 Thank you. So we can go ahead and get started. Right on. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you. And thanks to everybody for being here. We are excited to be here today. All right, so this is the Kodak moment of the presentation. You may want to take a picture of this slide. The work that we are presenting today is based on our article that is in press that American psychologist, and we have a preprint available and we're providing the link to the preprint there. And so while you're getting your cameras or your snipping tools ready, we're just going to go around and briefly introduce ourselves. So Nicole, do you want to take it away? Absolutely. And are we doing around briefly first and then coming back around positionality? Or do... Sure. All right. So my name is Nicole Buchanan, and I am a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. And I'm starting my 20th year there now. Mitch. Hi, everyone. My name is Mitch Princeton, and I recently started as the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for being with us today. I'm Lydia Thurston, and I'm associate professor at Texas A&M University. Hi, everyone. My name is Marisa Perez, and I am an associate professor in the department of psychology at Arizona State University. Hi, everyone. All right, back to you, Nicole. Okay. So one of the things that we'll be talking about in a little while is something called positionality statements. And if you're not familiar with that, it's where the authors of a manuscript or the presenters, as we are here, that they give information about themselves and their identities. And that helps to provide a insight into the lens that they are seeing their work. I identify as a biracial black woman who grew up middle class, working class probably is more accurate. And although I wasn't the first person in my family to go to college, I was among the first and certainly the first one to get an advanced degree. So I come to this work with a lens that really was centered on focusing on how oppression occurs across a variety of domains. As long as I could possibly remember. Thank you, Mitch. I again, I identify as a heterosexual cisgender white male who is Ashkenazi Jewish. And I was a first gen student and I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'll turn it over to Ilya. Hi, everyone. Hi, I use she her her pronouns and I identify as a Nigerian immigrant black woman. I spent my formative years in Nigeria and then moved here and have come to understand the experience of racism in America and understand colonialism in West Africa. And I come with that lens to this work. And I'm just, you know, thrilled to be on this panel with these amazing colleagues. We've been in the trenches with this work and I feel like I've grown so much in the process and just it's great to be here. I'll pass to Marisol. Hi, everyone. So I identify as a heterosexual Hispanic. She her pronouns. I'm a first generation college student. And I grew up from an impoverished and at times food and secure background. And so that is my approach here today. So thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to work with these individuals on the panel today. We have had a great time working together. All right. So let's go ahead and get started. So as efforts to really end systemic racism gained momentum across various contexts, it is really critical to consider anti-racist steps needed to improve psychological science. And so the article that we wrote together really presents examples of how epistemic oppression exists within psychological science and including how science is conducted, reported, reviewed and disseminated. And importantly, this paper really offers a needed contribution by providing really specific recommendations to different stakeholders, including those involved in the production, in the reporting and the gatekeeping of science, as well as consumers of science. So our goal today is to briefly discuss these recommendations. But as you listen to this talk, I really want you to take some time to consider what are some immediate steps that you can start taking tomorrow, because it's kind of late right now for some of you, to really start to move the psychological science forward towards more inclusivity and equality. All right. So let's start with recommendation number one. Conduct and publish more research on race. And this is really for both authors and educator. There's a paucity of research on black indigenous and other people of color or BIPOC communities, particularly in mainstream journals relative to research on white populations. And this directly impacts the citation metrics and those scholars that study those topics. We also encourage research and papers on a diversity of topics. And for journals and educators, we really encourage to think about offering special issues on these that center around BIPOC communities or issues that are central to BIPOC communities. In addition, you can showcase or highlight research and studies that, that center on these BIPOC communities. In addition, we suggest to require authors to address applications of their work to populations of color and populations that are experiencing inequality, both in journals and reviewers as you're reviewing studies in that discussion section, talk about how these funding findings really generalized to those that experience inequalities and are often neglected in our research. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a further recommendation. Okay. So recommendation number two, exemplify values regarding diversity, equity and inclusion. So it just mentioned to conduct more research on race, but also to conduct research on the full spectrum of each of the BIPOC populations. Often you'll see that there's work on one subgroup, for example, and although this is very important, but like low income and a racial or ethnic minority group that is an important and vulnerable population, but it is equally important to look at middle class and upper class individuals of that same racial or ethnic group. So taking a more intersectionality perspective and making sure that we're looking at, at the diverse groups in that way. In addition, we recommend to authors to publish BIPOC research from a strength based perspective. Consider looking at resiliency and protective factors. So much of the research is done on risk factors or from an individual deficit perspective. And that really can perpetuate some stereotypes. In addition, we really want to push journals to consider in their mission statements language that reflect the values of diversity, equity and inclusion. Like we said, showcase papers that really are relevant to BIPOC populations. And express value in publishing BIPOC related manuscripts. In addition, training the editorial staff on these priorities and highlighting this expectation to reviewers. We also encourage authors to include positionality statements and for journals to allow it just like we started today. And in our manuscript, we also have a positionality statement to role model for others. Finally, we really recommend that journals think through a bit more about the page limits that include reference sections. Research and studies show that individuals are more likely to cite white authors more than, than any other author group. And it can be impacted by limiting the number of references. So two things there to consider is one has a reviewer to consider references that include diverse scholars, but two to consider alternatives. Then including those reference limits. Okay. Recommendation number three, we're moving right along. And so promote diversity science and research methods that are appropriate for BIPOC populations. And that really goes directly to authors, right? It is really important in our field that we, that we really encourage diverse research methods that center the voices of BIPOC communities and related to that to train students on diversity science theory and diverse research methods. For example, community-based participatory research methods. And to train students on the decision-making on when research methods might be more appropriate and the diverse factors that's important to consider, including diversity, equity and inclusivity when making those decisions. We also really want to highlight the importance of recruiting diverse samples at graduate-level research methods courses. And that really goes to educators, right? That more diverse graduate-level research methods courses will train