Starting a New (and Different) Conversation
Earlier this month at our annual awards ceremony in Atlanta, we recognized the contributions of SPSP members and those in the personality and social psychology community who are advancing the boundaries of the field. The recipient of this year’s Service to the Field Award, Alison Ledgerwood, was recognized for her efforts to advance constructive scientific discourse in the field.
In 2015, she founded PsychMAP, a moderated Facebook group for discussions of psychological methods and practices. Started in 2015, PsychMAP now boasts a membership of nearly 8,000 students, educators and professionals who share a common interest in the field, with new members being added daily.
Here, Alison explains what led her to start PsychMAP and what she has learned from the experience. She also talks about its potential impact on the field of personality and social psychology, and how technology and social media might shape and influence the conversation moving forward.
What led you to set up and moderate an online discussion forum?
In December 2015, the movement to improve research practices in psychology was gaining momentum and producing a lot of important, interesting, and thought-provoking conversations and debates. And yet two aspects of these conversations and debates frustrated me (and I think a lot of other people). First, the most polarized views were often the loudest. Extreme perspectives seemed to be taking up a disproportionate amount of airtime, leaving out what Kate Ratliff called (in our 2015 SPSP symposium on improving research practices) “the vast middle ground” of nuanced approaches to moving the field forward. Second, the tone of the debates was often extremely angry—full of assumptions stated as facts, accusations about others’ bad intentions, and people shouting past one another.
What effect were these extreme perspectives and angry exchanges having on the field?
These elements were frustrating for several reasons. I have loved being in this field in large part because it’s full of brilliant, collaborative, and thoughtful scholars who genuinely care about doing good science. But in late 2015, it felt like we had set that collaborative and mutually supportive model of science on fire, and it wasn’t quite clear how to get back to it. I saw a lot of graduate students and early career researchers losing interest in being part of a field that was so angrily combative. And perhaps most of all, I was frustrated at seeing large numbers of people just tuning out of these really important conversations and debates about improving scientific practices. In my view, these conversations were essential for moving science forward—and yet large swaths of the field were turning away from them because of the style rather than the substance of the discussion. It seemed to me that if we wanted to capitalize on our momentum and make real changes both within and beyond the borders of our discipline, we needed to get more people on board, rather than shouting the same things to an ever dwindling and increasingly polarized audience.
How did you envision PsychMAP addressing these issues?
I wanted a place to have thoughtful, nuanced, and inclusive conversations about research methods and practices. Social media seemed to hold so much potential for creating broadly accessible venues for many different voices to get involved in conversations, and yet it also seemed challenging to realize that potential—all too often, a small handful of people seemed to dominate the conversation. I thought that maybe creating a space that had some basic ground rules for constructive and inclusive conversations, and some light moderation to help promote those norms, could provide a place to have a different kind of conversation about improving the field.
How confident did you feel that it might work?
I thought there was maybe a 5% chance this idea would actually work. It seemed like a slightly nutty and hopelessly idealistic thing to do. Fortunately, Mickey Inzlicht was up for being unreasonably idealistic right alongside me, and proceeded to donate a giant portion of his time to moderating the page in its early days, as did John Sakaluk a little while later. The success of the page is in large part because of all the time and effort they poured into making it work.
What impact do you think the forum might be having within the field?
I think PsychMAP has been part of a much broader shift in the field toward norms that promote a civil and inclusive, yet also critical and open, scientific discourse. And I think PsychMAP itself has become a really useful resource for scholars who are interested in learning about and contributing to discussions that range from very abstract debates about scientific ideals to very specific questions about study designs and statistical procedures.
What lessons did you and your colleagues learn along the way?
I think the moderating team (which has included Michael Inzlicht, John Sakaluk, Alexa Tullett, Cindy Pickett, Michael Bernstein, and myself) learned a lot along the way about how to moderate this kind of space effectively. It was challenging to figure out how to enforce our ground rules without feeling like we were constraining what people could talk about, and how to make sure we were being as objective as possible when moderating without spending the entire day deliberating about how to respond when a debate started to go off the rails. We learned that talking to people in the open (on the page itself) about a violation of the ground rules sometimes worked better than talking to them privately over messenger, because it left an open, transparent track record of what had occurred that everyone could see. We learned that we needed some clear and transparent rules that would enable us to make tough decisions, like temporarily removing someone from the page when they repeatedly violated the ground rules (something we’ve only had to do two or three times). And we learned—or rather, we were reminded—that social norms are extremely important; for example, setting up a Community Board of diverse scholars from a wide range of areas and research contexts seemed to help facilitate participation from a broader range of voices.
Moving forward, what are your thoughts on technology and its influence on our discussions?
I think we need to continue to look for opportunities to harness the strengths of new technology and online platforms for our science while finding creative ways to counteract their weaknesses. For example, social media allows us to disseminate our findings and ideas faster and further than ever before, but how do we make sure we’re still taking the time to read and think carefully about articles and blog posts, rather than relying on someone else’s one-sentence summary? Online platforms enable creative new tools for advancing our science, like StudySwap and Community Augmented Meta-analysis; how can we make these as user-friendly and widely shared as possible to maximize their effectiveness? I think we’re seeing a lot of creative solutions to these kinds of challenges coming out of initiatives like SIPS, and it will be exciting to see where these new ideas take us as a field over the next decade.
When she is not moderating PsychMAP, Alison leads the Attitudes and Group Identity Lab
at UC Davis and serves as an associate professor of psychology. She also reflects on the science of human behavior and the human behavior of scientists through her blog Incurably Nuanced. To learn more about Alison and her ongoing research, visit http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/people/aml.