Social recall is a central part of our day-to-day lives. Whether we are thinking about who to invite to a housewarming party or to a wedding celebration, trying to remember the name of the mechanic who did such a good job with your car last summer, or which of your climbing buddies would be keen on competing in a local bouldering competition, we are searching our social memory for specific people that we know. In this blog post, I want to make the argument that the extent to which we see diversity in academia is a by-product of search processes that operate on our social memory that depicts social networks of academics and researchers.

Much of our academic activity revolves around “finding the right person for the job” – more than we might initially imagine! Consider these scenarios. Aspiring graduate students considering various potential PhD supervisors. The post-doc thinking of “that person who worked on topic X” so that they could cite their work in the paper that they were working on. Action editors frantically looking for suitable reviewers for a manuscript. The early career academic considering which panelists or discussants to invite for a workshop that they are organizing. The nomination and selection of keynote speakers and winners of research prizes. It is clear that central aspects of academic work, be it conference organization, academic publishing, academic hiring, and graduate admissions, essentially involve a search of your social memory of all the academics and researchers that you know of.

Search processes in memory representations are a key research area in the cognitive sciences. A frequently used paradigm to study memory search is the verbal fluency task (sometimes also known as the category or semantic fluency task). The participant is typically asked to name as many different members of a semantic category (for instance, types of animals) that they can think of under time pressure.

We can also apply this paradigm to study how one might retrieve social contacts from memory. Let’s replace the category of “animals” with “academics you know.” What are the names that come to your mind? Feel free to try this for 2 minutes.

Based on prior work in social recall, we might observe the following properties in the list of names that were recalled.

1. People of closer social proximity to you tend to be recalled in earlier positions on the list.
2. Social contacts who are frequently encountered tend to be recalled in earlier positions.
3. People who are closely associated with each other (e.g., belonging to the same social category like friends from high school) tend to be rapidly retrieved together in “clusters.”

However, if left to its own devices, social search is likely to reproduce the current unbalanced social structures in academia.

Looking at the names that you have retrieved, you may observe social proximity to be correlated with the position of retrieved names. It is likely that early names tend to be of academics that you have collaborated with or know well, and perhaps even personally. They might be people whom you’ve shared an office with or colleagues in the same department and institution. Given the well-known homophilic nature of social networks where individuals with similar characteristics tend to be friends with each other, this also means that you are likely to think of people who are like yourself in terms of demographics, similarity in research areas, and geographical location. If the people in academia are already skewed towards certain social groups, this further implies that recalled names, on the whole, are likely to be lacking in diversity.

Let’s consider frequency next. Unsurprisingly, people that you frequently encounter tend to be retrieved first. If we broaden the definition of “encounter” to also include non-physical aspects such as listening to their talk at a recent conference, reading their papers (which happen to come up first in a literature review search), or reading their tweets on Twitter, it is likely that already prominent, well-established, highly visible academics (who tend to be characterized by a limited range of social categories) are likely to be recalled first.

Finally, associative recall effects show up in the clustering patterns. In other words, when recalling names of academics, there is a tendency to retrieve (in close proximity) names of people who belong in the same research group or institution. One implication is that being associated with a large, vibrant, and visible research lab may accrue retrieval benefits as it is initially easy to think of someone from that group, which subsequently leads to the retrieval of others from the same cluster. Conversely, smaller research labs may struggle to rise to the front of one’s “search results”.

In my view, it is clear that social recall plays an important role in shaping large swathes of academic activity, and that the results of our social recall have the tendency to reproduce the highly skewed structural biases that currently characterize much of academia. Furthermore, these “search results” of social recall in turn have the potential to shape the academic social landscape in ways that may further de-emphasize diverse voices. Decisions about who is invited to present their research, whose paper you chose to cite in your own paper, who should be hired and promoted, and who should receive funding, can have outsized effects on the overall social structure of academia.

Nevertheless, we can take steps to mitigate this outcome. In the short term, we can (i) adapt our search processes or append/augment them with additional checks and balances, and in the longer term, we can (ii) incrementally change the structure of our social memory representations.

1. Search, then verify or review.

• Don’t always go with the first/obvious choice. Essentially inhibit the first few names that come to your mind. Try to see if suitable candidates can be found in the later part of the (social) fluency list.
• Search more extensively. Early names tend to be strongly influenced by frequency and recency effects. Persist with the search so that you venture into the more peripheral areas of your social representations.
• Review your choices before committing. Before sending out those invitation letters, consider the overall diversity of your panelists/speakers/hires. Before submitting the manuscript for review, use this tool to include a diversity statement that highlights and acknowledges citation biases in academic publishing.

2. Create opportunities to diversify your social memory representations.

• Take steps to craft the social environment that you are exposed to. Follow underrepresented and diverse academics on social media. Read our papers. Attend our talks (and talk to us at our posters) at the next conference!
• Take steps to change the social environment around you. Elevate diverse voices, cite and engage with our scholarship, invite diverse scholars to present at conferences, brown bags, and seminars. Bring us to the forefront of your social search results.
• Leverage on the homophily of social networks. Underrepresented academics likely know other underrepresented academics. But instead of simply asking us for “other names,” elevate us to positions of influence so that we can implement change in our social networks.

On a final note, successful search (on Google and even human memory!) appears to be governed by a principle that prioritizes the “importance” of a citation or link from an already important node in semantic memory. This is encapsulated in the famous PageRank algorithm that underlies Google’s success, where webpages that are linked to other important webpages are prioritized in search results. The recursive nature of “influence” in social and semantic network structures has especially important implications for the role that senior academics play in the shaping of the social structure of academia. Senior academics have an outsized influence on search that is mediated by prestige and perceived importance of that individual in the social network.

If you are a senior, prominent academic, use your influence wisely because it matters: Encourage your graduate student to present at conferences (the Psychonomic Society recently piloted a program where a Fellow could cede their presentation to their graduate student), promote and amplify the research of underrepresented academics to your own social network, consider diversity of folks invited to prominent editorial roles and speaking opportunities. All of these actions will positively shape the social environment that all academics are exposed to and interact with, towards a social space whose structure enables diverse voices to be heard and celebrated.