Next week’s #PSD&I Digital Event is dedicated to diversity and inclusion, broadly defined, and how it relates to all aspects of the activities of the Psychonomic society and its members. The Psychonomic Society is committed to diversity and inclusion, as stated on its webpage:

“Most scientists in psychological research agree that diversity, both ethnic and gender based, are good for the field. As a Society, the enhancement of diversity and elimination of bias is one of our main goals. We must support this goal to ensure the proper direction of the field in the future. The ability of the field to meet these challenges will require the full participation of all members of society; thus the Psychonomic Society (PS) recognizes the strategic and critical importance of a diverse and inclusive climate for the future of the field.”

The Society has reaffirmed this commitment on several occasions on this blog, for example by highlighting how the norms of science are incompatible with presidential orders banning citizens of 7 mainly Islamic countries from entering the United States.

But why exactly is diversity and inclusion so important to the conduct of science itself?

A good entry point into exploring this question is the keynote delivered by Robert Sellers, of the University of Michigan, as part of the Presidential Symposium at the 27th APS Annual Convention in  New York City in 2015:

This keynote is well worth watching, but if you cannot spare the full 45 minutes, I found the following points of Sellers’ address to be particularly important:

• It is probably a truism that the objective of psychological science is the systematic interpretation and understanding of human behaviour.
• We can only truly understand human behaviour if we can capture the full human experience, in all its diversity. This means we must study people who are not WEIRD (that is, people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies).
• We must therefore, as a discipline, seek to study people in all their diversity.
• People are clearly affected by their cultural background in pretty much all aspects of their behaviour.
• Researchers, being people, will therefore necessarily bring to bear their cultural perspectives on their research as well—from the framing of research questions to the interpretation of their results.
• A multitude of perspectives is a hallmark of creativity and innovation.
• We must therefore strive for diversity among researchers as well, not merely for ethical or moral reasons, but to ensure that our science progresses.

And where and when and how exactly do we have to be concerned about diversity and inclusion?

This question is at the heart of the #PSD&I digital event. So please join us for posts by the following authors that will be published starting on Monday and leading up to the Psychonomic Society’s international meeting in Amsterdam. The posts are listed here in their likely order of publication:

• Susanne Quadflieg and Almas Talib (University of Bristol). Beyond Tokenism: Embracing Racial Diversity in Teaching Psychology.
• Wendy Francis (University of Texas at El Paso). Diversity and Inclusion in Participant Samples.
• Valerie Reyna (Cornell University). We need to talk about the replication crisis.
• Penny M. Pexman (University of Calgary) and Debra Titone (McGill University). Mapping the Leaky Pipeline.
• Kathy Rastle (Royal Holloway, University of London). Athena Swan: How to increase representation of women at senior levels in psychology.
• Ivy Defoe (University of Pennsylvania). The Puzzle of Adolescent Risk Taking: Diversity in (research) practice.
• Richard Morey (Cardiff University). Ignoring the problem is not an option: why doing nothing reinforces the status quo.

I look forward to the discussion next week.

As Robert Sellers put it, “diverse perspectives are just better.”