة، فإنه لا توجد دعوة صريحة تنادي بتوطين علم النفس في الكويت، لكن الجهود
في هذا المجال ضمنية، ومبعثرة، ومفردة، وتفتقر إلى التنسيق.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
Many Arab countries have experienced deep social, political, and psychological struggles and transformations, yet political psychological analyses of the region remain scarce. This chapter provides a brief overview of the historical context, present, and future directions of the field. Some challenges are epistemological and theoretical, including culturally decontextualized literature and under-theorised topics. Other challenges lie in research production, with difficulties in acquiring qualified researchers, institutional support, training, representative samples, and elaborate, culturally relevant approaches. The final set of challenges are social, political, and ethical in nature, especially pertinent in unstable and conflict-ridden settings, where sensitive questions may pose risks to the community and researchers, trigger suspicion, and highlight researchers’ positionalities and biases. Despite these challenges, however, growing recognition of critical, indigenous, innovative, and collaborative psychology points to promising signs for the future of political psychology in the Arab region, much like the rest of the Global South.
Conversations about the internationalization of psychological science have occurred over a few decades with very little progress. Previous work shows up to 95% of participants in mainstream journal studies are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations. Similarly, a large proportion of authors are based in North America. This imbalance is well-documented across a range of subfields in psychology, yet the specific steps and best practices to bridge publication and data gaps across world regions are still unclear. To address this issue, we conducted a hackathon at the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science 2021 conference to develop guidelines to improve international representation of authors and participants, adapted for various stakeholders in the production of psychological knowledge. Based on this hackathon, we discuss specific guidelines and practices that funding bodies, academic institutions, professional academic societies, journal editors and reviewers, and researchers could engage with to ensure psychology is the scientific discipline of human behavior and cognition across the world.
Across phenomena and areas of inquiry, social psychology often emphasizes social categories as the unit of explanation. However, the primacy of categories often leads social psychologists to neglect contextual features that might shape people’s psychologies and behaviour, limiting social psychology theories and their real-world applications. In this Perspective, we urge researchers to move beyond categories and incorporate context more deeply into their theorizing. To make this call actionable, we introduce social constructionism, assemblage theory and dynamic systems as alternative frameworks and present examples of how these frameworks already inform social psychology research. The work featured is not an exhaustive review of research emphasizing context in psychological theorizing, but rather serves to highlight the importance of alternatives to category-based or pseudo-universal frameworks. Social science that considers context must focus on psychological, structural and material features (rather than classifications), their interconnections, and temporal dynamism. Social psychology often emphasizes social categories as the unit of explanation. In this Perspective, Cikara et al. argue that the primacy of categories leads to neglect of contextual features that shape behaviour; they describe alternative frameworks for incorporating context into social psychology theorizing.
Feminist psychologists have called for researchers to consider the social and historical context and the multidimensionality of participants in research studies. The Reproducibility Project documents the degree to which the findings from mainstream psychological studies are reproduced. Drawing on intersectionality theory, we question the value of reproducing findings while ignoring who is represented, intersecting social and group identities, sociohistorical context, and the power and privilege that likely influence participants’ responses in psychology experiments. To critically examine the Reproducibility Project in psychology, we analyzed the 100 replication reports produced between 2011 and 2014 (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). We developed an intersectional analytic framework to investigate (a) representation, (b) whether demographic and identity factors were considered through a multidimensional or intersectional lens, (c) explanations of non-replication, and (d) whether socio-cultural context was considered. Results show that reports predominantly include WEIRD samples (people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries). Context and identity were rarely considered, even when study design relied on these factors, and intersectional identities and structures (considering power, structural issues, discrimination, and historical context) were absent from nearly all reports. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843211035678
Academic associations define the scientific standards and affect individual academic careers within a discipline. The European Association of Social Psychology (EASP) was founded in 1966 to become an association for all social psychologists in Europe. However, this was unattainable during the Cold War, and more subtle obstacles, such as women's underrepresentation in academia prevented EASP from due representation of all social psychologists. Social psychological theory offers insights into why social hierarchies are maintained and how they can be dismantled. We used the case of EASP to analyse challenges to creating a diverse and inclusive association by analysing membership data, participation, distinction and influence throughout the organisation's history (1966‐2020) and conducting a more in‐depth analysis for the 2011–2017 period. We found a glass‐ceiling effect for women and a persistent underrepresentation of non‐Western European scholars on all levels. We conclude that increasing diversity requires more fundamental changes to overcome structural inequalities.
