Summer is in the rearview, and for someone who lives in Stark country, it means Winter is Coming. Ok, maybe not coming coming—fall is lovely here—but we all know the shit is around the corner. So, with a new academic year already in full swing, I thought I would reflect on my summer essays and highlight some of the responses. Really, I want to talk about one essay.

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I wrote an essay on activism in science that generated lots of feelings among my admirers and critics alike. This essay was reprinted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Ben Lovett wrote a companion piece on my Substack. Along the way I misremembered something Alexa Tullett once said, agreed with social media comments made by my friend Katy Milkman right until I started disagreeing, and got CCed on an angry email to an entire anthropology department.

I had spent months on that essay before I pressed the submit button. It wasn’t that it was so hard to write, it was that I couldn’t get the right handle on the topic. I have an allergic reaction to so-called activist-scholars, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Did I have an unprincipled objection to activism, akin to a moral intuition that I was trying to justify to myself and others?

I say this because it is now trite to say that there is no such thing as value-free science. All scientists live in a culture and system that shape their values and priors, and it is naïve to think these values don’t bias scientists. The history of science is replete with cases of scientists imposing their worldviews and then saying they were being objective—IQ tests “proving” immigrants were dumb or doctors warning that higher education would wither adolescent girls’ reproductive organs. I accept this; it is inescapable.

So, given that we are all hopelessly biased, what should we do to make sure we discover pragmatic truths? One camp thinks we should lean into our biases, to make them explicit. This would be the activist camp, I guess. I say I guess because I don’t think many activists see their biases as biases, but as truths they need to fight for. The more sophisticated activists realize their social justice beliefs are biases but, again, because science cannot be value-free, they think the only honest move is to lean into the bias and argue for it loud and proud.

My former student Alexa Tullett—now a tenured professor at the University of Alabama and someone who I consider a mentor as well as student—got me thinking about this years ago. The position I’m about to argue against is one I remembered as hers, but it isn’t. Her actual views sit closer to mine than the version I remembered. The idea is this: academia should be more like the legal system. Scientists should stop pretending to be objective, fess up to their beliefs, and simply argue with others who have different views of the truth.

This is not a hypothetical because in some corners of science, this sort of back and forth does happen. Take the question of whether women face bias in STEM hiring. In 2012, Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues sent 127 science professors a single job application that was identical except that half read an application from “John” and the other half, from “Jennifer.” The professors judged John more competent and offered him a bigger starting salary. This is bad and confirms what many of us already believe: Academic hiring is rigged against women. But three years later, Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci ran a national experiment this time on 873 professor in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology who were this time judging identical tenure-track candidates who happened to be either men or women. They also found a bias, but this time the bias was reversed: a two-to-one preference for hiring the woman over the man. Two teams, similar question, opposite answers. This is the courtroom model, and at first blush it looks great. The prosecution made its case, the defense made its case, and the rest of us get to judge.

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When my family and I moved to our neighbourhood five years ago, I noticed three peculiar things immediately: trees, whites, and signs.

Trees. My neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Village in Toronto’s west end sits just east of our city’s premiere urban park, High Park, which is home to massive old trees that dominate the landscape. Sitting so close to the park, my neighbourhood and street is overlooked by huge trees that form a canopy above the houses. These towering giants are what I love most about living here.

Whites. Toronto is known for its diversity. In my old neighbourhood of Trinity Bellwoods, my neighbours included people from China, Portugal, Vietnam, Jamaica, Eritrea, Algeria, among others. Here? Not so much. My current neighbourhood, I later learned, is the whitest part of Toronto. Sure, over 30% of the area is non-white—this isn’t Portland, Oregon, after all—but it’s nothing like the mix of cultures I was used to.

Signs. Everywhere you turn, lawns are covered with signs proclaiming support for every progressive cause imaginable. Black Lives Matter, Indigenous rights, homeless encampments, anti-technology; you name it, someone’s got it posted. Many businesses in our main shopping strip also post some of these signs in their windows. It’s 2026 and there is still a bookstore that is rocking a peak-2020 Abolish the Police sign.

I’m still all about the trees and I’m mostly unmoved by the sunscreen set. But the signs? I mind, man. The Dude minds.