that next generation to really be able to perform and more high-level training in DE and I. Finally, we also want to suggest that these methods really capture the diverse heterogeneity in our samples. We will hear examples of reviewers we're telling authors unless there's a theoretical or empirical studies that validate don't lump all of your, let's say racial and ethnic groups together. And that really can obscure findings that centralize the BIPOC communities. And so we really recommend allowing authors to do analyses that better capture the heterogeneity if they do have that diverse sample. And related to that, journals and reviewers, we suggest incentivizing people, incentivizing scholars that submit research using diversity science approaches. And there are a number of ways that we can do this. We can write letters to those authors that they can submit in their annual evaluations or in their promotion and tenure portfolios. They really highlight the importance of their work and that the work was really showcasing the values of DE and I. Another option is to give authors free access to webinars or free access to certain issues of the journal as an incentive for engaging in diversity science. Recommendation number four, encourage the recruitment of more diverse samples. And we came up with a number of different strategies that we feel authors and educators could really start doing right away. For example, when using psychology 101 subject pools, collaborate with community colleges who often have more diverse samples. So that's one really simple, easy strategy, especially today where we use online surveys to really expand the diversity of a student of the sample. Also consider establishing community partnerships with BIPOC organizations to increase diverse samples. For journals and reviewers, consider the demographic characteristics of the United States and report how research samples compare to these two national statistics. I think this is really important, especially when we're talking about the generalizability of our work. And relatedly to journals and reviewers require discussion of the lack of diversity in a study when it is predominantly white participants. And what that might mean, and definitely put that in the limitation section. Recommendation number five, encourage, require the use of system-centered language. It is really important to frame results within systemic structures that maintain disparate outcomes when interpreting the findings. And so for authors, we highlight, we really encourage the use of system-centered language. And that can be tricky to do, and it does take practice and training. And let me give you an example. Often you'll see in a manuscript hypotheses that say, you know, this, we hypothesize that X racial and ethnic group is going to have a poor outcome on some certain, on some variables. Rather than saying that, we would recommend a sentence such as that, given the historical inequalities in access and treatment to quality healthcare, we hypothesize that X racial or ethnic group is going to have a poor outcome on this variable. So that's a very, that's a one example that we can provide you about framing language so that is more system-centered. We also recommend training students on this system-centered language and having them practice in that manner to educators. And to journals, we would suggest updating the author guidelines to require the use of system-centered language. Relatedly, we training reviewers and editors on using system-centered language. And to journals, specifically, we recommend that system-centered language be incorporated and mandated in the next revision of the APA publication manual. We would also suggest to journals to require authors to confirm or attest that they did use system-centered language when submitting their manuscript. And to everyone, authors, educators, journals and reviewers, you know, really review manuscripts for person-first language and system-centered language. All right, Nicole, I'm handing it off to you now. Thank you, thank you. So moving to recommendation six, please. So here, some of these, these are so concrete and so simple, but updating journal keywords so that they're more inclusive. And a really easy step is that, or consideration is that manuscript submission portals end up communicating values. What kind of research is valued? What kind of research is certainly not valued. And so our list of keywords that many articles, many journals require you give the categories that the research belongs to, they need to be updated to ensure that they're including categories related to diversity, equity and inclusion. And so authors can do their best to make sure that they're using specific and relevant keywords that describe the nuances in diversity science research. But of course the authors are limited to what journals have and journals need to increase the pool of diversity related keywords that they have and include topics or items like racism, structural inequality, cultural humility, implicit bias, discrimination, ethnic identity, racial identity. We also suggest that they need to have an other field where authors can add a descriptor that might be missing from the list and that they regularly review and update their keywords to remain current with evolving language that's used in diversity science. And then recommendation seven, define race contextually and conceptually. Hopefully this audience doesn't need convincing of this, but race is a political construct, it's a social construct, but it is independent of biology and this construct reflects systemic racist practices and inequities. Our educators have to train the students, train students to better understand this and to be able to incorporate that into the research that they do and how they disseminate their findings. In addition to educators and authors doing this though, journal author, journals need to make requirements that authors place their work within the context and that they be explicit about contextualizing race and ethnicity when they're writing their findings. Now this can be done in positionality statements similar to what we did in the beginning because this will help tie authors to potential biases they may have as well as expertise that they may have due to their lived experiences. And then journals and reviewers will also need to ensure that manuscripts properly contextualize race and gender and other factors like race, ethnicity, gender. How might they do this? Well, one, they can make sure that they're being properly defined and that they are properly discussing how race and context could impact the findings in their discussion sections. We have a slide, recommendation eight. So reporting race and ethnicity and within group heterogeneity. Many do not fully understand the differences between terms like race, ethnicity, even nationality often can be used interchangeably and often be confused by individuals. And although there are calls that at a minimum studies should report and consider finer differentiation within BIPOC being black, indigenous and people of color. 73% of psychology papers across 11 journals did not provide any data on race or ethnicity of the participants. Which means we have zero understanding of how those findings generalize or what the limitations of their generalizability are. So we need to have not only the basic of reporting that information about participants, but we also need to explore whether or not the findings are similar or they're different across groups. And we also need to consider reporting and analyzing across intersecting identity groups. So we can know, do the findings apply to black women? Do they apply to Latino men? And in addition, it's critically important that we no longer allow discussion sections to have very superficial comments on general generalizability that then presume that the results, if it's a white sample, are generalizable. But when it's a sample of color that it's only generalizable to that group, all papers need to be very thoughtful about how they're talking about generalizability and that they don't go beyond the groups that were included in their study. And recommendation nine, create systems to detect and fix inequalities in the review process. We know that there are ongoing patterns of systemic racism that it can actually affect the trajectory of an entire scientific discipline. So we recommend that publishing outlets and societies, professional associations, all those places