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Pouco se sabe sobre a amplitude e a profundidade da publicação acadêmica no campo da psicologia e de suas disciplinas afins, provenientes de autores latino-americanos. Para melhor definir as variações entre as subarea, realizamos uma análise para examinar as tendências (por exemplo, status, quantidade e qualidade) de publicações acadêmicas produzidas na América Latina, tomando como referência o primeiro autor. Os resultados sugerem que houve um aumento rápido e constante na quantidade de publicações acadêmicas produzidas por autores latino-americanos. A prondução aumentou 880% entre 2001 e 2013, com tendência para aumento na publicação internacional. Os dados indicaram que as publicações acadêmicas originárias da América Latina estão em ascensão e com boas perspectivas para o futuro.
Despite unprecedented access to information and diffusion of knowledge across the globe, the bulk of work in mainstream psychological science still reflects and promotes the interests of a privileged minority of people in affluent centers of the modern global order. Compared to other social science disciplines, there are few critical voices who reflect on the Euro-American colonial character of psychological science, particularly its relationship to ongoing processes of domination that facilitate growth for a privileged minority but undermine sustainability for the global majority. Moved by mounting concerns about ongoing forms of multiple oppression (including racialized violence, economic injustice, unsustainable over-development, and ecological damage), we proposed a special thematic section and issued a call for papers devoted to the topic of "decolonizing psychological science". In this introduction to the special section, we first discuss two perspectives—liberation psychology and cultural psychology—that have informed our approach to the topic. We then discuss manifestations of coloniality in psychological science and describe three approaches to decolonization—indigenization, accompaniment, and denaturalization—that emerge from contributions to the special section. We conclude with an invitation to readers to submit their own original contributions to an ongoing effort to create an online collection of digitally linked articles on the topic of decolonizing psychological science.
Resumen
A pesar de acceso sin precedentes a la información y difusión del conocimiento en todo el mundo, la mayor parte del trabajo en la ciencia psicológica hegemónica todavía refleja y promueve los intereses de una minoría privilegiada de personas en centros ricos del orden mundial moderno. En comparación con otras disciplinas de las ciencias sociales, hay pocas voces críticas que reflexionan sobre el carácter colonial Euro-Americano (nordocéntrico) de la ciencia psicológica, y en particular su relación con los procesos de dominación que facilitan el crecimiento de una minoría privilegiada, pero socavan la sostenibilidad de la mayoría global. Movido por preocupaciones sobre las múltiples formas actuales de la opresión (incluida la violencia racializada, la injusticia económica, el desarrollo insostenible y daño ecológico), propusimos una sección temática especial y emitimos una convocatoria para recibir artículos reflexivos dedicados al tema de la descolonización de la ciencia psicológica. En esta introducción a la sección especial, primero discutimos dos perspectivas—psicología de la liberación y psicología cultural—que han fundamentado nuestro acercamiento al tema. A continuación discutimos manifestaciones de la colonialidad en la ciencia psicológica y describimos tres enfoques para la descolonización—indigenización, acompañamiento y desnaturalización—que surgen de las contribuciones a la sección especial. Concluimos con una invitación a las/os/xs lectores a enviar sus propias contribuciones originales a este esfuerzo en movimiento para crear y continuar una colección electrónica de artículos digitales sobre el tema de la descolonización de la ciencia psicológica.
