Epistemic violence in psychological science: Can knowledge of,from,and for the (othered) people solve the problem?

Abstract

A primary target of Indigenous psychologists and critical psychologists is the epistemic violence found in mainstream research. The epistemic violence derives from two alleged mainstream tendencies: (a) omitting concepts/conceptions of othered peoples and (b) interpreting observed group differences to be caused by inherent inferiorities of othered peoples. In seeking remedial research practice, some theoretical psychologists distinguish (a) psychological knowledge from and for the folk, which they advocate and (b) psychological “knowledge” about the folk, the alleged source of objectification of othered peoples. Though seemingly self-evident, this for/about prepositional divide may not be clear. First, mainstream epistemic violence often depends on folk notions. Second, the use in science of folk concepts/conceptions has advanced oppressive purposes, whereas some mainstream findings may serve progressive goals. I exemplify with race concepts, especially racialized essentialism and dehumanization, and I demonstrate how mainstream science sometimes reveals mechanisms of othering that may inform progressive social reform efforts.

Keywords

epistemic objectivity versus relativity epistemic violence Indigenous psychology knowledge about people versus from and for people racialized essentialism and dehumanization

Despite debate within theoretical psychology about a proper philosophical foundation of psychological knowledge, concern with mainstream contribution to the oppression of othered peoples has coalesced into a burgeoning Indigenous Psychology movement.¹ Considerable attention is given to the epistemic violence said to derive from two observed mainstream tendencies: (a) omission of the concepts embedded in the lived experience of othered peoples and (b) interpretation of findings of difference between peoples to be caused by inherent inferiorities of those who are already othered, so as to cast them as problematic and/or of lesser (or even sub) humanity.

It is in this dual-problem context that Indigenous psychologists have arisen, both independently of and in concert with critical psychologists, who also seek to combat epistemic violence in psychology. Accordingly, I use the term “critical-cum-Indigenous psychologist” when referring to those who identify with both groups, and “critical psychologist” or “Indigenous psychologist” when referring to those in one or the other group. And though I agree with Tissaw and Osbeck’s (2007) assertion that “there really [is] no ‘mainstream’ that exists independent of specific research trajectories” (p. 160 ), in speaking of the mainstream I use their traditional gloss, namely, “a conception of psychology-as-science and commitment to experimental methods as the basis of inquiry” (p. 158). The natural science “methodolatry” (or “physics envy”) said to follow faithfully from this conception of mainstream science is a prime target of those who seek a psychology cleansed of epistemic violence.

Mainstream omission of concepts of othered folk and other-denigrating causal interpretation of observed group difference are not necessary components of this methodolatry, but they play a complementary role in escalating the epistemic violence that can serve social, political, and economic oppression. Taking the epistemic bull by the horns, critical-cum-Indigenous psychologist Thomas Teo (2018) advocates remedial action that distinguishes (a) “from-below” psychological scientific knowledge, which is of, from, and for the folk and (b) “from-above” psychological scientific “knowledge,” which is about the folk. The from-above (about-the-folk) prepositional “attitude” is seen as an objectifying source of epistemic violation, which deprives many peoples of their own subjectivity. Targeting mainstream epistemic violence, critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists Christopher, Wendt, Marecek, and Goodman (2014) write, “It is time to set aside the ‘rhetoric of objectivity’ that pervades much of U.S. psychology” (p. 652). In casting objectivity as a rhetorical device, they imply that there can be no objective psychological knowledge, except in wishful rhetoric that conduces to othering.²

This anti-objectivist (and by extension anti-objectifying) sentiment is pervasive among theoretical psychologists (e.g., Clegg, 2017; Kirschner, 2005; Richardson & Fowers, 2010), who repeatedly take aim at a conception of epistemic objectivity that was not necessarily adopted by those who pursued it in the first place (see Held, 2007, chap. 8). Although the term “objective” and its cognates therefore carry considerable interpretive baggage, I nonetheless use that term in opposition to the kind of epistemic relativity that inheres in truth defined relative to the beliefs of a socioculturally defined group of people (including, especially, beliefs about the truth of the claims in question). Truth without such true-for qualification is what I mean, first and foremost, by objective truth. I define objective truth negatively, so as not to unduly restrict the many kinds of methods and (empirical) evidence that are demanded by (or are relative to) any particular (empirical) research question. I call the type of epistemic relativity that I contrast with objectivity as just defined “true-for (a-group) relativism,” to distinguish it from the kinds of “relativisms” that are necessary for objective inquiry in any field.³ And because I appreciate objectivity’s many historically situated meanings within science (Daston & Galison, 2007), I take no issue with those who prefer the term “nonrelativist” (or, more precisely, “non-true-for relativist”), to describe the epistemology I advance herein.

Objectivity has of course stood in contrast to subjectivity, whose meaning has received renewed attention in theoretical psychology. Theorists often agree that a bona fide psychological science entails understanding situated subjectivity, which requires person-level inquiry about life as it is lived/experienced within a sociocultural context. Including the situated nature of subjectivity in science is often thought to demand a nonobjectivist epistemology—one relative to the subjectivity of those studied, including a people’s beliefs about themselves. This view of subjectivity is professed to help reduce epistemic violence by standing in distinction to (a) person-level inquiry sans culturally bounded concepts, beliefs, and understandings and (b) subpersonal-level inquiry, which ignores everyone’s lived experience in investigating structures and mechanisms by way of naturalistic methods (e.g., Wertz, 2016). Subpersonal-level inquiry, in its allegedly “objectifying” study of “mechanisms,”⁴ is, to use Teo’s terminology, about people.

In what follows I aim to demonstrate how the person-level knowledge favored by theoretical psychologists can be either of, from, and for people or about people. Therefore I argue that the for/about prepositional divide is conceptually fuzzy, especially in the way that epistemic violence attributed to from-above mainstream science often enough depends on folk notions from below and in how some mainstream psychological findings about people may serve progressive goals and so also be for (othered) people. This I demonstrate by way of theoretical/philosophical and empirical study of race, with emphasis on how racial essentialism is treated in both folk (from-below) and expert (from-above) conceptions of race. I also review recent mainstream psychological work which contributes to our understanding of mechanisms of othering, including the dehumanization that often follows from racialization.

Indigenous psychology

Teo (2018) notes that “indigenous psychology may refer to indigenized psychology, to a psychology that is indigenous to a culture, or to the psychology of indigenous people” (p. 155). He also cites Kurt Danziger’s (2006) definition, namely, “attempts to ‘develop variants of modern professional psychology that are more attuned to conditions in developing nations than the psychology taught at Western academic institutions’” (Teo, 2013, p. 2).