that sponsor journals, create and maintain processes that allow scholars to report practices that are maintaining epistemic oppression. So this can happen in a variety of different ways. But one, they have to monitor the current practices in place and then begin to analyze and identify areas where there could be improvement. This would then, for accountability's sake, figure out where you're going to make changes, set benchmarks for change, and then review that process annually so that you can determine it if you are having progress, if you are making gains. And we suggest that that be something that's publicly reported. We also know that papers that are related to marginalized topics or identified groups that are marginalized in society are often not given the same kind of equitable review and are more likely to encounter more cycles of reviews, more likely to have desk rejections, and longer timeline before they get reviews back. So journals need to begin to track how these papers are handled, track their rejections, track the topic of the papers that are rejected in different categories. This includes desk rejections that never go out for review, but also looking at what was the timeline it took to return reviews to authors and how many times are articles being rejected because they couldn't find a reviewer to do it. And then we have to have mechanisms for reporting bias in statements, in reviews, and in protocols that are, when action editors are passing on reviews that have problematic and bias comments, we need to have a mechanism for making sure that that is reportable to the journal so that hopefully they can also then address that with that reviewer. And recommendation 10. So recommendation 10, tackle racism from the top down. If anyone here works within organizations, what you already know is that the leadership sets the tone. So we have to implement changes at the top that then address ongoing racism in the review process in academic publishing. And then we need to provide training to the editorial team that begins to change these processes. So all parties involved in academic publishing can vigilantly monitor processes that create inequalities in science. This would include thinking about when we're hiring editors when we're hiring leadership and publishing, what are the values that we are looking for? What are the accomplishments that we find important? So consider candidates' abilities and track record in creating an equitable environment and then vetting their editors. Require that candidates do things like submit a diversity statement. And journals can do so much. So examine their current leadership and then develop procedures that promote equitable practices and leadership selection. Evaluate journals on the metrics related to the presence of BIPOC people and topics and how they're represented in both authorship, editorial membership, and in the content that they're publishing. And of course, participating in training related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I will say training is really largely about making sure we have awareness that these things are real and they happen and that we have some common language. But there has to be commitment to sustained education, training, and change that's going to really result in there being a difference in practices on the ground. And of course, when we're talking about training, we can't stop with just the leadership. We can't stop with just the reviewers. We have to make sure that the training goes across every member of the editorial team, every member of the academic publishing process if we really want to see change in white supremacy and science. And I will pass the mic on to the next recommendation. Thanks so much. I am so excited about, I just want to take a moment and an intermission here for a second. Just to say how much I learned from this process and this opportunity for us to all work together on this paper and really to help elevate some of these comments that I think have been under addressed for far too long. And it's just so, so important that I think we think about the ways that we can benefit from each other's sciences and we really appreciate the comments that are coming in the chat so we can be hearing about other issues that have kind of been addressed within other disciplines and ways in which our work could be used or could be used to help others. One of the things that I think that many, many scholars from communities of color have experienced very often is discrimination or really offensive comments that come in the peer review process itself. Now for those who are not scholars from communities of color you might be surprised to learn just how often this happens, but imagine for all of the work that goes into our attempts to diversify our fields and increase the pathways towards a more diverse group of scholars for those young scholars to enter undergraduate programs to submit their first manuscripts for review and then the reviews that they get back from respected scholars in the field to say things that pretty explicitly suggests that these young scholars lived experiences somehow don't count or are being invalidated or are suggested as being not important to incorporate or in some ways even offending the notion of these constructs and concepts as not being as not fitting the prior scientific evidence which of course is predominantly dominated from a white point of view. And I think that that is so incredibly not only offensive and damaging, but it really then undoes a lot of the work that we've been trying to engage in to try and have a really diverse group of scholars and I think that this cycle and this way that we ultimately end up offending and potentially alienating the diverse members of our up-and-coming scholars is something we really need to look at very carefully within a number of our disciplines. There are a number of ways that we could address some of that feedback and really think about how we can do that. First of all, we might want to think specifically about how to train editors who themselves may not have experienced this before as they were younger scholars to think about the appropriate ways to give that kind of feedback to reviewers when they see these types of microaggressions or outright offensive statements kind of mentioned in the context of reviews and also for editors to use their editorial prerogative to be able to buffer those comments or position those comments and give that feedback publicly as well. So the author of the manuscripts and the reviewers can see that editors will not tolerate that kind of feedback and there isn't a need and an opportunity for really a different way that we think about how to give reviewer feedback. I think also we might want to think about whether there are ways of really helping authors to safely and appropriately be able to give feedback to the editors, the publishers, and the scientific associations that really house those journals. It's very, very hard because there's an inherent power differential of course for authors. You never think that authors are going to say that was a bad review. I'm going to complain about that. That's a really tough thing to do. But if we could create a safer platform and opportunity for authors to even anonymously share that the feedback that they got was actually offensive. It was off-putting and it was maintaining kind of a white default or a way in validating the context and the lived experience of scholars. That would be an incredibly important mechanism that could be put into place. So I think that there are ways that one can imagine putting something like that together that could be helpful. I think moving on to recommendation 12, thanks so much for advancing those alone, is of course we need to think about ways that we can really increase the number of scholars from communities of color to be part of the journal reviewer and editor process. Now a number of scientific associations have actually found funds to be able to incentivize editors to increase the number of action editors that they might have for their journal to be able to bring in and mentor younger scholars who might particularly be from diverse communities and really help to develop that resume. Because of course a lot of folks are not going to be common editor unless they've been an associate editor and a lot of associates are going to get there only because they've been doing lots of reviews and have developed that relationship. So we