Colonisation in Australia has had a devastating and lasting impact on the wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia (herein referred to as Indigenous Australians). This paper discusses the role of psychology in Australia and the negative impact that certain disciplinary theories and practices have had on Indigenous Australians. The impact has been further exacerbated by the failure of mainstream policy makers and mental health practitioners to recognise the key, distinctive cultural and social determinants that contribute to Aboriginal health and wellbeing. There is a growing response by Aboriginal psychologists, critical social theorists, and their allies to decolonise psychological theory and practice to redress this situation. This paper outlines key decolonising strategies that have been effective in interrupting those aspects of psychology that are inimical to Aboriginal wellbeing
Contemporary psychologists in the Arabic-speaking world remain deeply concerned with many of the same foundational issues that have impeded the development of sustainable research traditions since at least the 1950s. As a means of assessing historical and current trends in regional research practices, the project reported in this article employs a content analysis method to assess the cultural sensitivity of peer-reviewed English-language empirical studies conducted on peoples of the Arabic-speaking world. Results suggest that cultural sensitivity is quite low on many of the dimensions assessed, including whether/how findings are applied to everyday settings, validity of methodological procedures employed, the way cultural contributions to psychological processes are discussed, the local relevance of conclusions drawn from empirical findings, and how theories and concepts are transferred from mainstream (Western) psychology. The current findings are used to suggest some strategic and potentially controversial connections between culturally sensitive research and developing an appropriate psychology.
The inclusion of the social and cultural characteristics of groups in the concept of national development highlights the contributions that culturally sensitive psychological research can make to development efforts. It also highlights the relevance of assessing and promoting such research, especially in majority world countries where development needs are pressing. In the current study, a content analysis was conducted to assess the degree to which Lebanese psychological researchers in post-civil war Lebanon have engaged in culturally sensitive research practices. The Cultural Sensitivity Measure for Published Research, which was inspired by Adair, Puhan, and Vohra's ( 1993 ) measure of indigenization, was applied to 54 peer-reviewed English- and French-language empirical studies conducted by Lebanese researchers on Lebanese samples within Lebanon. The results suggest that while cultural sensitivity levels were generally low, the sampled researchers engaged in more sensitive practices compared to researchers in the region. For example, they used qualitative methods more often, made more efforts to ensure the cultural compatibility of their methods, and engaged in more complex conceptualizations of culture and its relationship with psychological processes. Furthermore, certain practices, such as studying diverse groups or using findings to suggest real-life applications, were found to be predictive of higher general levels of cultural sensitivity in the sampled articles. These research practices could be fostered in institutional and intellectual contexts, and such initiatives would go a long way in supporting a locally appropriate research infrastructure that contributes to national development efforts.
This article proposes that psychological research published in APA journals focuses too narrowly on Americans, who comprise less than 5% of the world's population. The result is an understanding of psychology that is incomplete and does not adequately represent humanity. First, an analysis of articles published in six premier APA journals is presented, showing that the contributors, samples, and editorial leadership of the journals are predominantly American. Then, a demographic profile of the human population is presented to show that the majority of the world's population lives in conditions vastly different from the conditions of Americans, underlining doubts of how well American psychological research can be said to represent humanity. The reasons for the narrowness of American psychological research are examined, with a focus on a philosophy of science that emphasizes fundamental processes and ignores or strips away cultural context. Finally, several suggestions for broadening the scope of American psychology are offered.
Social Psychology: A Very Short Introduction tells the story of social psychology, its history, concepts, and major theories. Discussing the classic studies that have defined the discipline, it introduces social psychology’s key thinkers, and shows how their personal histories spurred them to understand what connects people to people, and the societies in which we live. Taking us from the first ideas of the discipline to its most cutting-edge developments, it demonstrates how social psychology remains profoundly relevant to everyday life. From attitudes to attraction, prejudice to persuasion, health to happiness—social psychology provides insights that can change the world, and help us tackle the defining problems of the 21st century.