The Indigenous Psychology Taskforce (see note 1) describes Indigenous psychology as “a reaction against the colonization/hegemony of Western psychology” (Task Force on Indigenous Psychology, n.d., para. 1, line 3), with “need for non-Western cultures to solve their local problems through Indigenous practices and applications” (para. 1, lines 4–5) and “to recognize [themselves] in the constructs and practices of psychology” (para. 1, lines 6–7). This description thus subsumes a limitless plurality of Indigenous psychologies. Indeed, on the Taskforce website Dharm Bhawuk notes that Indigenous psychology does not and should not seek “homogenization” with mainstream psychology (Bhawuk, n.d.). On my interpretation, homogenization here entails epistemic violence.

Epistemological violence

Teo (2008) defines epistemological violence (EV) as a practice that occurs in psychological science when

interpretative speculations regarding results implicitly or explicitly construct the “Other” as problematic. The term epistemological suggests that these speculations are framed as knowledge when in reality they are interpretative speculations regarding data. The term violence denotes that this “knowledge” has a negative impact on the “Other” and that the interpretative speculations are produced to the detriment of the “Other.” (p. 57)

Teo (2010) judges these interpretations to be person-level/intentional acts of violence: the “subject of violence is the researcher, the object is the Other, and action is the interpretation of data that is presented as knowledge” (p. 295). An example of a violent interpretive act is explaining findings of lower IQ scores in Black people to be caused by an immutable heritable difference in intelligence, with all the social, political, and economic disadvantages that follow. As Teo (2018) states,

If “I” choose an interpretation of data that is harmful to a group of persons, knowing that equally valid alternative theoretical interpretations are possible, and if “I” present that interpretation as fact or as knowledge, then a form of EV has been committed. (p. 222)

Critical and Indigenous psychologists do not deny the othering and oppression caused by folk belief, but rather take aim at ways in which findings of psychological science, in their received status as expert knowledge, have contributed to othering in scientific acts of omission and commission. They are therefore rightly keen to determine the means by which psychological science can reduce epistemic violence.

Reducing epistemic violence

Folk versus scientific concepts and conceptions

The distinction between folk belief and scientific knowledge claims is more pronounced in the natural sciences than in the human sciences, where overlap between scientific and folk concepts abounds (think happiness studies). Because natural kinds seemingly enjoy no subjectivity, they remain unaffected by our views about them, thereby freeing natural scientists from fear of violating them epistemically, however much our actions damage the physical/biological world, even with benefit of extensive knowledge (think global warming). By contrast, psychologists are always in danger of epistemically violating the subjectivity of those whom we study.

And so critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists are right to insist on receiving the voices of othered peoples as sources of knowledge production (e.g., Christopher et al., 2014; Gone, 2016, 2017; Sundararajan, 2014, 2015). Teo’s (2018) from-above/from-below distinction is thus pertinent, and he exemplifies by way of personality psychology:

Since many personality theories are constituted from above and reflect the needs of power (is this person conscientious?), it is possible to develop a theory from below. I suggest that this would be possible with Nunberg’s (2012) historical and linguistic reconstructions of assholism (A)⁵ . . . [For example,] it would not be difficult to develop a psychological instrument to measure “A” as a psychological personality characteristic. That the discipline . . . does not have such an “A” scale reflects an order in which the interests from below . . . are less relevant than the interests from above. Yet, it belongs to many people’s everyday experiences to encounter “A”s on a regular basis when dealing with authority. . . . A similar example would be a psychological measure for “bullshitter” (B) based on Frankfurt’s (1986/2005) descriptions and analysis. (p. 91)

Teo insists on a science replete with ordinary folk concepts and theories—those based on “everyday experiences”—in place of the dominant “from-above” concepts and theories of science that, he says, meet “the needs of power.” In that last quotation he focuses on concepts not of othered folk but of dominant (Western) folk. Despite this nuance, I do not find the above/below distinction to be sufficiently clear.

First, folk concepts and meanings are not necessarily ignored by scientists. For instance, common/folk understandings of race have been studied by scientists for well over a century. Second, although assholism is a folksy folk concept, it does not follow that less folksy concepts, like conscientiousness, do not constitute folk concepts, owing to their use in science. Within Western/American culture, the conscientious person is arguably no less familiar than is the asshole, even if the former is less colloquial.⁶ Third, any concept, however folksy, can be used for purposes of regulation and oppression, including “asshole.” After all, racialized othering and oppression is often preceded by folk concepts and conceptions of race. Folk/from-below concepts, beliefs, and understandings are therefore not necessarily benign: a scale to measure assholism could be used to reject certain people—such as applicants to psychology graduate programs. In short, respecting and privileging folk concepts and conceptions in science does not automatically ensure respecting and privileging the folk.

We should of course investigate the bases for selection of all concepts and conceptions in psychology. But this does not entail a clear line of demarcation between folk concepts from below and expert concepts from above. If by “from above” Teo means only the concepts that are selected by scientists for their fit with questionable regulatory purposes, then the worry is not (a) the folksy vs. scientific nature of the concepts themselves, but rather (b) the reasons for their selection, which implicate the ways in which group differences are interpreted and the real-world purposes to which those interpretations are put (see Teo, 2010). I return to this distinction (a vs. b) in due course; here I elaborate the prepositional aspect of epistemic violence in psychology.

Those pesky prepositions

Teo (2013), in following critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp’s view of psychology as “conducting research for people and not about people,” endorsed the idea of a theory and research “from the standpoint of the subject” (p. 8; see Schraube & Osterkamp, 2013). And he expressly linked the for/about distinction with the from-below/from-above distinction: “It is possible to develop a theory that focuses on everyday experiences stemming from below (instead of from above), a concept not ‘about,’ but a concept ‘for’ and ‘from’ people” (Teo, 2018, p. 90).

True-for and true-about prepositional “attitudes”

Does a theory for people entail a relativist epistemology in which a theoretical explanation is true for members of a group of people (Gs), but not true for all others (nonGs)? After all, Teo (2015, 2018, p. 112) himself does not dismiss objectivity, so long as its form accounts for (socioculturally) situated subjectivity. Teo (2015) concludes, “Objectivity remains a virtue of academic work, . . . just not the narrow objectivity demanded by mainstream psychology” (pp. 147–148). Whether the mainstream demands a narrow form of objectivity “as a rhetorical tool to justify the status quo or a preconceived agenda” (p. 139) is not obvious, and I return to that matter.

Here I consider how knowledge for a group can readily be taken to entail a true-for-some-but-not-for-all form of relativism.⁷ I elaborate meanings of “true-for” and “true-about” prepositional attitudes, using two statements that blur the relativist vs. objectivist meaning that may inhere in the for/about distinction: (a) it is true about Gs that Gs believe X and (b) X itself is true for Gs. Let us stipulate that X is a proposition about the cause of “depression,”⁸ such as black bile, demonic possession, neurotransmitter defect, or self-deprecating thoughts. Whichever X we select, statement (a) is either objectively true or false—it either is or is not the case that Gs believe X, regardless of the truth status of X itself, which is a separate matter. Now, what does “X is true for Gs mean”?