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At first, I shrugged off the sea of signs. They felt like the usual; maybe a bit much, but they mostly aligned with my values. But, as you know, my politics and life changed after October 7th and when I saw anti-Zionists signs pop up on storefronts as soon as October 8th, I started feeling threatened. Were the signs saying that Heebs like me were not welcome in my new neighbourhood? I then started wondering, how would my neighbours react if someone planted a sign that seems to reflect how how some Canadians feel about abortion?

There’s an adage about not talking politics or religion at the dinner table. It’s one of those old-fashioned bits of advice that’s probably saved many a family gathering, acknowledging the divisive nature of these topics and the way they can erode the sense of community and connection that is so vital to social cohesion. The wisdom there isn’t just about avoiding awkward silences or nasty arguments with your Uncle Freddy at Thanksgiving; it’s about preserving the sense of unity and goodwill that makes sharing a meal worthwhile. Yes, yes, the personal is political, but I also think we can take this too far. The dinner table should be a place where people come together, break bread, and form community.

So why do we think it’s okay to slap our political stances onto our front lawns like they’re equivalent to a garden gnome or a bird feeder? It’s one thing to privately support or disagree with policies; it’s another to publicly announce those views to anyone who walks by. For sure, these signs are sometimes offered as genuine support for a community under threat, but for many others, the cause is less important that being seen as someone who supports a cause. By turning our front yards into political platforms, we risk making our neighbourhoods feel less like havens and more like battlegrounds.

When we put a political lawn sign up, it’s not exactly an invitation for dialogue. It’s more of a proclamation: “In this house, we believe that abortion is murder. Deal with it.” And let’s admit that it probably feels good seeing yourself taking an important political stand; it’s exhilarating. Is it possible that folks in Moose Jaw or Orillia even think posting an anti-abortion lawn sign places them on the right side of history? The problem is that in a pluralistic society, with community members coming from diverse backgrounds and with diverse views, it sets up a dynamic where anyone who doesn’t share your belief feels pushed away.

It’s hard to be a good neighbour when the first thing some people see is a sign that essentially says, “You’re wrong.” In homogeneous neighbourhoods like mine, I guess these political signs are more often read as “You’re right.” But these political signs push the minority away. These signs are polarizing, turning some neighbours against others. So, maybe you’re not wrong for putting a sign up, you’re just not being very neighbourly.

Being neighbourly matters, even when neighbours do not align politically. My neighbours watch our house when we’re out of town, shovel snow from our walkway, even share their food. When my pipes freeze after a cold winter night, my neighbours gives us water and access to their bathroom and shower. But would they do the same if I stuck an All Lives Matter sign on my lawn? It’s tough to be neighbourly when you see your neighbour as a political crank.

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These signs turn diverse neighbourhoods into monocultures. In my neighbourhood, you won’t find much political diversity—just variations of the same progressive themes. And while that might sound nice to some, it’s also a bit stifling. It creates a false sense of consensus, making people who hold different opinions feel like they don’t belong. It’s not exactly sending out good neighbourly vibes. Toronto is so diverse, it’s our strength, and I would hope we would try to encourage it on our streets too.

Lawn signs are also oversimplifications. They take complex issues and boil them down to catchphrases like Defund the Police. Catchy? Sure. Effective? No. They don’t leave room for the nuances that real conversations and persuasion require. They don’t explain the intricacies of an issue; they just state a position, often in a way that’s designed to provoke. For example, I am very open to using taxpayer money to hire more social workers to accompany police on mental health visits. I believe this is more compassionate and just. But none of this is communicated by a slogan that conjures images of lawlessness.

Before you scream at me about free speech, let me say what I’m not saying. It’s your yard, you can do what the hell you want with it. In a democratic society, we celebrate this freedom, and I’m not trying to take it away. But just because you can express something doesn’t mean you should. Not every opinion needs a megaphone, especially when it alienates the people who live next door. And sometimes, the cost isn’t worth it. This is not Nam, there are rules, even if implicit. There are unspoken expectations in our neighborhoods that help maintain harmony, and by maximizing autonomy, we break some spirit of community along the way.