need to walk the walk here and not just talk about and lament that there aren't enough scholars from communities of color to invite as reviewers and actually use funds and use our authority to increase mentorship and create opportunities to have additional reviewers, additional editors. And I think that's really important. I think of course if we think about a lot of graduate programs and doctoral programs, maybe there's a way that some doctoral advisors will come up with an opportunity to mentor and review process with their students. But interestingly we don't really have a systematic way of doing that within graduate programs for a lot of disciplines. And that would be actually a very instructive and helpful thing that we could be doing for all of our students, but perhaps particularly for students who are coming from communities of color. And that would be really important. I think what we can do is create some benchmarks. So if everyone were to look at the number of their reviewers and the number of editors in the journals for their discipline right now, establish what the proportion of those reviewers and editors are today, who are scholars representing communities of color or other areas of diversity, that gives us a great benchmark and a great way for us to then start looking at the progress that we're making. And that becomes a science. So we can really look at together what practices are working to increase those numbers over time. We can help to celebrate and publicize what journals might have more of a safe climate because those are journals where there are a number of reviewers and editors who are coming and will understand and respect that the white kind of dominated theories and methods are not necessarily going to be the ones that are looked at as having the scientific backing needed to lead to a journal article being accepted. So I think it's really important that we start really looking towards quantifying what we're doing, publicizing that and really using that as a basis for increasing our work and then sharing tips with what led to these outcomes, which we can measure scientifically. In recommendation number 13, thanks so much for advancing those along, I think there are also ways that we can really think about the way that we're getting new voices into our system. So we're not going to affect multi-systemic change without thinking about creative solutions that affect every system of the way that we do science. And that might be that we think a little bit differently about the ways that we can confront and learn from perspectives that are not going to be dominated by the groups that have traditionally had most of the power and who have had the opportunity to have most of the voice and how is that science has continued. One way that we can do that, of course, is to have folks within the communities that we're hoping to serve and the communities that we're hoping our samples are representing to actually be able to comment on the journal articles that we're producing. Now, this can be done in a number of different ways. Within journals, of course, we're not going to expect folks who might not be scientists to comment, perhaps, on statistics or on the methods. But there might be ways that kind of a comment within the discussion section or a commentary that follows an article to be able to talk about ways that the community may or may not find that science to be useful to addressing the questions that are of most value or stating it in language that's likely to have the most applicability. That's really important. There are some scientific societies that have done a really cool thing where they've had scientists really get up and do a symposium like we've all seen, like we're doing right now, but then have a community member who also is able to speak within that and say, you know, here's the way in which the science really speaks to me or the community that I represent. And here's how it doesn't. And I think that, you know, you would all benefit from really doing this in a very different way. And that's just a fascinating and really important way for us to more rapidly make sure that what we're doing in the journals really has the impact that I think we all want in many of our disciplines in the communities that we're hoping to work within. So that could be a really fantastic way to really make an impact. For recommendation number 14, we really talk about ways that we should be spending more of our energy into helping our BIPOC scholars to engage in editing and reviewing. And this needs to be put into a context because it seems to be the case that in many, many different disciplines in many universities, of course, those scholars who are coming from communities of color have a higher service burden than others. So these are folks who might be more likely to be asked to work on a search committee because there needs to be diversity within each search committee. There might be ways in which there's invisible service too. Many scholars, especially predominantly white institutions, might be doing an incredible amount of service meeting with students from communities of color and serving as a role model and serving as an example and a mentor, an informal mentor to really help guide and pay back to students to increase those pathways into the field. Well, with all of that service going on, both the invisible and the mandated kind of service, we then ask for BIPOC scholars to be part of the reviewing process and take on more reviews and more editing. Well, that's just unfair. And I think, again, if we really want to think about the ways that we're going to make an impact, we have to think about new and creative systems that we can, new and creative ways to change long held systems that have been developed by and reinforced by predominantly majority or white scholars. So we should think about ways, as Nicole and Marisol were saying before, that we can send letters from our professional societies to the tenure packet of our scholars from communities of color to say, this is a tremendously important service and this should be given a huge weight within this person's promotion and tenure. And no, they may not have as many publications as people who are asked to do less service and that's great because that means that they are spending time doing service that is so critical to the field to really make sure that our voice and our reviewing that's done is not going to be predominantly, it's not going to be dominated by this white perspective. So we really got to think about ways that we are supporting and encouraging and incentivizing the editing and the reviewing that we're wanting to see happen. Several professional societies have done a great job of establishing formal mentorship programs in the review process, which can really help as well. And that's another way that we could really be sharing information across disciplines and sub-disciplines to make sure that we are thinking of creative solutions to change this very systemic issue. And I think with that, recommendation number 15 is going to move on to IDIA. Or is it not? This is actually mine too. Sorry about that. The other thing that we can do is recognize that so many of the things that we have written and I am guilty of this as well and I am constantly interested in learning and listening and doing better, but we have sometimes written things that have suggested that our quantitative approaches or our findings suggesting racial and ethnic differences, we kind of say those things, we write those things and not recognize that does damage, that reifies stereotypes. Those are ways in which we are continuing to create a dialogue within our fields that might be continuing to create a white default in the way that we think about our theories, our methods, our findings. And it's very, very important that we think of these as creating a safe conversation for people to learn to understand and to get critiques specifically on the way in which we do science. One of the ways that we do that might be to ask scholars to present commentaries to articles in which we've made statements having to do with race and ethnicity and really help to create a safe conversation where people can feel that this is an opportunity for learning as well. We do this for the review process for so many other things if it comes to an analytic approach or whatnot, but ultimately those kinds of reviews tend to reinforce this white default approach. If we really wanted to invest