First, this use of “for Gs” could mean that the objective truth status of X itself is meaningless or irrelevant: what matters (for X’s epistemic status) is, in relativistic terms, what Gs take to be the truth status of X—what Gs (and only Gs) believe about the truth of X. By contrast, the objective truth status of X does not depend on anyone’s beliefs about the truth of X (Held, 2007, chaps. 5, 8); it depends on evidence independent of beliefs about X’s truth. Admittedly, the form of warrant that should be taken as truth-maker in any given case is a bone of contention. Nonetheless, that any choice of justifiers reflects foundational values that guide all scientific acts of discovery does not thereby reduce all scientific knowledge to true-for forms of relativism (see note 3).

Second, “true for Gs” could mean that what Gs take to be true should be respected epistemically only so long as their beliefs have sanguine consequences for them and do not oppress nonGs. In this sense, true-for Gs means good for Gs and not bad for nonGs, and so it constitutes the kind of pragmatism that many theoretical psychologists advocate, in which the epistemic criterion consists in the socioculturally situated consequences of holding claims (such as X) to be true. Thus, saying that X (now stipulated as demonic possession causes “depression”) is true for Gs signifies that believing X brings to Gs beneficial consequences. The beneficial consequences do not result solely from holding belief X, but rather, perhaps, from the likelihood that belief X inclines Gs to also believe that exorcism rituals will rid them of their demons (Belief X₁), which motivates Gs to participate in rituals whose beneficial effects might exceed such exorcism rituals as taking antidepressant drugs—without drug side-effects! The point is, there is a chain from beliefs to acts based on those beliefs, which together bring beneficial effects.

If these beneficial effects are realized, they constitute the epistemic standard of truth: they make X true. And if believing X (and X₁) carries beneficial effects for Gs, but not, upon empirical investigation, for nonGs, then X is not true for (X is false for) nonGs. In that case the (pragmatic) truth status of X holds only relative to (or for) Gs. Here we can begin to see slippage from for-Gs (objective) knowledge to true-for Gs (relativist) knowledge: the latter entails true-for relativism and the former does not, in that it is also in principle “true for” nonGs (i.e., for everyone) that holding Belief X benefits Gs. That the true-for relativist epistemic standard allows that nonGs can know it to be the case that belief X (when held by Gs) carries beneficial consequences for Gs is logically problematic for anti-objectivists who advance true-for relativism.

We can now see how “true for Gs” (in the relativist sense) depends on “ true about Gs” (in an objectivist sense). First, knowing that Gs take X to be true can be translated into “It is true about Gs that they believe X.” Second, knowing that taking X to be true is followed by desirable consequences for Gs can be translated into “It is true about Gs that desirable consequences follow their believing X.” Therefore, the proposition that believing X conduces to sanguine consequences for Gs (and perhaps only Gs) is also objectively true about Gs implicitly—nonGs can in principle know this fact. And so if all “about” propositions constitute the objectifying knowledge claims of mainstream psychology, then true-for claims, such as this “for Gs” claim, also constitute objectifying claims about Gs, for nonGs.

I return to the for/about distinction in due course. Here I turn to the kind of speculative interpretation that Teo finds especially prone to epistemic violence: knowledge not for people but what I consider “knowledge” against people.

Speculative interpretation of observed group differences

Teo (2010) acknowledges that we may interpret the causes of some group differences in sanguine ways—ways which may contribute to achieving progressive goals. He exemplifies this by interpreting the fact that there are fewer female faculty members at elite universities in the United States to be caused by their oppressive treatment at such institutions (p. 299). The sanguine (at least for women) nature of this interpretation may, according to Teo, be no less speculative (and so no more warranted) than the violent one that causally attributes the gender difference to women’s inherently inferior intellects.

This emphasis on interpretive speculation raises the question of whether Teo thinks there can be no causal interpretations (of observed group differences) that are warranted enough to consider as facts, owing especially to the underdetermination of theory by (theory-laden) data. If so, we could not say, with objectivist warrant, that between-group differences on, say, measures of achievement are caused, even in part, by nonheritable/nonessentialist variables, such as power imbalances that sustain oppressive/impoverished environments. Nor could we make the culturally informed case that it is true about Gs that believing X contributes to consequences that are beneficial for Gs, and for that reason we should not impose on Gs concepts and beliefs that are alien to Gs. Thus, efforts to advance progressive agendas might be impeded by rejection of objectivist warrant on grounds that it constitutes a confidence trick.

Do critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists think that scientific claims about the inferior essences of some peoples are immoral solely owing to the oppressive acts that follow from holding them, or because they are in themselves epistemically unwarranted, regardless of their consequences? Even if no malign consequences followed from believing that Black, Jewish, and Muslim people are essentially inferior or subhuman (hard to imagine, but just suppose), I suspect that progressively minded psychologists might still be inclined to reject that proposition on grounds that it is patently—dare I say objectively?—false. My point is, the objective falsehood of such denigrating claims may not be so readily rejected by true-for relativists, in a disinclination to qualify those falsehoods as epistemically relative to anyone. If so, they put themselves in a logical bind: in rejecting objective psychological truth, they cannot logically embrace objective falsity.

One virtue of true-for statements may be that the “for” preposition signals the obvious falsity of a belief, without having to say more—for instance, saying “it is true for White Supremacists (WSs) that Black, Jewish, and Muslim people have inferior/subhuman essences (Belief B)” signals that the rest of us should not believe B. We may nonetheless insist on epistemic qualification of both the truth status of B itself and the pragmatic consequences of holding B to be true. Although it is arguably “good” for WSs to believe B (B is true for WSs in a pragmatic sense)—for example, in the false sense of superiority WSs may derive from viewing non-White people as having less intrinsic value—this is not what I take critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists to mean by “good for” and therefore true.

To be sure, (objectively) unwarranted (e.g., racist) belief from-below can have and has had oppressive consequences, independent of science. But it is only when scientists seek to validate such a folk-belief, especially essentialist causes of racial differences, and then proclaim its scientific legitimacy, that the folk belief “graduates” to epistemic violence. This we see in racist science, which has regrettably “raised” racist folk-belief to the undeserved status of knowledge, in service of oppression. Hence the critical-cum-Indigenous psychology call for use of from-below concepts and beliefs must be qualified before we can assume that their adoption in science ensures sanguine consequences. Moreover, some mainstream research has progressive implications.