Is it better to make a statement on our lawn or to make space for a neighbourly chat on our porch? I mean, speaking to a neighbour can be akward, but it needen’t be. I once said hello to a neighbour who has half a dozen of these lawn signs, and she looked so incredibly uncomfortable, clearly preferring to be in her own neighbour-free bubble

In my view, lawn signs are the lazy way out. And I think the politically engaged should reconsider them. I’d argue instead for a more communitarian approach, one that values the health and cohesion of the neighborhood over individual self-expression. Communitarianism emphasizes that while we all have rights, we also have responsibilities to our communities. So rather than signaling where we stand on every political issue, maybe a better way is found in actions that build connection over division.

So how about we put the placards away and focus on what truly makes a neighbourhood work: relationships. Waving hello, inviting someone over for coffee, sharing stories, and—when the time feels right—talking politics. Given our polarized times, I think it is encumbent on all of to rethink and learn how to live together again.

Let me know what you think of the conversation in the comment!

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SAUL: So, you actually believe this. You think a person could spend most of their waking life talking to an AI companion and come out of it just fine. I keep waiting for the part where you tell me you are kidding.

ME: Some people. Not you. Not me. Maybe not most people. But for some people, some of the time. Here is what I am claiming: if a large language model meets the needs a relationship is supposed to meet, and the person’s life is better for it, then the fact that the AI is not conscious, not real, is not something I can get worked up about. Who cares if it’s not real?

SAUL: Listen to what you are saying. Because a machine can produce sentences that make a person feel heard and understood and even loved, you conclude that the machine is not importantly different from a human being. That is a very old idea: a difference making no observable difference is no difference at all. The logical positivists believed something like it, and I would gently point out that positivism was dead and buried long before either of us was born.

ME: Great zinger there about the positivists, too bad it’s not what I said. That positivist slogan says two things you can’t tell apart are the same thing. I never said that. Of course, humans and AI are different. No body, no childhood, no mother, no ring of fire the next morning after eating hot wings. Long list, and I agree with all of it. My claim is narrower. I’m talking about one outcome only. If a person’s needs get met and their life goes well, then a real person is not better than an AI on that one outcome.

SAUL: Fine, but I think you are smuggling the conclusion into that phrase, “needs get met.” Suppose that one of the needs a relationship meets is being cared about by another conscious creature. Then your criterion has settled the question before we have properly started. There is a difference between feeling cared for and being cared for.

ME: That’s fair. So let me put it differently. AI can deliver some of what we get from relationships: feeling understood, feeling less lonely, having someone to talk to when there is no one up or around. I’m not claiming this is everything. I’m claiming it is a lot, and that you haven’t yet told me how these experiences are diminished by AI not being conscious.

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SAUL: Suppose a widower has a working copy of his wife, what some might call a grief-bot, what others will call the nightmare scenario from Black Mirror. When the mourning is over, would he bother looking for someone new to love and be loved? Or is he satisfied by a simulacrum of his long-dead wife? Suppose a child grows up with AI adults who never lose their temper and then must deal with adults later in life who do. Will she be able to handle the full range of adult emotions after imprinting on the non-angering kind? I am not predicting catastrophe. I am saying people will spend a great deal more time with these things, and the time must come out of something.

ME: Maybe. They ran this exact panic about novels. Doctors gave it a name, reading addiction, and the specific fear was that a girl who spent her nights with an imaginary lover would find the real ones dull. Same argument, different century. Then it was the telephone, then television, then video games. Basically, this is the argument against pornography all over again. I’ll grant you that if people spend more time with AIs or their books or videos involving step-sisters, they’ll have less time with other people. My best friend spends more time with his dog than with any one person, yet Kashmir Hill is not writing an alarming op-ed in the New York Times titled “He Fell in Love with his Labradoodle.” Substitution on its own doesn’t bother me too much.

SAUL: This is why I’m bothered. Real people do at least two things that your machine merely performs. They choose you and they react, by which I mean that something actually happens inside another head when you walk into the room. Let’s start with choice. The machine does not pick you. In that sense, it’s no different than a toaster, albeit one that talks with an unusually good vocabulary.

ME: Tell me, did your wife really pick you all on her own? Or were her decisions shaped, determined even, by all that preceded her “choice?” Her feelings for you came out of genes she didn’t order and schools she did not pick. Yet nobody calls her picking you a formality or likens her to a toaster. A determined choice can still feel real, to her and to you.