This article reviews the compelling volume edited by Wiebke Keim, Ercüment Çelik, Christian Ersche and Veronika Wöhrer Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences: Made in Circulation (2014) to critically assess some explanations of the emergence and the development the global regime of knowledge production and circulation of knowledge within it. While praising alternatives to some hegemonic and universalizing trends in knowledge production, it is sought to demonstrate that the way postcolonial studies have been projected in the Arab region does not sufficiently account for the complexity of the situation neither in this region nor elsewhere. It is argued, in the end, that it is necessary to forge post-authoritarian studies to supplement postcolonial studies.
The study investigated the content analysis, structural tendencies and indigenization of creativity, intelligence and gifiedness in research in the Arab world. The sample for the study constituted 50 studies both empirical (n =35), and theoretical (n = 15), in 18 journals, local (n =15) and international (n =3), published from 1984 to 1997. The study showed that Arab research is characterized by a single paradigm, which is a descriptive or psychometric one, in contrast to worldwide research which employs multiple types of designs. The study showed, in general, that the process of indigenizing of psychology is slow, compared to that achieved in India. However, research published by Arab psychologists in international journals and in allied fields are more sensitive to the local culture than research published in regional journals. The study suggested the need for both indigenous and cross-cultural studies of creativity, intelligence and giftedness, which can lead to the development of global understanding.
Over recent decades we have witnessed the globalization of research. However, this has yet to translate into a worldwide scientific network, across which competencies and resources can flow freely. Arab countries have strived to join this globalized world and become a 'knowledge economy,' yet little time has been invested in the region's fragmented scientific institutions; institutions that should provide opportunities for individuals to step out on the global stage. Knowledge Production in the Arab World investigates research practices in the Arab world, using multiple case studies from the region with particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. It depicts the Janus-like face of Arab research, poised between the negative and the positive and faced with two potentially opposing strands; local relevance alongside its internationalization. The book critically assesses the role and dynamics of research and poses questions that are crucial to further our understanding of the very particular case of knowledge production in the Arab region. The book explores research's relevance and whom it serves, as well as the methodological flaws behind academic rankings and the meaning and application of key concepts such as knowledge society/economy. Providing a detailed and comprehensive examination of knowledge production in the Arab world, this book is of interest to students, scholars and policy makers working on the issues of research practices and status of science in contemporary developing countries.
During my graduate school and early career days in the 1970s and 1980s, cross-cultural and global psychology were of marginal concern to most American (and European) psychologists. For my part, however, I considered the American psychology of the day to be highly ethnocentric in nature, in part because I had traveled widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa. So it was with great interest that, in 1990, I picked up Berman’s (1990) edited volume, Nebraska ’s Symposium on Motivation 1989: Cross-cultural Perspectives. Among its prominent chapter authors, Çiğdem stood out as the only non-westerner (Kağıtçıbaşı 1990). As a developmentally oriented social psychologist, I found her systematic way of linking cross-culturally variable family systems to equally variable socialization practices and to social change both novel and convincing – and I still do. Years later, I had the opportunity to meet Kağıtçıbaşı on a few occasions, such as the Twenty-sixth International Congress of Applied Psychology in Athens. This 2006 Congress was part of the ever-expanding movement to give psychology a global rather than merely Euro-American basis. Following this tradition, my chapter outlines the status and future prospects of psychology in some of Turkey’s neighboring Arab countries. In these countries, a battle is now underway for the hearts and minds of their inhabitants, a battle that pits fundamentalist interpretations of Islam against the politically and culturally more liberal frameworks suggested by the forces of modernization.
This article aims at questioning the relationship between Arab social research and language by arguing that many factors including the political economy of publication, globalization, internationalization and commodification of higher education have marginalized peripheral languages such as Arabic. The authors demonstrate, on the one hand, that this marginalization is not necessarily structurally inevitable but indicates dependency by choice, and, on the other hand, how globalization has reinforced the English language hegemony. This article uses the results of a questionnaire survey about the use of references in PhD and Master's theses. The survey, which was answered by 165 persons, targeted those who hold a Master's or PhD degree from any university in the Arab world or who have dealt with a topic related to the Arab world, no matter in which discipline.