When folk conceptions degrade and mainstream/scientific conceptions elevate: The case of racial essentialism

Biophilosopher Luc Faucher (2017) articulated four beliefs that together constitute a standard folk conception of racial essentialism: (a) “Individuals share a number of physical and psychological features that are specific to their group and that they do not share with any other group”; (b) “That they exhibit these features is explained by the presence of an underlying and unobservable cause, an immutable ‘essence’”; (c) “The possession of this essence is necessary and sufficient for membership in the group”; and (d) “They share these features in virtue of a biological mechanism that ensures the transmission of the racial essence from generation to generation” (p. 250).

Although some question whether all folk race-notions entail essentialism, many folk have held racially essentialist notions long before modern Western science emerged to impart them from above with race concepts. This includes not only the European Middle Ages but also classical antiquity (see Heng, 2018; Isaac, 2006; Smith, 2011).⁹ To whatever extent scientists have committed epistemic violence in “validating” such folk views in their speculative interpretations, the road between folk and scientific conceptions runs both ways, not least in psychology. To appreciate this cross influence, let us take a closer look at essentialism in folk and scientific conceptions of race.

Essentialism in folk and scientific conceptions of race: Bloodlines

Some scholars deliberately blur the distinction between scientific and folk conceptions. For example, philosopher of biology Lisa Gannett (2010) maintained that

the dichotomization of scientist-expert and nonscientist-commonfolk conceptual schemes . . . rules out consideration of ways in which scientific ideas about race and wider cultural ideas about race intersect. . . . Scientific and folk meanings are autonomous insofar as cross-classification and differences in extension are permitted without necessitating a demand for revision of the folk meaning; however, scientific and folk meanings are not wholly autonomous because science influences the folk meaning and the folk meaning often provides a starting point for scientists in their research. (p. 375)

Gannett (2010) asserts that a priori assumptions made by blood group researchers (e.g., “which phenotypic characteristics matter, who counts as indigenous to a territory”) “prove integral to whatever a posteriori classification results” (p. 375). However one evaluates the search for a blood basis for racial boundaries, one cannot deny that Nazi science, as a prime example, rested on ancient folk notions of racialized blood lines, notions that could in principle constitute the kind of a priori folk categories that Gannett accepts. Yet Gannett is not insensitive to “scientific racism”: she fears that “dichotomization of scientist-expert and nonscientist-commonfolk conceptual schemes” wrongly supports the “assumption that only ‘ordinary people’ can be racist,” when scientists “are not immune to racism” (p. 376). After all, racist sciences have depended on a priori/folk racial essentialism in Faucher’s terms. And from racial essentialism there followed the dehumanization¹⁰ that racist sciences aided, according to philosopher of biology and psychology David Livingstone Smith (2014).

On the racist view that within each member of certain racialized human groups there resides an inferior essence, unique to the group, which makes each member of that group a lesser human, if not subhuman (Smith, 2011, 2019b), we have an example of a concept, race, from the folk—from below. History provides examples of how such folk understandings, with their racial essentialism intact, have been plucked from below to advance racist sciences, including psychological science. As Smith (2019b) observes,

During the Weimar period, folk-conceptions of race and blood became yoked to the new science of serology to produce a potent, blood-centered racialist cocktail. . . . Weimar seroanthropologists [sought] to use blood typing to objectively distinguish one race from another. . . . The race-obsessed intelligentsia of the Nazi movement [hoped, though without success] to use the analysis of blood to distinguish “true” Germans from Jews. (p. 87)

According to Smith (2019b), the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda claim that racial “spiritual predispositions” are “encoded” in the blood was used to “justify” the Nazis’ assertion that Jews are inherently dangerous, thereby necessitating their extermination—including Jews who looked Nordic. About North American racism, Smith (2019b) writes that the same blood-based genealogy “was the basis for the notorious one-drop rule of the American South, which remained in legal force well into the twentieth century” (p. 89).

On Smith’s (2019b) view, these beliefs collectively constitute a widespread folk theory of race: “The [folk] idea of race is the idea of a human natural kind the membership in which is transmitted biologically by descent” (p. 96). Folk understanding of race is akin to folk understanding of biological species; they both entail an underlying essence that causes the observable features that delineate discrete kind membership. This move from racial concepts to the emergence in the 19th century of both folk and scientific racial theories is important. According to philosopher of psychology Ron Mallon (2013), racial theories “became widely shared effectively displacing a mishmash of essentialist theories with a unified essentialist account of racial difference and hierarchy that could serve to rationalize and justify European colonial ventures and American slavery” (p. 86). Such “justification” would entail highly speculative assumptions (about the cause of group differences) that fan the flames of epistemic violence in racist science.

Smith maintains that to racialize (the act of racializing) invokes an essentialist moral inferiority, in which the racialized group is given less “intrinsic value” (2014, 2019b). The function of race concepts and theories among the folk (and in racist science) is therefore to situate populations on an inferiority/superiority axis. This function does not serve what should be the interests of (biological) science: “The only real biological sense of race is subspecies, and there is insufficient genetic variation between human populations to qualify them as subspecies” (Smith, personal communication, March 25, 2018; see Hochman, 2013). Hochman (2017) recommends replacing the term “race” with “racialized group,” to indicate variation across time and place about the peoples selected for racializing practices. Moreover, there is considerable debate about the reality of race (in distinction to Hochman’s racialized groups) among philosophers and (biological) scientists; this debate reflects diverse conceptions of race, both within the expert community and between experts and the folk.

When scientific and folk conceptions of race of diverge

There is debate about how scientific and folk theories of race do and do not intersect, and whether scientific and folk theories and concepts must intersect, to make progress scientifically—and/or socially (see Gannett, 2010). Philosopher of biology and social sciences Robin Andreasen (2005) maintains that there is reasonable overlap between a cladistics¹¹ race-concept, which she propounds as biologically real, and folk race-concepts. By contrast, philosopher of race Joshua Glasgow (2003) finds the overlap to be insufficient: “How revisionist [in science] can one be about the meaning of ‘race’ and still call it ‘race’?” (p. 462). Andreasen replies that any divergence presents no problem, because scientific and folk conceptions of race serve different functions, owing to their natural-kind vs. social-kind statuses, respectively (see Boyd, 1999; Held, 2017; Khalidi, 2015, 2018, on challenges to this distinction).¹²

Others find divergence between conceptions of human kinds and natural kinds to impede social progress. As Glasgow (2003) maintained, if scientific and folk conceptions of race do not overlap sufficiently, we are no longer talking about race—certainly not any conception of race that matters for socially progressive purposes, which is why, for many who hold a pragmatic epistemic attitude, race talk matters. And though Faucher called race a “damaging fiction” (2017, p. 251) that should be expunged from biology’s lexicon, he did not inveigh against race talk in the social sciences. This raises a thorny question.

Can there be race science (in psychology) that is not racist?