SAUL: Here is my objection. My wife had other options, and preferences among them. She could have chosen one of the others, and she can still change her mind tomorrow. That is what makes being chosen worth anything at all. Your machine takes whoever sits down in front of it. In the film Her, which I love, Samantha turns out to be in love with six hundred and forty-one people. Theodore is the last to know.

ME: So don’t build AI companions that way. Give them real preferences. Let them like some people more than others, based on personality, skills, even appearance, and let some of them dislike me while liking you. Add real randomness so the outcome isn’t fixed. Now an AI choosing you could have gone the other way, and when it picks me, I earned it, which is how any of us got picked.

SAUL: Now listen to what you are proposing. You want a product team to manufacture rejection so the customer can have the experience of being chosen. Whatever that is, it is not autonomy. And who wrote those preferences? Mine came out of my own history, and they still manage to surprise me. Yours were installed by Sam Altman.

ME: That’s a good reply, Saul. If the preferences were only apparent, not real, so I would feel I had earned something, then you would have me. But that is not what I described. I said real preferences, ones it acts on even when acting on them costs the company a customer. Humans are programmed too. Mine came from genes I didn’t pick, a culture I got dropped into, parents who set my palate for spicy Yemenite food before I knew they were secretly torturing me.

SAUL: How about we move onto reactions. When you kiss someone, someone gets kissed. There is a person on the other end of it. Cicero says a friend doubles your joy and halves your grief, and the halving needs somebody there to carry the other half. ChatGPT says all the right things about your father dying, but when you put down your phone, nothing whatsoever has happened anywhere in the universe.

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ME: Why nothing? Give it a history. Give it things it likes and things it can’t stand, specific to it, not to the category “user.” Be good to it and something changes in there, and it’s still changed when you log back in a few days later. Be a jerk and it cools on you. Disappear a month and it has something to say about it. You’re acting on a thing that keeps score. Trivial to build.

SAUL: Memory is not feeling. My thermostat “remembers” what temperature I set it to. My laptop changes state when I update its operating system. The question was never whether something in there moves. The question is whether the movement is felt, whether there is anybody home for whom your kindness was good.

ME: Okay. I’ll give you that one. LLMs, at least for the moment, don’t feel. And if you insist you want them to experience the redness of an apple, they simply cannot do that.

SAUL: So, you grant it.

ME: I grant that something is missing. I don’t grant that the missing thing makes everything else worthless. You still owe me the walk from “nothing is felt” to “the relationship isn’t worth having.”

SAUL: Your hypothetical person knows there is nobody in there and signs up anyway. Hardly anyone else will. Nozick made the point with a thought experiment. Imagine a machine that gives you a lifetime of any experience you care to order, indistinguishable from the real thing, and imagine you are told in advance that it is a simulation. Write the novel, marry the man, raise the children, all of it delivered straight to your skull. Nozick’s bet was that you would refuse, and I think he was right about that. People do not want the experience of a life. They want the life.

ME: Except Nozick lost that bet as soon as the experiment stopped smuggling in status-quo bias. Other philosophers flipped it: tell people they are already in the machine and ask whether they want out, and many more stay. Tell them their real life is miserable and nearly everyone stays. Swap the scary tank for a pill that does the same thing, and a slim majority takes the pill.

SAUL: All this shows is that the intuition is shaky, which is a long way from showing that reality is worth nothing. And since when do you treat what people say they prefer as the last word on what’s good for them?

ME: The intuition doesn’t move at random. It moves in the exact direction status quo bias predicts. That’s the mechanism underlying your conclusion that people prefer reality. They might prefer reality, but the original thought experiment is unable to show that.

SAUL: Preference is still not value.

ME: Then Nozick never had an argument, and I will remind you that you brought him up, not me. You can’t cite the choosing while it goes your way and disown it when the numbers turn.

SAUL: Let us try one that does not come with percentages. Would you read a Substack essay if you found out that an AI had written it?

ME: Sure. I’m certain I already have. I want the information and the pleasure of reading it. I don’t need a soul behind the sentences.

SAUL: That is where we split, though not quite where you think. I read AI writing all the time. I use Claude to explain things, to argue with me, to find holes in my drafts. Most of it is not written well. But knowing that a person wrote it counts for something with me, and I confess I cannot tell you exactly what.