in helping to learn and change and remove that white default or that white supremacy, then we would invite opportunities to learn and to hear from other voices in a way that really helped us to recognize the limitations of our own work in ways that we have not done before. And with that, I do think that the next recommendation does pass it off to Idia. Sorry about that. All good. Thanks, Mitch. So kind of joining my colleagues and moving us through the last set of recommendations and hopefully open up to a robust discussion. Recommendation six is to track rejection rates for manuscripts with BIPOC samples. So there was a comment in the chat about, you know, how much does, how much do we think addressing some of these issues will result in, I guess, behavior change. And I think that really aligns with this comment for a specific reason. The issue with all of these recommendations that we're talking about is there's no data. So we don't know. We don't know a lot of these things. We don't know if just reviewers knowing that someone could know who they are would make a change in their behavior. And I think part of our push and our, what we're hoping comes out of all of this is that we just start to collect the data so that we can figure out how best to make change and where best to make change. So one major area that's really important is how we track and monitor rejection rates. So we want to think broadly about rejection. So not just when papers actually put into the reviewer system, but desk rejects. So collecting data on the demographic distribution of for desk rejects, looking at reviewed papers. As Nicole had mentioned earlier, looking at papers that how long it takes to go out to review, to be reviewed. How many cycles of revisions it goes through. Journal editors have the power to determine what science does or does not make it, what type of science does it does not make it into our field. They are gatekeepers. They do determine what gets pushed out. And so we want to lean on journal editors to really make an impact here. This is an area where a major change could occur. We know that a higher percentage of BIPOC scholars engage in BIPOC centered work, work that centered in the experiences of BIPOC communities. So that means that if a lot of those scholars work is rejected, then it makes it has a disproportionate impact on the careers of BIPOC scholars, including in the promotion and tenure area. And so all of these factors sort of compound the issue that we've been talking about in our field for a long time about the lack of diversity in our science and the lack of diversity on boards. But all of these issues compound and drive out certain scholars and retain other scholars in a disproportionate way. So a journal that would be excelling in this category is one that would report manuscript rejection rates across the different keywords that Nicole had referred to earlier to assess whether there are any inequities towards BIPOC scholarship. And most importantly, set benchmarks for improvement. So we all, you know, taking a cultural humility approach, we all know that there's room to improve. And collecting data doesn't dam certain journals to the ether. It's really owning the space that we currently are in. And then setting setting benchmarks to move things forward. And that's really what we're looking for folks to address. Next slide, please. So moving on to recommendation number 17. We want to encourage the empowerment of authors to educate educate the field about race. Now this is one that I sometimes cringe about because I just want to emphasize that we're not putting the load on BIPOC scholars to then constantly be the ones educating people. So we're really thinking broadly here. We're thinking about our training programs and updating training programs for psychological scientists to explicitly discuss and train students on the added value of BIPOC center scholarship. Now what do we mean by that? So scholars who publish on BIPOC center topics have to skillfully critique why prior research by white authors or on white populations may not be applicable to their sample. So many times reviews come back and say, oh, this is not novel. However, this work has not been examined in the population that's being examined. And so there is an education components that is necessary so that people understand that a phenomenon being shown in one group does not mean that it applies to other groups. And because BIPOC center scholarship tends to be more than a number of BIPOC journals and therefore it's less read less often by white scholars. And because there are fewer BIPOC scholars, there are then fewer qualified experts were able to evaluate research on BIPOC populations. And Mitch alluded to this earlier. So this puts a higher burden on BIPOC authors to provide like a whole textbook description of why this work is so important. And you're writing and writing and trying to convince these reviewers as to why this topic is so critical. And we know that that puts a higher burden than on BIPOC authors or authors who are publishing on BIPOC populations. That is unjust and needs to be changed. And so our call here is for training programs to take up some of that load to train students to value and describe how studies of BIPOC populations contribute to the literature and to the field to educate readers and reviewers on how to skillfully respond to bias comments in the editorial process. And this really falls on both authors on journals and on reviewers. And then to train students and scholars to proactively challenge and rebut any common biases about BIPOC scholarship and really promoting the significance of the added value of BIPOC research. So a training program that would excel in this category is one that would support and lead educational and training efforts that raise awareness about the value of BIPOC scholarship, raise awareness about bias in prior work and prior published studies, and that really supports this need to open racism in our psychological science. So recommendation number 18 is to report and reward community-based dissemination. So we want to emphasize the key point here is that we avoid penalizing manuscripts that have been disseminated to broader community settings. So the ways in which our science is disseminated plays an important role in upholding white supremacy. Because as scientists, we have to be equally accountable to share our findings with the community. And also with the communities whose behaviors we're trying to impact. We don't do a lot of training or prepare students to do dissemination of work. And so really changing how we do that in our field. And then to this end, we must not penalize public dissemination efforts. And in fact we should encourage or maybe encourage public dissemination of work. And so we're facing a version of the paper that you published so that the people you're trying to impact actually get those findings. And that might look like different things. It might be an op-ed. It might even be a Twitter post. But the point is you push yourself to communicate your findings to populations who maybe otherwise would not have access to public-facing dissemination. And so we want to make sure that originality index scores are adjusted for any kind of public-facing dissemination efforts. And that we really celebrate when those kind of initiatives or actions are taken. So a journal that will be excelling in this category might be one that actively encourages public and community dissemination of work. And so we want to make sure that public dissemination efforts may be over a third of their articles include public dissemination plans for BIPOC communities. And then recommendation 19 is to create public-focused dissemination strategies that extend to BIPOC communities. So it's not enough to sort of have this public-facing dissemination effort, but it's not enough to have this public-facing dissemination effort. So we want to promote and support innovative dissemination tools that extend the reach of our science broadly and specifically to BIPOC communities. So we have new metrics like alt-metrics that really think about impact beyond journal citations. And so using those type of metrics is really important. And so I think it's a great opportunity for us to go to this conference and practice oriented journals might offer ways to get our science used and into the hands of the public. And really as much as we cringe, love and hate news media, but it's a way to get our work