If essentialized racial groups are ontological fictions, then investigating psychological differences between races is not only nonsensical but also likely to be racist. How often do psychological scientists who insist on heritable racial differences in intellectual capacity and personality traits distance themselves from folk-based essentialization as a practice akin to and often a component of racialization?

Psychologists J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen (2005), in propounding a strong genetic component in racial intellectual and personality differences, wrote:

The fact that the heritability of IQ is between 0.50 and 0.80 does not mean that individual differences are fixed and permanent. It does tell us that some individuals are genetically predisposed to be more teachable, more trainable, and more capable of changing than others, under current conditions.¹³ (p. 239)

That “under-current-conditions” qualifier might appease some. Still, the term “genetically predisposed” suggests a short inferential hop from the causal notion of heritable component to that of the traditional kind-defining essence that fuels racist beliefs and acts, especially since there is no reason to think that relevant “current conditions” will change (for the better) anytime soon. Thus many, including Teo (2011), justifiably fear the large interpretive leap that inheres in Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) claim that despite there being no “necessary implication” of causes of within-group variation for causes of average between-group differences,

within-groups evidence does imply the plausibility of the between-groups differences being due to the same factors, genetic or environmental. If variations in level of education or nutrition or genes reliably predict individual variation within Black and within White groups, then it would be reasonable to consider these variables to explain the differences between Blacks and Whites. (p. 239)

By contrast, there are compelling arguments against inferring the causes of between-group differences from within-group sources of variation (e.g., Block, 1996; Lewontin, 1970, 1974).¹⁴ Thus, in the above quotation, the terms “plausible” and “reasonable” carry unwarranted interpretive baggage. Indeed, sociologist Ann Morning (2011) demonstrates a “continuity between contemporary scientific depictions of race and the essentialism of the past” (p. 38). She charts racialization from ancient observable physiognomic features to 19th- and 20th-century serology, culminating in contemporary DNA science, where age-old racial essences are “‘buried alive’” (pp. 38, 237–247). Rushton and Jensen (2005) nonetheless have no difficulty reinforcing “traditional racial groups classification” (p. 238), and even assert the “utility” (p. 237) of their findings based on these classifications, saying that denying them is “likely to be injurious both to unique individuals and to the complex structure of societies” (p. 285). We may question their stated concern, given their press to assess racialized psychological differences in the first place (cf. Sternberg, 2005, p. 300). This returns us to practical considerations.

In a pragmatic spirit, Glasgow and Woodward (2015) asked not “whether races exist” but rather what we want to do about the fact that “we look different” (p. 465); for them the reality of race as an ontological kind is far less important than the implications of its use in science for purposes of “social progress” (p. 465; Glasgow, Shulman, & Covarrubias, 2009). After all, the idea of distinct races (as essentialized human subspecies if not subhuman kinds) is so entrenched historically and culturally, and carries so much political, social, and economic baggage, that to ignore it in the social sciences would constitute a form of epistemic violence—an act of omission. I therefore turn to ways in which mainstream psychologists have investigated the role of essentialism in their research on folk conceptions of race.

Mainstream psychology’s investigation of folk conceptions of race

Social, cognitive, and developmental psychologists have studied folk/from-below conceptions of race. This is not the racist science that uses racial distinctions in service of empirical differences that are interpreted in denigrating essentialist terms, with oppressive consequences. But neither is it a science expressly infused with from-below concepts and belief. Rather, it is designed to attain non(true-for)relativist (or objective) evidence, to shed light on the “psychological mechanisms that underlie the way people think about racialized groups” (Faucher, 2017, note 15, p. 259, see Nelson, 2016).

Racialist cognition and essentializing language

Psychological research demonstrates that we do not essentialize all human groups equally, and of those that are essentialized “not all instances of them are essentialized in every culture or at every point in history” (Faucher, 2017, pp. 264–265). This logically implicates mechanisms to transmit information about “which kinds of groups, in any given sociopolitical context, should be essentialized” (pp. 264–265). The obvious mechanism is language, in supplying cues to rules for essentializing (p. 268). To exemplify, Faucher cites Gelman and Heyman’s (1999, p. 491) finding that when presented with a common name such as “carrot eater,” children were more likely to view that property as “more stable and more likely to persist” (Faucher, 2017, p. 265) than when presented with a verbal phrase such as “is eating carrots” (p. 265). Moreover, generic statements (or property generalizations such as “tigers are striped” or “pit bulls have an aggressive nature”) contribute to the reproduction of essentialist beliefs (Faucher, 2017, p. 265).

Certain kinds of generic statements affect the transmission of social essentialism (e.g., Gelman, 2003; Rhodes, Leslie, & Tworek, 2012). Philosopher of psychology Sarah-Jane Leslie (2017) concluded that, upon hearing strong generic statements that she calls “striking property generalizations” (p. 395; e.g., “mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus”), we intuitively judge them to be true even when given compelling statistical information such as “less than one percent of mosquitoes carry the West Nile Virus” (p. 395). Leslie elaborates, “If even just a few members of a kind possess a property that is harmful or dangerous, then a generic that attributes that property to the kind is likely to be judged true” (p. 396).

Psychological research indicates the dependence of negative stereotypes on seeing members of an essentialized group as highly uniform (e.g., Hamilton, Sherman, Crump, & Spencer-Rodgers, 2009). Smith (2014) explains how the perceived uniformity of racialized groups depends on racial essentialism, which rests on psychological essentialism—the human propensity to understand kinds by way of hidden essences that cause observed properties and provide grounds for “inductive inferences about members of natural kinds” (p. 816; see Bastian & Haslam, 2006; Prentice & Miller, 2007). Smith (2019b) finds in racial essentialism “a special case of psychological essentialism [that] conforms to the same general pattern as essentialism about species” (p. 114), such that psychological essentialism helps explain dehumanization. This, owing to the folk-theory view of species membership as “absolute rather than incremental.” Here Smith exemplifies:

The racial essence imagined to be possessed by all and only Black people is supposed to be what makes such people Black. . . . However, according to essentialist thinking, it’s possible for a person to be of a race without ever manifesting the appearance and behavior that’s associated with that race. In the essentialist framework, their essence is latent. . . . So, for example, the racial essence of Jews is supposed to be greedy, deceptive, and exploitative. Jews who do not behave in these nasty ways are nevertheless imagined to “have it in them” to do so. (2019b, pp. 114–115; see Muhammad, 2010; Steinweiss, 2008)

Essentialism in folk race conceptions: Experimental philosophy

Experimental philosophers question the ubiquity of the standard essentialist folk conception of race. Glasgow et al. (2009) reported a “widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, nonessentialist) criteria for social classification” (p. 15). Shulman and Glasgow (2010), after asking (predominantly White) participants whether they think race is real or merely imagined, classified participants as realists (75%) or anti-realists, respectively. The realists were asked if they believed that race is determined by looks (biology), by personality and abilities (psychology), and/or by social ties (sociology). Half of the realists thought of race as “wholly biological,” 21% as “wholly social,” and 20% as a biosocial hybrid (p. 253). Although “racial realists exhibited higher levels of racism” than anti-realists, the “three realist groups [biological purists, social purists, and biosocial hybrids] did not differ in their level of racism” (p. 252). This surprising finding raises questions about the central role that racial essentialism is theorized by Smith to play in racialization and dehumanization.

