“Some uninteresting data from a faraway country”: Inequity and coloniality in international social psychological publications

Abstract

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

Psychology as a site for decolonial analysis

“…Bou Zeineddine et al. (2022) work within traditions of hegemonic social psychology from the periphery of the anglophone Euro‐American mainstream. In the article, they report results of a survey on barriers that social psychologists face in publicizing their work from outside WEIRD and anglophone centers of psychological scientific authority.…”

“…Similarly, scientists writing about research in US settings can typically take for granted that editors and reviewers will not require them to demonstrate the broader relevance of their work by collecting data in a non‐US setting. In contrast, scientists from the Global South who report results of research using only samples from their own communities risk reactions from editors and reviewers who regard it as “uninteresting data from a faraway country” (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022) that is not worthy of publication unless made relevant or even intelligible by virtue of a comparison to data from White Americans.…”

“…Besides the coloniality of scientific methodology, the epistemic violence of hegemonic psychology is evident in forms of epistemic exclusion such as those that are the focus of the final article in this section (Bou Zeineddine et al, 2022). 4 Bou Zeineddine et al ( 2022) work within traditions of hegemonic social psychology from the periphery of the anglophone Euro-American mainstream.…”

“…Yet, it remains important to recognize the extent to which the basis of the science in these languages, especially English, comes with costs. One problem with such linguistic imperialism is that the dominance of English gives native speakers an unfair advantage in the intellectual marketplace (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022). Beyond this issue of professional injustice is a more conceptual harm: specifically, the translation of concepts into English takes particular articulations of human experience and elevates them to a context‐indifferent form that masquerades as a just‐natural standard.…”

Foundations for a decolonial big data psychology

“…Meanwhile, the social lives of Global South populations have been relegated as special cases for WEIRD concepts, or pathologized as deviations (Adams et al, 2018(Adams et al, , 2019. Rich decolonial scholarship exposes how these entrenched frames manifest practically in issues such as unequal research arrangements between North and South researchers, biases in peer review and publication, and the Anglophone, Western-centric pedagogy for psychology in educational institutions worldwide (Bou Zeineddine et al, 2021;Montiel, 2018). Conversely, some scholars in the Global South may even resort to practices of "self-othering" to present their own cultures as palatable to the Northern gaze (Beals et al, 2020;Mignolo, 2009).…”