out to the public. It's a way to push our science out to the public. So we want to encourage these dissemination efforts in these variety of formats are tailored for BIPOC communities and that journals hire and support dedicated staff with specialized dissemination skills in these areas. So a journal that's excelling in this category might be one that tracks the proportion of papers whose findings were directly disseminated to the public and specifically were targeted BIPOC communities in their dissemination efforts. And not only that, but that they report on these numbers annually. So again, there's this accountability built in and continued striving for growth. Final recommendation number 20 involves community members being co-authors. So critical to this point, we want to emphasize that authors work with community partners to disseminate findings in a range of outlets. I've gotten push back before about community members being co-authors. And I think that's something we have to emphasize. The knowledge that's provided in a research article that we start to value lived experience as much as we value our ability to our educational colleagues that we really put lived experience and academic knowledge on a similar playing field because they both contribute to the issues that we're talking about. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about community members on ways on how best to disseminate findings for broadest community impact. And that's knowledge that they can provide because they're living in those communities. They have everyday experience with that community. And when we do those kind of partnerships there's less of a struggle in terms of how to get your work out. And it reduces the workload that those of us in the academic ivory tower have to take on. So we really want to encourage this idea of community partners as co-authors on our papers and as who supports the dissemination of our research to communities that are impacted by the research so it occurs with community partners as co-authors. And that would be a great goal for journals to move towards. So this recommendation really applies to journal editors but also to authors to encourage us to do more partnering with community members. So that brings us towards the end of our presentation. We have a few more slides to talk about that. There's a lot of conversation about racial reckoning happening. Many scientists across different fields have begun to discuss processes that have unfairly benefited white scholars over black indigenous people of color scientists. Many scientists have talked about how these processes have advanced research on white populations over populations of color and how these processes have maintained a default reliance on scientific theories and methods that originated from white dominated perspectives. Even further originated from eugenics movement and were created with that in place. We really need to take a moment to understand what our field is building off of and how we change that direction of our field. It's not enough to raise the white flag and say we're doing something wrong. We have to really be accountable to that. We're past the days of promising things. We have to be accountable to that. Without accountable action behind it. We cannot allow whiteness to resume the default norm. We created a draft accountability index by this team. That's the website link that's provided. It's open access. It allows people to openly comment and debate about how best can we keep journals, authors, educators, publishers accountable to changing the way our field is structured and maintained. It's an open dialogue. We have the website link up here. Every lab, every journal, every scientific society, every institution in the world. It will allow the public to keep us all accountable. It will increase the likelihood of lasting change. Maybe even those who score high on this index can be championed in a similar way as how we look at impact factors. APA is leading the way. American psychological association is supporting those harms. I think that is a great step in moving towards that. We have to acknowledge past and current wrongdoings in order to move forward in good faith. Many of these communities have been negatively impacted by our science. It's time for us to reckon with that and to honor everyone's lived experience. In conclusion, today we have a great opportunity to greatly move psychological science by dismantling white supremacy and epistemic oppression in our discipline. It is noted that although our paper and this presentation we are giving you today is aimed to highlight the systemic nature of change to achieve equity, inclusion, diversity, and justice by highlighting simultaneous actions that are needed across a bunch of different stakeholders. This is by no means exhaustive. There are many things that could not make the list. We know that we have to cut many hours of trying to decide how we are going to move forward. It is by no means exhaustive. We know that grant funding agencies matter in the type of science that comes through. Institutions of higher education are also among other systems that require change in order to fully eliminate white supremacy in the field's scientific endeavors. Psychological science is aiming to understand that we are all humans. Only when epistemic oppression is eliminated will our discipline really have the opportunity to achieve this goal. There are many blind spots within psychological science. In addition to white supremacy we know we center intersectionality. We know as we started our presentation that we are not only our race, but we are also a group of individuals that have played our signs for a very long time. We want to bring us together to a personal accountability. In addition to our systems having accountability we also want to bring ourselves to accountability. We leave you with this question before we open it up for questions from the larger group. Maybe we will take a couple of minutes to give people a chance to write this down or think about it. Considering all the things you have heard today in our talk, if you are watching this recorded later, or those who are currently here in the room, considering everything you have heard today, what are three action steps that you can commit to take to upend racism in your area of science, in your specific slice of this pie? I am a psychologist. We can't help but make smart goals. It is not enough to name the three steps. When will you take your first step? Marisol started off saying tomorrow, maybe tonight, but maybe tomorrow for those of us on different time zones. When will you take that first step? What is the thing you will do? If you don't do it in the next three days, I have read a study about this that is not likely to happen. I hope that folks take some time now. I am hoping it is okay. We can maybe take a minute for folks to think about those three steps that they will take and when they will take their first step. If people feel comfortable, you are welcome to put comments in the chat about that. Thank you. Thank you. Now we have a question that came in. Do we want to go ahead and get started with the Q&A? Can you speak about how we can keep in mind and be sensitive to BIPOC community's interests and rights when required to publicly share information? Great question. This is one of my big pet peeves. I am a fan of many aspects of open science, but I think this is particularly problematic. One of the things we are commonly seeing is that individuals who have no real connection to the populations don't really understand the context. Maybe we had no involvement in the data collection and having to do whatever work was done to build community and pick through the data and present stories in ways that may be inconsistent with what was intended by the original data collection team. I am certainly from what the community themselves had to say and would have chosen to have said about them. This has been a significant critique. I am taking this in a particular direction of should we be doing this? My answer is no. I am not going to go down that road. There are many levels that we need to think about how this practice is problematic and what we might do to protect participants in this process. I would be curious where it is happening that this is a requirement that will be presented in what ways we can push back on doing that and what kind of variables we don't offer and things of that nature. I would love to hear