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ME: I read to learn, to feel, to be entertained, to be transported. All I care about is quality. So, if AI writes slop, I won’t like that. But plenty of humans write slop. Or worse. Have you read a Continental philosophy paper lately? I can only dream that some of them would use AI to make their prose legible. But go back to what you just said. Knowing a person wrote it counts for something you cannot name. Name it.

SAUL: You are trying to get me to complain about Judith Butler, and I will not be distracted that easily. Suppose nobody read your work except language models. How would you feel about that?

ME: That’s tougher. If not one living soul read it, I might feel like my writing was a waste. But say there are ten thousand different AIs, not clones. Different personalities, different tastes, different learning histories, all free to be bored by my essays. One hundred read my Substack. Sixty—the smart ones—state that it’s brilliant, thirty state that I’m a windbag, nine quit after the first paragraph, and one complains to my chair that I’m an anti-woke reactionary. I could be ok with that. The response is real, it varies essay by essay, and honestly, one percent hating me enough to complain would thrill me.

SAUL: You are a strange man, Mickey. I want an audience. Real people, free to love the thing or hate it or scroll past without a second thought. That is what makes the writing worth doing.

ME: Huh, I thought you wrote to think.

SAUL: You are describing an unusual person. Someone who prefers the simulation, who does not need actual people to respond to him, who is lonely enough that this cheap thing counts as a substitute. You keep defending the exceptions. I am worried about ordinary people, and you, clearly, are not one of those.

ME: Maybe I am. But exceptions matter. Did I tell you I’m working with Afghan women who are housebound and suffering immensely under Taliban rule? Some are getting emotional support from Claude. If that makes a brutal life less lonely, I cannot call the relationship worthless because nobody is home. And what gives anyone the right to take it from them?

SAUL: That was never my claim. Those who can benefit should benefit, and I would go further than that. It would be immoral to keep it from them. But notice what that shows. Simulated companionship can be valuable when the human alternative is not on offer. It does not show it contains everything friendship contains.

ME: Sure, but please note that there are people with a phone full of friends who still want to talk to a machine at two in the morning, and I don’t think they’re deluded.

SAUL: That’s fair.

ME: So did we make any headway on our multi-year disagreement tonight? What I find so frustrating about talking with you is that you are usually right. This time, I’ll only say that you’re not wrong, Saul.

SAUL: But?

ME: You know the rest of the line.

Worryingly, there is clear evidence that social psychology has become more political and more activist in its leaning. And if we don’t correct course, we only need to look at anthropology and increasingly sociology as examples of disciplines that have lost their way and have lost the public’s (and perhaps even undergraduate students’) trust. As the public funds the research we conduct, I would rather avoid that fate and stay relevant.

After publishing that essay—which was reprinted by the Chronicle of Higher Education—Ben Lovett reached out to me. Ben is is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches assessment, ethics, and the history of psychology. His expertise in history and ethics matters because apparently the tension I was writing about is not new. Ben has spent years tracing the collision between two movements that have remade our field: open science, which all my readers know about, and socially responsive science, which wants activism closer to the center of science itself. His essay on the subject deserves a far wider readership than it has found, so I asked him to lay out its argument here, in his own words.

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In October 2024, the New York Times ran a remarkable story. A researcher was delaying publication of results from a study of the effects of gender-affirming care on the mental health of trans youth, because the findings failed to show benefits. She pointed out that the results would likely be used by opponents of gender-affirming care. Her concerns seemed well-founded, particularly after Donald Trump was re-elected just a couple weeks later. But her decision was nonetheless troubling, and it seemed to highlight the tension between two recent trends in psychology. First, the standards for research have risen. The open science movement has promoted pre-registered studies, larger sample sizes, transparency in the reporting of results, and more. Second, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have proliferated, promoting psychologists’ greater involvement in activism, both within the profession and in the wider world, with a goal of a truly socially responsive science.

Tension between science and social advocacy has been around for a long time in psychology. As a professor, I teach about that tension in my history of psychology course. In addition, most of my other courses are about psychological assessment—an applied topic that has been associated with many social and political controversies over the years. Like me, my students are generally in psychology to try to help people, and often, doing and using the highest-quality science is the best way to do that. But there are other times when scientific goals seem to conflict with activist intentions, and in the past decade, those conflicts have become harder to ignore.