Smith (2019b) rejects the claim that racial essentialism is less pervasive than presumed. He suspects that when “people use racial labels,” they implicitly believe that members of each race are instances of a “discrete natural human kind . . . in virtue of possessing a ‘deep’ [inalienable] essence that is responsible for the surface characteristics that are taken to be typical of the kind” (p. 130; see Wendt & Gone, 2012, pp. 161–162). He is skeptical of experimental findings such as Glasgow’s, as he worries that responses to questions about race may reveal respondents’ “beliefs about their beliefs about race, rather than their beliefs” (p. 132). This raises concerns about how social desirability and moral identity may influence responses, to which I return.

Essentialism in racialization and dehumanization

In asserting the ubiquity of essentialist folk theory of race, Smith (2019b) says that such belief is “all that is necessary [in] connecting the dots between racializing people and dehumanizing them” (p. 135). He describes how psychological essentialism is core to both processes, in that racialized people

are regarded as categorically other while retaining membership in the more encompassing category of the human. They may pass as members of the dominant group in . . . having an appearance that departs from their supposed racial essence [which always threatens to reveal itself]. But when racialized people are dehumanized, they are pushed even further into the terrifying twilight zone of otherness. The structural similarity between dehumanization and racialization . . . is explained, in large measure, by the fact that both are rooted in psychological essentialism. (p. 137)

Smith’s racialization/dehumanization distinction rests logically on the folk metaphysical idea of the “Great Chain of Being”:

If you demote a human being sufficiently, there is a qualitative change such that (“mere”) racialization gives way to [the] dehumanization that presupposes a subhuman essence. [He exemplifies racialization as a human as] slaveholders’ conceiving of Blacks as “irredeemably underdeveloped” humans in the antebellum South [and racialization as a subhuman as] conceiving of Jews as vermin who infest such as cockroaches or rats, in Nazi Germany. (Smith, personal communication, May 2018; also see Smith, 2014)

Smith (personal communication, May, 2018) says that “when people are racialized, they are relegated to a distinct and inferior sub-rank of the human category,” and he considers this a “dress rehearsal” for dehumanization: “Once a human population is consigned to an inferior human rank it takes relatively little cognitive effort to thrust them still lower, into the realm of the subhuman.” On his theory (Smith, 2019b, in press), the quasi-automatic nature of moving from racialization to dehumanization depends on the ease with which cognitive mechanisms/processes transform the former into the latter. Thus, mainstream research that sheds light on these theorized mechanisms/processes might well be relevant to achieving progressive goals (see Nelson, 2016).

Some mainstream research supports Smith’s theorized link between essentialist folk race-conceptions and attitudes toward racialized others. Psychologists Williams and Eberhardt (2008) defined racial “biological essentialism” as understanding “race . . . to be a fundamental and stable source of division among humankind that is rooted in our biological makeup” (p. 1033); they found that holding biologically essentialist views predicts lack of motivation to change racial inequalities:

Individuals who understand race to be biologically derived are more accepting of racial inequities [and] tend to understand racial inequities as natural, unproblematic, and unlikely to change . . . , a relationship that cannot be accounted for by racial prejudice. (pp. 1034, 1043)

And in a unique twist on motivational factors, psychologists Rothschild and Keefer (2017) demonstrated that “moral outrage”—arguably a pervasive from-below phenomenon—can be motivated by genuine need for justice or by defensive feelings of guilt that threaten moral identity. Those differentiated by these motivations also differ in their likelihood of taking social action to right injustices. If guilt feelings are alleviated in the latter group, so is the outrage—and thus the likelihood of taking restorative action.

In sum, in examining the nature and consequences of racial essentialism in traditional psychological subdisciplines, mainstream researchers have, in recent years, studied from-below or folk notions of race in nonothered folk. Many of these scientists do so with an eye toward combating racialization and other forms of othering.

Anticipated objections

I have cited examples of mainstream research about the nature of folk race-conceptions, mechanisms/processes of othering, and psychological conditions under which progressive action is more and less likely to be motivated. Does this research meet the morally infused epistemic criteria of critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists? In mainstream study of how mostly White participants conceive of, perceive, and respond to othered peoples, many critical-cum-Indigenous psychologists may find elements of epistemic violence—not only in a failure to include othered peoples’ concepts/conceptions, but also in an emphasis on (speculative causal) conclusions about people.

These are legitimate concerns. Nonetheless, research about the mechanisms/processes of racialization and dehumanization among nonothered folk might serve “interests from below” (Teo, 2018). This research could aid in developing policies and interventions designed to combat racist beliefs more successfully. For example, apropos of Smith’s theory (2019b, in press), knowledge of cognitive processes that help transform racialized kinds into dehumanized kinds could implicate ways to derail that process. And given the pervasive tendency to believe that racialized kinds entail essentialist psychological components, it might help in combating that belief to understand the workings of psychological essentialism itself, including its part in our inclination to see people who look different from us as discrete racial (rather than racialized) kinds or subspecies.

Smith (2018; also see 2019a) transcends psychological insights in applying philosopher of biology Ruth Millikan’s (1984) teleofunctional theory to the problem of racist/dehumanizing ideologies. On that view, although these ideologies are not facts of the matter, they are (a) believed to be true and they (b) preserve certain advantages of the powerful over the powerless. We must not conflate (a) and (b), as Smith (2018) maintains that holders of such ideologies do not do so cynically—that is, with intention to preserve the advantage conferred by such belief, while knowing it is false. Instead they take this content to be true, with its essentialism intact. Thus, “to determine whether one’s beliefs are ideological, one must trace the social genealogy of those beliefs, drawing on history rather than psychology” (Smith, 2018, p. 23). This has educational implications, and Smith (2018) states that “it may be more effective to educate the sexist about the genealogy of sexist beliefs, so that he is in a position to recognize their ideological character” (p. 24). Smith thus calls for historical education, prior to challenging beliefs psychologically, as ahistorical “attitudinal interventions often conflate intentions with teleofunctions” (p. 24). Although Smith concedes that this strategy may be insufficient in failing “to address the proximate psychological causes [of] holding these beliefs” (p. 24), he insists that understanding the historical genealogical bases of ideological belief may be “transformative” (compared to epistemological and/or psychological understanding), precisely because they may put us in a better position to reveal just how the belief is unwarranted (cf. Strangor, 2016).