more about the context in which it is happening and I would like to know if you have any questions. I think this is where system-oriented language is so important for us to be teaching. Journals to require it. Authors to verify that that is the approach they took and integrating that into training programs for all disciplines. I think it is important to create a narrative that is not capturing the true ways that we think about the social constructs of race and ethnicities. I do think that is important. It doesn't solve all of the issue but I think it would significantly reduce the extent to which more harmful things are happening. This is where community partners can be key and letting participants know this might be a possibility. Understanding from them and community partners what are they comfortable with and what is unacceptable to them and putting that in the code books and having some sort of gatekeeper to have access or gain access to a data set. That is another where someone can monitor the publications that are being used. Also make them aware of the ethical statements and positionality statements that the participants in the community partners themselves have made too. I think there are some things we can do to keep up with the public data sets and the public data sources. At the end of the day, who is going to keep up in monitoring the gatekeeping of these public data sets? I think the one thing I was going to add was that the point about partnering and co-authoring with community partners really comes up here and I think it's important to make sure that the public data is protected and that similar trust the folks who are using that data have to engage in the same kind of trust. They also have to draw connections with the community. I think if folks are willing to do that to understand where that data is coming from and not just like here are some numbers I think there has to be a similar agreement between that researcher who wants to use that data and the community from which it came from. If our science wants to do that, then creating a structure or system where that happens so that the folks who's data was provided thinking it would impact their local community and now it's being generalized to a broader community in the United States that's not why they gave that information and so that has been violated in that way and so there really has to be this commitment from the researcher side who wants to use that data to honor that specifically. That was a great question and so I'm thinking while we wait for more questions to come in would we like to discuss what are some action steps that we are currently engaging in from our recommendations and some of the barriers that we sometimes experience in implementing those recommendations. I'm happy to share one that I know it's really hard and I've been trying to be very intentional is system centered language. I know that when I read other things I've written that cringe at the language that I used to describe people who look like me and I think like, man, what did I feel like at the time writing that? I didn't know there was another way because I was taught that way and so my biggest growth area or my biggest pursuit is that in everything we read that comes out of my lab we read and look for ways that we can really center the system in the experiences we're talking about and that we keep this is again another opportunity for cultural humility we understand that we didn't know what we didn't know and so as we move forward now we know that this language is empowering and doing that also has helped the heaviness that sometimes is in this work because of the systems and the way our systems are structured when I've been able to center it in the root cause of that system it doesn't feel as heavy and so that's definitely one thing that I've been trying to implement that's been tough but we keep working at it. That's the same here I will say personally that it has definitely been a really helpful process to look not so helpful to look back at probably things I wrote but helpful to look at the ways that we're doing things in the future and really advising that to other authors now when involved in a team project and people are generally very receptive and really appreciate learning that there are other ways I would say also the in doing data collection even the ways and the ways that we ask people to identify themselves tends to communicate whether or not we feel that diversity is relevant or if we ask somebody if we only give the choice of let's say African American and not suggest you might identify as black but not African American and that is important and valued and we're going to offer that response choice to demonstrate that you are included and your perspective is valued and we're not going to lump you in with somebody else you know the ways in which we're trying to be thoughtful in our data collection process itself you know really communicates a lot about how we think scientifically and how we respect the participants that work in our projects I will say that from the broader perspective I'm very excited about the number of things that you mention that APA is engaged in you know one of the other things that we're doing that you all you have all been very helpful in thinking through is the production of a document that we're just starting this work now to really help educate folks during the promotion and tenure process about the ways in which people from communities of color might experience and disproportionate amount of service might be asked to put their manuscripts and lower impact factor journals because studies on communities of color have traditionally been just wait you know not same frequency from the higher impacts kind of journals you know or there's been a demand for comparison groups white comparison groups in order to get in higher impact journals I think now we all look and see that those practices are incredibly offensive and inappropriate but nevertheless it takes a long time for change to occur and I'm really excited Marisol is actually going to be on the task force to really produce a document that we're hoping will be attached literally to each and every dossier that goes up and we're hoping that people from other fields will see that when it goes up to promotion tenure committees at universities and similar practices will be adopted in other scientific fields outside of psychology as well so we're really excited about the ways that psychology can be part of the dialogue perhaps even leading the ways that we really think about academia and the ways that we can be eliminating white supremacy in the academy I can say for me some of what I'm choosing to do at this stage of my career is to also begin to make the critiques and make them louder and make them kind of make them often and so not only of course with this paper but you know trying to get information out there that's offering the critique but also offering the education so talking about what really is intersectional research and how is that different from what most of the field is doing right now and calling intersectional research and then what would we need to change to make our research truly intersectional and then how doing that actually elevates all research not just research that's on BIPOC people but also everyone's scholarship is enhanced getting out information what you were talking about Mitch directly about what are impact factors actually measuring while they're measuring subscribership and so when you are doing research that appeals to a wide general population then that's going to appeal to the journals that have the highest impact factors typically but impact factors were never intended and that's what I wanted to talk about in the commentary on an individual's paper or an individual scholar let alone their program of research but people use it as a lazy proxy basically to rank order things and that's never how they were intended and getting people back to the education and the information that makes that not just my argument because I'm BIPOC I want you to think about my work and what I said in their initial writings about how they should and should not be used so I'm trying to do more to get the information out more broadly and feel kind of I'm in a good place professionally where I can afford to do that kind of writing and I'm allowed to do that kind of writing where I can express my educated opinion on things and actually have it catch hold because