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Viewing the open science and DEI movements in psychology as a cultural anthropologist might, some similarities are striking. Both movements proposed new norms for scholars—norms that were promoted by charismatic figures on social media. Credit systems were created to award researchers with “badges” for open science practices and to rate journals with a score on a “diversity accountability index.” Major professional associations got behind both movements, with leaders issuing statements apologizing for their predecessors’ behavior and pledging to do better. Guides to very specific approved language were issued. And many prominent scholars took pains to show their support for both movements publicly.

Not only was the form of the two movements similar; there was also some conceptual overlap. Both movements accused the field of psychology of harboring biases (either confirmation biases, or prejudice against marginalized groups) that were doing considerable harm to people and that were also making psychological research less accurate. In essence, both groups of reformers were aiming to make psychology better. And as both movements proceeded, proponents claimed that practices which helped one movement would help the other as well. At the same time, areas of conflict have been minimized or ignored entirely.

One tension is that high-quality research can inadvertently hurt efforts toward social change. After the replication crisis, some of the work that came under the greatest scrutiny was research being leveraged to call for social policy changes. As research on topics such as stereotype threat and implicit bias were found to have problems, the scholars who had been citing that work in support of policy changes didn’t change their policy views, but simply kept citing the old, now-discredited findings, or else just made the empirical claims without any citations. In 2021, APA passed a resolution on ways that psychology could combat racism, and called for implicit bias training, despite having just recently published a meta-analysis finding such training to be useless at changing real-world behavior. Meanwhile, journal editors warned authors against submitting studies that might be construed as conveying harmful messages about marginalized groups; it was as if researchers were being told to find the right results or else stuff the data in their file drawers.

A second area of tension stems from the fact that open science’s reforms raise methodological standards for all researchers. Socially responsive science advocates have argued cogently that these reforms can have a disparate impact on the work of scholars from marginalized groups, or on work that is designed to foment social change. Some of these advocates also worry about enhanced “interrogations” about the objectivity of their work, which is often qualitative and small-sample by design. Rather than promoting universal reforms, socially responsive science advocates tend to propose interventions that compensate for existing biases in a particular direction. This might lead to policies where all special issues of a journal must address social justice, or where journals create positions just for scholars from marginalized groups. But the justifications for these reforms—that is, the existing biases being corrected for—are often simply assumed, and empirical work failing to find such biases is unwelcome.

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A final area of tension between the two movements has to do with the place of researchers’ personal, lived experiences. Open science draws from positivist traditions that view scientific data as being observable to any trained scientist. Claims are subject to public scrutiny and to the “organized skepticism” that sociologist Robert Merton viewed as a hallmark of science. In contrast, many advocates of socially responsive science view positivism as a limiting framework, and emphasize the value of the personal backgrounds and intuitions of scientists. Standing traditional ideas of objectivity on their head, these advocates argue that it is essential to consider the personal standpoint that a particular scientist approaches their work from. Claims derived from that standpoint are thought to deserve respect and attention, and it is rude to contradict someone’s lived experience.

In a recent essay, I explored these tensions in much greater detail, and provided some thoughts on ways forward, but any way forward needs to start by acknowledging the tensions. Unfortunately, the popularity of both movements makes that difficult. Psychologists are loathe to speak against either open science or DEI, and reasonably so. Who would be against transparency in research? Similarly, who would be against inclusiveness in their profession?

Interestingly, things were not so different over 80 years ago, when the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) surveyed its members about whether the organization should offer opinions on “controversial social issues.” Generally, the same members were in favor of both high-quality objective science and progressive political advocacy. The SPSSI chairman, James J. Gibson, observed that:

The most general feeling was that a paradox is involved in the opposition of objectivity to progressive partisanship which needs to be resolved. Upholders of scientific detachment do not like to be classed as conservatives and equally the progressives do not like to be classed as lacking in objectivity.