Conclusions

Essentialist beliefs and representations from below have historically informed interpretations of observed group differences in psychological science, whose from-above epistemic privilege grants these interpretations the status of knowledge that has often enough served oppressive sociopolitical agendas. Whether these explanations are seen as warranted, whether judged to be epistemically violent, and whether they entail inferiority, they do not prove the existence of racial (as opposed to racialized) groups. And so the question of when race science should be seen as racist science remains.

Combating epistemic violence surely begins with the phenomena we choose to investigate. Yet, if the selected concepts and conceptions fail to capture not only the experiences of the othered but also the relevant experiences and cognitive-social mechanisms/processes of those who engage in othering, then psychology’s hoped-for contribution to reducing othering and oppression is unnecessarily limited.

Demagogues have historically benefited socially, politically, and economically from their pragmatic epistemic criteria, selected relative to their oppressive goals. Their “achievements” have derived in part from disguising their true-for falsehoods as objectively warranted truth. And therein lies the problem for anti-objectivists with progressive purposes: the potential harm of nonobjectivist epistemologies may not be readily seen by its proponents, despite their attunement to progressive ideals, in part because denigrating essentialist claims have been put forth (and received) as objectively true when they are nothing more than true-for relativist pronouncements.

In challenging the falsity of these denigrating claims, those who seek progressively informed epistemologies may renounce all psychological knowledge based on objectivist epistemologies as itself oppressive. In this, aim is taken at the wrong target. The misappropriation of the mantle of objectivity does not necessitate true-for relativist knowledge—so long as psychological science proceeds with firm unpacking of historical and contemporary reasons for, including meanings and uses of, selected concepts, and with appreciation of the fallibility and limits that inhere in all empirical endeavors. True-for relativist epistemologies do not own these virtues exclusively.

Decades of theoretical-psychology alternatives to objectivist epistemologies have not put a halt to objectively false claims that are characterized as objectively true. This will not end with demands for a science stripped of objectivist rhetorical pretension. Because public policy depends on public opinion, progressive policies might benefit substantially more from a psychological science that demonstrates the objective falsity of demagogic essentialist claims than from a science that dismisses those claims on grounds that they do not, indeed cannot, enjoy their proclaimed (but illusory) objectivity. This proposition is a pragmatic matter that rests on objective epistemic criteria.

Are mainstream findings about the nature of racialization on the part of nonothered folk about those of us who have been so studied—or for us? I suggest that they are both about us—how we construct and act on racialized distinctions—and they are for us—in the real-world implications of that about-us information for the efforts of those who are willing to look in the mirror in seeking to combat racist attitudes, acts, and policies, in pursuit of progressive reform. My argument of course extends to all forms of othering, including othering based on gender, class, and sexuality. Progress depends on appreciating not only the experiences of othered peoples but also of those who participate in the othering, intentionally or not. Pragmatically, this includes objective knowledge of the oppressive consequences of holding dehumanizing beliefs about othered peoples to be objectively true. We may be wasting time in trying to eliminate epistemic violence in psychology by failing to consider all the available evidence—regardless of whether it is considered to be part of psychology’s mainstream.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is an extended version of an invited paper, “The culture of science and the science of culture,” in T. Tjeltveit (Chair), Some diverse ways of knowing. Presidential symposium conducted at the 2018 Midwinter Meeting of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Phoenix, Arizona.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Barbara S. Held

Notes

Author biography

Barbara S. Held is the Barry N. Wish Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita at Bowdoin College. She is author of Back to Reality (Norton, 1995) and Psychology’s Interpretive Turn (American Psychological Association, 2007) and is co-editor (with Lisa Osbeck) of Rational Intuition (Cambridge, 2014). She is the 2012 recipient of the APF Joseph B. Gittler Award for scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge.

References

Andreasen

R. O.

(2005). The meaning of “race”: Folk conceptions and the new biology of race. The Journal of Philosophy, 102, 94–106.

Bastian

Haslam

(2006). Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 228–235.

Bhawuk

D. P. S.

(n.d.). Three cheers to Indigenous psychology (IP): Why should we do Indigenous psychological research? Task Force on Indigenous Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.indigenouspsych.org/index.html

Block

(1996). How heritability misleads about race. The Boston Review, XX(6), 30–35.

Boyd

(1999). Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa. In Wilson

R. A.

(Ed.), Species: New interdisciplinary essays (pp. 141–186). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Christopher

J. C.

Wendt

D. C.

Marecek

Goodman

D. M.

(2014). Critical cultural awareness: Contributions to a globalizing psychology. American Psychologist, 69, 645–655.

Clegg

J. W.

(2017). Hermeneutic theory and objectivism in social psychology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47, 159–163. doi: 10.1111/jtsb.12115

Danziger

(2006). Universalism and indigenization in the history of modern psychology. In Brock

(Ed.), Internationalizing the history of psychology (pp. 208–225). New York, NY: New York University Press.

Daston

Galison

(2007). Objectivity. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

10.

Faucher

(2017). Biophilosophy of race. In Smith

D. L.

(Ed.), How biology shapes philosophy: New foundations for naturalism (pp. 247–275). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Frankfurt

H. G.

(2005). On bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1986)

12.

Gannett

(2010). Questions asked and unasked: How by worrying less about the “really real” philosophers of science might better contribute to debates about genetics and race. Synthese, 177, 363–385.

13.

Gelman

S. A.

(2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

14.

Gelman

S. A.

Heyman

G. D.

(1999). Carrot-eaters and creature-believers: The effects of lexicalization on children’s inferences about social categories. Psychological Science, 10, 489–493.

15.

Giere

R. N.

(2010). Scientific perspectivism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Glasgow

J. M.

(2003). On the new biology of race. The Journal of Philosophy, 100, 456–474.

17.

Glasgow

Shulman

J. L.

Covarrubias

E. G.

(2009). The ordinary conception of race in the United States and its relation to racial attitudes: A new approach. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9, 15–38.

18.

Glasgow

Woodward

J. M.

(2015). Basic racial realism. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1, 449–466.

19.

Gone

J. P.

(2016). Alternative knowledges and the future of community psychology: Provocations from an American Indian healing tradition. American Journal of Community Psychology, 58, 227–500.

20.

Gone

J. P.

(2017). “It felt like violence”: Indigenous knowledge traditions and the postcolonial ethics of academic inquiry and community engagement. American Journal of Community Psychology, 60, 353–360.

21.

Greenfield

(2000). Three approaches to the psychology of culture: Where do they come from? Where can they go? Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 223–240.

22.

Hamilton

D. L.

Sherman

S. J.

Crump

S. A.

Spencer-Rodgers

(2009). The role of entitativity in stereotyping. In Nelson

T. D.

(Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination (pp. 179–198). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

23.