This article attempts to demonstrate how the university system and the system of social knowledge production greatly influence elite formation in the Arab East (in Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territory, Jordan and Lebanon) by focusing on three intertwined factors: compartmentalization of scholarly activities, the demise of the university as a public sphere and the criteria for publication that count towards promotion. Universities have often produced compartmentalized elites inside each nation-state and they don’t communicate with one another: they are either elite that publish globally and perish locally or elite that publish locally and perish globally. The article pays special attention to elite universities.
The impact of psychology on the developing world has begun to receive some attention, but there is a need for theoretical concepts in order to provide a framework for critical discussion. Using the concepts ‘dual perception’ and ‘parallel growth’ (Moghaddam and Taylor 1985) as a framework, the concept of ‘appropriate psychology’ is introduced to assess the transfer of psychology from the developed to the developing world. Six criteria for evaluating appropriateness are discussed: self-reliance, needs responsiveness, cultural compatability. institutional feasibility, economic suitability and political practicality.
It is exactly 50 years since C Wright Mills (1959) penned his rendition of the sociological imagination as the interplay of biography and history, or, more actively, as transforming private troubles into public issues. Given the currency of Mills's pithy formula, one might expect sociologists to be all the more conscious of the connection between their own biography and history, or between their own personal troubles and public issues. Yet sociologists can be most obtuse about their position in society, silent as to how their ideas are an expression of the world in which they live, and, thus, naïve about the limits and possibilities of changing that world. So often, it is as if their ideas soar above the context in which they are produced, as if their creativity is a unique and ineffable quality divorced from their own social worlds. Sociologists are guilty of what Alvin Gouldner (1970) once called methodological dualism - that sociological analysis is for the sociologised not for the sociologist who miraculously escapes the social forces that pin down and constrain everyone else.
This asymmetry applies to C Wright Mills himself who harboured all manner of illusions about his self-defined isolation at the margins of academia, unshaped by the forces he described. Moreover, he thought that the analysis of the link between social milieu in which people live and the social structure which shaped that milieu would spontaneously give rise to the transformation of personal troubles into public issues. In other words, he seemed to think that knowledge immaculately produces its own power effects. Although he did have political programmes they were divorced from his sociological analysis. He did not investigate the way sociological imagination has to be connected to political imagination via organisation, institutions, and social movements if it is to contribute to social transformation. In the final analysis, he shared with the academics he criticised the illusion of the knowledge effect, and thus like them justified his separation and insulation from society.
In this paper I wish to suggest that, because it is a dominated sociology, Southern sociology more easily recognises its own place in society, which sets limits and creates possibilities for sociology's participation in social transformation. Moreover, sociological imagination is no guarantee of social transformation, the turning of personal troubles into public issues, as Mills implies, but this requires in addition a political imagination, forged through collective and collaborative practices with groups, organisations, movements beyond the academy. The expansion of Southern sociology depends on the dialectic of political and sociological imagination.
I will make this argument through the interrogation of the life and work of Edward Webster, one of South Africa's most distinguished sociologists. He is a perpetual motion machine - a windmill. A typical day in the life of Edward Webster might start out with a run on the golf course, interrupted by a conversation with local workers, then a debate on the radio with the head of the trade union federation, moving on to a meeting of SWOP (Sociology of Work Unit that he founded in 1983), and then to a lecture to SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) journalists, who are taking the two week course at the university, to the completion of a scholarly article, to a meeting with NUMSA (National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa) who want him to undertake research on workplace control. Perhaps during the day he will find some time to visit with his grandsons. He gets home late, energised by the day's activities, to be cooled out and debriefed by his wife, the renowned biographer and popular historian, Luli Callinicos.
What marks Webster's sociological practice is not just hyper-activity, but the intimate connection between his academic and his public lives: the one inseparable from the other. The Webster windmill takes in the winds of change - social, political and economic winds - and turns them into a prodigious intellectual engagement. As the winds intensify the windmill accelerates, generating ever higher voltage sociology. Sparks fly, igniting the political will as well as the sociological imagination of all those around him, and thus feeding more energy into the windmill. We are not here talking so much about the personal...
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
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