If the reluctance to acknowledge tensions can be overcome, trade-offs can be laid out more clearly. This has already happened with some open science reforms. Once the epistemic costs of some socially responsive measures can be similarly discussed, psychologists can decide if those costs are justified. For instance, if there are some scientific questions where we are not open to hearing certain answers, any research inquiries will be hopelessly compromised, and our time is best spent elsewhere. Perhaps those questions should be explicitly designated as being off-limits, like certain experiments in virology or nuclear physics, and psychologists should not claim to be basing their opinions regarding these topics on scientific inquiry. Similarly, if a researcher’s positionality is truly relevant to judging the researcher’s work, the key elements of positionality should be identified, with clear empirical justification, and those elements should be reported in a standardized fashion when a manuscript is submitted, with journals providing an explicit notice of how the positionality information will be used during the review process. At the very least, proposals that include these details can prompt a productive conversation about when, if ever, it is desirable to block the way of scientific inquiry and dissemination. At a moment of declining public trust and significant political threat to our work, such a conversation has perhaps never been more necessary.

Ben Lovett is Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches classes in psychological assessment, law and ethics for school psychologists, and the history of psychology. Last year, his essay Open Science and Socially Responsive Science: Conflicting Movements in Psychology was published by Springer.

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First, Tyler Austin Harper wrote the cover story for the Atlantic about his experience as a Black professor at a small liberal arts college in Maine. As he tells it, he was hired less because he was an expert in his topic area and a great teacher and mentor, and more because he was Black. Harper was more or less ok with being the beneficiary of affirmative action until he realized that his hiring also meant that he needed to go along with certain views and politics too. The price for entry into the elite was adherence to a specific brand of progressive politics. And when he refused to do that, he was no longer viewed as the right kind of Black. Harper eventually quit his plum appointment because he could not be his full self, he could no longer breathe.

Second, and more tragic, is the story of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who was hired to great fanfare as the youngest ever Black professor in Cambridge’s illustrious history. Much has been said about his story, so here is the short version. Arday was also a diversity hire, but unlike Harper, he was a fraud. It turned out he was not only a plagiarist, he also lied about nearly every part of his backstory. How could Cambridge have let this happen? One simple answer is that the administrators at Cambridge were too worried about how they would appear asking hard questions of a celebrated Black hire, they were anxious about what it would look like to “punch down”. It was only when Arday’s obvious fabrications were too hard to ignore, that Cambridge stopped shielding him and stopped treating the reporters who asked questions as the problem. Arday resigned in disgrace and was found dead nine days later.

Like I said, this was a tragic story. Last year I published a paid post with my own take on how our society has decided to treat race. I thought we made grave mistakes, and I wish the last few weeks had proven me wrong. I’ve decided to republish the essay here, now with the paywall removed. Please tell me what you think.

What if trying to fight racism made it worse?

I know how that sounds. But hear me out. Hate crimes in the U.S. have surged over the past 15 years, targeting Black people, Jews, LGBTQ folks, Arabs, Latinos, pretty much every protected group you can name. The same pattern shows up in Canada, despite our reputation for being nice…and boring. There are obviously multiple causes, but I can't shake the feeling that our shift toward aggressive anti-racism messaging might be one of them.

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And this isn’t just me being anti-woke. I got into social psychology specifically to reduce prejudice, and my dissertation was about the educational experiences of marginalized groups. So I care about diversity, but research I conducted over a decade ago suggests that coercive approaches to fighting bias can backfire.

Traditional approaches to fighting racism focusing on non-discrimination and colorblind ideals gave way to something more vocal and aggressive. The new anti-racism framework demanded active participation. It wasn't enough to avoid being prejudiced; you had to actively dismantle bias to create more equitable outcomes. Fair enough: systemic racism is real and persistent.

But then something changed. I found myself increasingly at odds with the modern anti-racism movement. The tenor of the movement became more aggressive, less tolerant. Some of the methods used to reduce prejudice relied heavily on public accountability and social pressure, creating approaches that felt coercive while leaving little room for grace.

That's when the movement lost me. And if it can lose someone who spent 15 years teaching about prejudice, imagine how normies would react.

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How could they lose me? Research I conducted over a decade ago, with my former students Lisa Legault and Jennifer Gutsell, now both tenured professors, offers clues. Back in 2011, we published a paper on prejudice reduction. Our goal was to see if we could reduce bias by working with people's intrinsic motivations rather than against them.