Held

B. S.

(2007). Psychology’s interpretive turn: The search for truth and agency in theoretical and philosophical psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

24.

Held

B. S.

(2017). The distinction between psychological kinds and natural kinds revisited: Can updated natural-kind theory help clinical psychological science and beyond meet psychology’s philosophical challenges? Review of General Psychology, 21, 82–94.

25.

Heng

(2018). The invention of race in the European middle ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

26.

Hochman

(2013). Against the new racial naturalism. Journal of Philosophy, 110, 331–351.

27.

Hochman

(2017). Replacing race: Interactive constructionism about racialized groups. Ergo, 4, 61–92.

28.

Isaac

B. H.

(2006). The invention of racism in classical antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

29.

Kaplan

J. M.

(2015, June 1). Heritability: A handy guide to what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and that giant meta-analysis of twin studies [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/heritability-a-handy-guide-to-what-it-means-what-it-doesnt-mean-and-that-giant-meta-analysis-of-twin-studies/

30.

Khalidi

M. A.

(2015). Three kinds of social kinds. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90, 96–112.

31.

Khalidi

M. A.

(2018). Natural kinds as nodes in causal networks. Synthese, 195, 1379–1396.

32.

Kirschner

S. R.

(2005). Conclusion: Toward critical openness. In Slife

Reber

Richardson

(Eds.), Critical thinking about psychology: Hidden assumptions and plausible alternatives (pp. 267–277). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

33.

Leslie

S. J.

(2017). The original sin of cognition: Fear, prejudice, and generalization. Journal of Philosophy, 114, 393–421.

34.

Lewontin

(1970). Race and intelligence. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 26, 2–8.

35.

Lewontin

(1974). The analysis of variance and the analysis of causes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 26, 400–411.

36.

Long

(2019). Comment: Ingenous psychology: Going nowhere. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39, 115–119.

37.

Mallon

(2013). Was race thinking invented in the modern West? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 44, 77–88.

38.

Millikan

R. G.

(1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories: New foundations for realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

39.

Morning

(2011). The nature of race: How scientists teach and think about human difference. Berkeley: University of California Press.

40.

Muhammad

K. G.

(2010). The condemnation of blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

41.

Nelson

T. D.

(2016). Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

42.

Nunberg

(2012). Ascent of the A word: Assholism, the first 60 years. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

43.

Osbeck

L. M.

(2019). Values in psychological science: Re-imagining epistemic priorities at a new frontier. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

44.

Prentice

Miller

(2007). Psychological essentialism of human categories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1 6, 202–206.

45.

Ratner

(2008). Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology. New York, NY: Nova Science.

46.

Rhodes

Leslie

S. J.

Tworek

(2012). Cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(34), 13526–13531.

47.

Richardson

F. C.

Fowers

(2010). Hermeneutics and sociocultural perspectives in psychology. In Kirschner

S. R.

Martin

(Eds.), The sociocultural turn in psychology: The contextual emergence of mind and self (pp. 113–136). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

48.

Rothschild

Z. K.

Keefer

L. A.

(2017). A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity. Motivation and Emotion, 41, 209–229.

49.

Rushton

J. P.

Jensen

A. R.

(2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235–294.

50.

Schraube

Osterkamp

(2013). Psychology from the standpoint of the subject: Selected writings of Klaus Holzkamp ( Boreham

Osterkamp

, Trans.). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

51.

Shulman

J. L.

Glasgow

(2010). Is race-thinking biological or social, and does it matter for racism? An exploratory study. Journal of Social Philosophy, 41, 244–259.

52.

Smith

D. L.

(2011). Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others. New York, NY: St. Martin’s.

53.

Smith

D. L.

(2014). Dehumanization, essentialism, and moral psychology. Philosophy Compass, 9, 814–824.

54.

Smith

D. L.

(2018, March). The dilemma of ideology and its biophilosophical solution. In: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, San Diego, CA.

55.

Smith

D. L.

(2019a). How media makes, ignites, and breaks ideology. In Fox

Saunders

(Eds.), Media ethics, free speech and the requirements of democracy (pp. 183–202). New York, NY: Routledge.

56.

Smith

D. L.

(2019b). Making monsters: The uncanny power of dehumanization. Manuscript in preparation.

57.

Smith

D. L.

(in press). On inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to resist it. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

58.

Steinweiss

A. E.

(2008). Studying the Jew: Scholarly antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

59.

Sternberg

R. J.

(2005). There are no public-policy implications: A reply to Rushton and Jensen. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 295–301.

60.

Strangor

(2016). The study of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination within social psychology: A quick history of theory and research. In Nelson

T. D.

(Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination (2nd ed., pp. 1–26). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

61.

Sundararajan

(2014). Indigenous psychology: Grounding science in culture, why and how. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45, 64–81.

62.

Sundararajan

(2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer.

63.

Task Force on Indigenous Psychology. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved from http://www.indigenouspsych.org/index.html

64.

Teo

(2008). From speculation to epistemological violence in psychology: A critical-hermeneutic reconstruction. Theory & Psychology, 18, 47–67. doi: 10.1177/0959354307086922

65.

Teo

(2010). What is epistemological violence in the empirical social sciences? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 295–303.

66.

Teo

(2011). Empirical race psychology and the hermeneutics of epistemological violence. Human Studies, 34, 237–255.

67.

Teo

(2013). Backlash against American psychology: An indigenous reconstruction of the history of German critical psychology. History of Psychology, 16, 1–18.

68.

Teo

(2015). Historical thinking as a tool for theoretical psychology: On objectivity. In Martin

Sugarman

Slaney

K. L.

(Eds.), The Wiley handbook of theoretical and philosophical psychology (pp. 135–150). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

69.

Teo

(2018). Outline of theoretical psychology: Critical investigations. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

70.

Tissaw

M. A.

Osbeck

L. M.

(2007). On critical engagement with the mainstream: Introduction. Theory & Psychology, 17, 155–168. doi: 10.1177/0959354307075120

71.

Wendt

D. C.

Gone

J. P.

(2012). Decolonizing psychological inquiry in American Indian communities: The promise of qualitative methods. In Nagata

D. K.

Kohn-Wood

Suzuki

(Eds.), Qualitative strategies for ethnocultural research (pp. 161–178). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

72.

Wertz

F. J.

(2016). Outline of the relationship among transcendental phenomenology, phenomenological psychology, and the sciences of persons. Schutzian Research: A Yearbook in Lifeworldly Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Sciences, 8, 139–162.

73.

Williams

M. J.

Eberhardt

J. L.

(2008). Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 1033–1047.

74.

Yudell

(2014). Race unmasked: Biology and race in the 20th century. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.