I was not the case for me the last 15 years, the first 15 years of my career and I think also we're seeing a shift societally where now there's ears to hear as we say hear some of this now so it's getting new traction so I'm trying to use this new time frame and this kind of new age of at least having awareness to broaden the education and then get it out in concrete publications so people have stuff to reference when they're saying this is real, these things happen to BIPOC scholars or this is the way this kind of research is mistreated in grant review processes. Fantastic, I'm very similar to Ivia where I'm working on system-centered language and it is, it's hard and I have looked back as well and cringed at some of our publications and it's so much easier to help others than it is to actually edit your own writing so the other thing that we've started to do is in every single publication we are now submitting a supplemental table that is more information than you could ever want to know about the characteristics of our sample from as many intersectional ways with also some descriptive stuff on the variables of relevance for that study as just a supplemental because another thing that we have noticed is that there are a number of future meta-analyses that are limited to just the variables that the authors use but if everybody has a supplemental table with this painstaking, I mean we've even included geography in one that we recently submitted within the US in addition and breaking it down by those then I think we could really enhance future meta-analyses and cross-study comparisons and allow authors to really figure out some of these mixed findings and also what are we actually missing as well and so that's another thing that we've also started to do now and with supplemental materials are really nice in that it doesn't actually impact print it will live online but it will be accessible there online to researchers so that's what we've been doing as well All right So if there aren't any other Q&A I know it is late for everybody so we thank you so much for being here and also for a lively chat so we our panelists were Yes, one more question just came through Q&A Oh really? Oh Thank you Okay so the question is if a positionality statement is part of standard practice what implications do you think it will have for the production of knowledge in the academy? It's an excellent question It says Mitch is typing an answer Yes No, are you not typing an answer? I'm not but I think it would be good for that to be standard practice I think that it also creates an opportunity I think for people to recognize the lens as psychologists we can say that in our discipline perhaps especially the lens in which we think about our hypotheses in which we framed the questions that we asked or the paradigms that we asked and the ways in which we're interpreting our data are absolutely affecting our science I think it would be as much as science aims to be an objective and standardized approach that we in our discipline can say with some confidence that our own points of view as scholars is absolutely shaping the ways in which we think about and express our hypotheses and interpret our data and state our conclusions and I think that is absolutely essential I know it's an anthem of to the way that we think about science we're all supposed to be just data robots and none of those things bias the ways that we think about our work but I really do believe that the psychology of scientists is very relevant to all of our areas of science and I think it's absolutely important for us to be able to recognize that not to blame or discount others in any way whatsoever but to acknowledge and celebrate that it's important that we have replications done with a variety of perspectives a variety of voices and that we're really using an opportunity particularly for colleagues who have had the opportunity to have the loudest voice in the room for a long time to shut up and step back and start listening to voices that have not had the opportunity you know and for us to spend some time learning where our research has fallen short I teach multicultural psychology many of us teach some version with this grad or undergrad and you know what I'm always amazed by is when I present some information and how surprised how surprised our undergraduate students are that like this is still happening currently like because in their mind this is something to happen back in the day so I do think even as our field we owe you know we owe it to our upcoming generations about like being better holders keepers of the science and doing better with what was given to us that we do better than that and I think you know the pace is so slow like you know many people will say oh it took 400 years to get here but it can't take 400 years to pass this I mean this next technology engaged generation will not allow and so I mean that's why I just really think the role of education is so important because you know it's the younger people that will lead us to the promised land and I think we just you know putting that energy into the education and how we're preparing the next set of scientists so if we start to set the standard now that positionality statements is the thing that you do it wouldn't seem weird five years from now because everyone will be doing it everyone is aware reflexivity is part of what you're thinking about because it does matter in the way you look at science I mean you read an article what you pay attention to and it's just our way of owning that and I think it is consistent with this technology informed generation and that using tiktok and insta gram and all these technology you know there is you know your face is there there is no hiding behind that right and so I think that that's a little bit what we're trying to do in our papers like most of the time you can google a scholar anyway and find you know find out something about them and this generation is very open and out in their acknowledgement of so many things and so I think learning from that young for us to own that space as well I think is just so critical so if I may add and I would say we're going to benefit from taking a look at the identities across many different pieces of these papers we had time to talk about what are the citation practices and what they show is that even as fields diversify white men in particular only cite other white men largely as across disciplines and across the diversity of the actual discipline itself and so even as we are getting more people to the table there's a stable large group of people that are not welcoming anyone else in which again says whose work is being read whose work is getting cited whose work is being built upon which theories are being developed or not and so identity mattering in these in your face ways but also in these behind the scene practices that impact the scholarship impact field impact careers and do so invisibly so looking at those practices looking at what our beliefs are about which science should be which hinted at a moment ago but who says that the researchers neutrality is a value in the first place it's not a value I hold actually is damaging to our science when we presume we've gone forward in that way but we've kind of grown up reared in this in the scholarship that it should look a certain way and we should talk about it a certain way it doesn't change that we as people are in it it just means that we're not using that as a part of the data and we're letting that influence it invisibly. Alright, well this has been fun and we hope everybody can is living here with at least one thing but better three that they can do and you know our paper is available pre-print for free as well as the diversity accountability index which we hope people will take and adapt to meet you know whatever journal they're at or whatever manuscript they're working on and set benchmarks for themselves from which they can help track their growth and so on that note thank you all and it's been it's been a pleasure. Thank you everyone, this was wonderful. Thank you, thank you so much this is really wonderful and it's caused a lot of self-reflection for myself just want to post that this is the end of the conference for today we'll be resuming shortly though and you're all welcome to continue to engage on Slack and on Remo I'll put the link here I'll just post a slide for the next few minutes with some information but yeah thank you so much again. Thank you.