Towards new horizons: Welcome to the future

Thirty years have passed quickly. It seems as if yesterday when Ziyad Marar and I discussed the establishment of a new journal bringing together topics of culture and psychology in my office at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. ¹ And now—three decades later—the Journal continues at the forefront of scholarly international exchanges on how to understand culture in psychology, as well as in its neighboring disciplines. We have lived up to our transdisciplinary and international promises that we made thirty years ago. And this is an achievement in itself. The relevance of the various aspects of culture is on the rise in the social sciences.

In the rough ocean of scholarly publishing Culture and Psychology has managed to keep and expand its focus. I am particularly glad that our Journal is overtaking its closest similar project in history—Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie ² —as it moves forcefully beyond its 30^th birthday. Longevity is important— new ideas need a responsive arena to become publicly accessible all over the World. And this we have accomplished in Culture and Psychology, Future growth of new ideas is possible by giving voice to young eager researchers who look for new solutions to problems that persist.

New ideas are always fragile. Hence they need an editorial system of a journal that supports the authors’’ efforts and help them to bring these ideas one step further. The hallmark of Culture and Psychology has been the central role of manuscript reviews that support the author—even if being critical of many issues in the manuscripts—in bringing the article to its final form. I have deep gratitude to all the reviewers and associate editors who have made this possible over the past three decades. They have dedicated much of their time—and we all know that academics are always under time pressure—to help the authors in the most collegial yet critical manner. Many authors have understood, and appreciated, that. Culture and Psychology is a journal where the notion of intellectual freedom is practiced as a key credo for basic science. It will continue so.

There is a good reason to emphasize the need to preserve intellectual freedom in academia. Pressures limiting that freedom from many sources have been on the increase all over the World in the past three decades (Geberth and Woller, 2023). When we started in 1995 nobody of the authors who contributed to the first few years of issues of the Journal asked (first) about its “impact factor”—a trivial indicator of citations of the journal that by the end of the 1990s started to become institutionally used to evaluate the authors on the basis of the invented “social value” of the journal. In the 21^st century such administrative uses of journals’ socially constructed value indicators (e.g., listing in Scopus list or Web of Science, national “pecking orders” of journals by their relevance categorizations) has become rampant. I find this trend counterproductive to development of new ideas in science. It is as if the brand of clothing one wears becomes the substance of the body of their wearer. The impact of this on development of new ideas in the given field is clear—what is new needs to be camouflaged by the old up to the point where it is no longer visible.

This hiding of ideas has direct impact for a journal. As the editor reading all the many submissions I am constantly frustrated by the need to find out what is the authors’ new contribution to the field. It is hidden behind many references to others—usually of superficial kind (e.g., no marking of what idea is referenced, from what page of the referenced text). The shared social rule of being humble about their ideas is exploited by university systems for evaluations by demanding increased referencing of others to be considered “scientific”. ³ The initial goal of referencing—knowing the precise thinking of other scholars working on the same topic—has been replaced by the demand for “social capital” construction by making superficial references. Thinking of the future, I would really like to see a new editorial policy that would restrict the number of references in an article to 5 (or any other small number) with inclusion of no more than two references to one’s own work. This of course will be deeply unpopular reform as it undermines the evaluation systems of academic administrations. Yet this reform would free the authors from the need to make references not needed precisely for elaboration of the given topic.

The process of commoditization of journal articles (“you should publish in institutionally approved high impact factor journals”) should end—so that the freedom to use selective referencing to one another’s precise ideas and shared phenomena is restored. Publications are not products produced for a fashion market and to be counted as academic “productivity” indicators, but efforts to communicate new ideas to colleagues who are intellectually interested in similar topics. I can relate to this personally—while my publications list reaches 700 over my 50-year history of publications (1974–2024) I get fascinated approvals for my “productivity”. Yet I politely smile and turn conversation towards the substantive unresolved problems that none of the many publications have authoritatively resolved. True—these acts of public testimony are important to trace my persistent efforts which mostly have failed. I keep searching for the new—and pay no attention to “H-indexes” and other inventions that institutions have learned to like.

What is the future like for cultural psychology, and for its Journal? Predictions are always difficult to make. Maybe it is more realistic to outline some of the possible obstacles the field needs to bypass. The first of these is the danger of trivialization of the complex phenomenon of culture. This happens at the intersection of basic research of cultural psychology—looking at complex phenomena- and the demand to provide public popular-scientific accounts of what cultural psychology does, or how it can be applied.

The second danger on the horizon is popularity. In the recent decades psychology has moved ahead not by new discoveries, but by changing fashions. The major substantive foci of psychology in the 20^th century—behavioral and cognitive arenas for investigation—are by the 21^st century replaced by appealing labels of “evolutionary psychology”, “positive psychology”, “emotional intelligence”, “well-being”, and the like. These are all fashions in the shadow of which the traditions of elementaristic empiricism thrive. Cultural psychology—under the societal increased interest in ”cultural issues” in a given society—is in potential danger of being turned into a similar fashion. It would be a deep irony—public success without basic problems solved.

Finally—and most specifically for our Journal, Culture and Psychology—there is the danger of becoming extinct— through becoming a repository of papers some cite and nobody reads. A journal is an arena for the community of scholars who have been brought together as a collective unity by the journal. It that community of scholars is replaced by a conveyer line of mere formal evaluation of incoming manuscripts the intellectual substance will disappear. This danger is present not to any one journal, but to all of them. We already now can observe the technical indicator of a text—its DOI number—becoming equal to the author, year, title, and source tradition of referencing. Combining that technical innovation with the journals becoming mere presenters of empirical papers which are not related with one another within a journal—the likely outcome is the disappearance of the need for journals as public frameworks and their substitution by publishers’ databases that can be accessed (be it for pay or “open access”) by merely the DOI number. The current Sage Open can easily become Sage Comprehensive Database, and the current role of journal editors and reviewers is only the evaluation of items that strive towards inclusion of this database, Undoubtedly such database is well guarded and maintained—but the scientific communities now supporting the journals intellectually would disintegrate.

This last scenario is a very disturbing one for science. Journals have of course ways to prevent that from happening—by building in the journal issues increased interactivity between authors and their perspectives. Over years, in Culture and Psychology we have accomplished that through special issues on relevant topics, and thematic sections on smaller issues. The recent addition of the genre of reviews of the issues has added to such interactivity. In am confident that this gloomy scenario of extinction is not to happen to our Journal.

As Culture and Psychology continues, I am very glad to hand it over to Kevin Carriere who has been intimately involved in making of the Journal for a number of years, and starting from 2025 takes over from me as the Editor-in-Chief. I have full confidence in him. Kevin has developed his unique version of cultural psychology of political processes which is a creative synthesis of macro- and micro-levels of the complex of politics (Carriere, 2022). He will innovate the Journal in its continuation as the arena for heterogeneity of perspectives looking systematically into how culture lives in psychology. Welcome to the Future!