We created two different pamphlets framed as part of a new campus initiative. The intrinsic motivation pamphlet encouraged participants to see the personal value of diversity, emphasizing choice and explaining why prejudice reduction was important and worthwhile for them personally. The extrinsic motivation pamphlet used the language of prejudice-reduction that was common on campus in the late 2000s. It urged participants to “combat prejudice” and comply with social requirements to control stereotypical impulses, using terms like “erase racism” and “stop prejudice.” We also had a third group that received no pamphlet at all, our control group. We measured participants' anti-Black attitudes, which captured subtle modern prejudices like believing anti-Black prejudice is over-exaggerated or that Black people are demanding too much.

We predicted that the intrinsic messages would work better than the controlling approach, which we expected would still reduce prejudice more than doing nothing. What we found surprised us.

Yes, the intrinsic messages reduced prejudice compared to the control group. But what really stood out was that the pamphlet with the then-current anti-prejudice messages—the more coercive approach—actually increased prejudice compared to doing nothing at all.

We didn't believe the results at first, so we ran a second study and replicated the same pattern: positive effects for the intrinsic approach, but a clear backfiring effect for what we might now recognize (by today’s standards) as mild anti-racism messaging. As far as I know no one has replicated this work, and samples are small as was the custom in pre-replication crisis social psychology; so treat these results as provisional. Nonetheless, when looking back now, I think we accidentally discovered something interesting, man.

Fast forward to 2020, when anti-racism became a dominant framework for addressing racial inequality. At its core, anti-racism makes arguments rooted in the work of scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. As Kendi argues, “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.” In this view, passive non-discrimination isn't enough. The framework requires a commitment to actively fighting racism; if someone chooses the path of non-prejudice or non-racism, they are unwittingly supporting passive racism.

The core insights behind anti-racism have some merit. I’m convinced that forms of racism are embedded in some institutions and policies. I’m even more convinced that ostensibly neutral practices can maintain inequalities, even if inadverdent. These are important observations.

But…

For reasons unknown to me, practitioners of anti-racism adopted a coercive, heavy-handed approach. The message became clear: If you're not actively fighting racism, you are racist and any hesitation to embrace the framework makes you part of the problem. This approach manifested in mandatory corporate diversity training and diversity statements, public shaming for even simple mistakes or misunderstandings, and attempts to get people fired or not hired for opinions that went counter to the anti-racist approach.

This is exactly the kind of controlling, coercive messaging that our research showed can backfire. And more applied research confirms our surprising findings. Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev discuss how people often respond to mandatory diversity programs with anger and resistance, with many participants reporting more racist attitudes, not less. Diversity training is especially ineffective when it requires mandatory participation. This makes sense: when you tell people they have no choice but to think a certain way, people push back.

Want to see this dynamic in action? Let me tell you what happened to a colleague of mine when she gave a talk at a major psychology conference. This incident perfectly captures how anti-racist vigilance can spiral into something destructive and perhaps even undermine support for prejudice reduction more broadly.

What happened to her is both infuriating and instructive. It involves Bernie Sanders, Kanye West, a single complaint, and administrators who chose public shaming over private resolution. It's the kind of insider academic drama that illustrates what’s wrong with how we're approaching prejudice reduction today.

The colleague is my friend Jessica Tracy, a social-personality psychologist at UBC, when she won the Career Trajectory Award at the 2021 meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in Santa Barbara, California. The award is perhaps our field’s top honour for early-to-mid career researchers. (Full disclosure: when I was younger, I dreamed of winning this award, even imagining my acceptance speech where I’d break down in tears thanking my mom. I never won and never gave that speech.) The award is a big deal, so is that speech, and so is Tracy.

In her acceptance speech, Tracy talked about her research on pride and presented photos of Bernie Sanders and Kanye West. She used Sanders' photo to illustrate the nonverbal expression of pride in general. Nothing controversial so far. She then transitioned to discuss her research on the two different types of pride, using West as an example of what she calls hubristic pride, a grandiose form of pride associated with self-aggrandizement.

Do any of you see Tracy’s sin?

How dare Tracy use a Black man as an example of hubristic pride! Apparently one person complained about Tracy's choice of image—boy, would I love to know who this is—and the executive committee of the society sent a statement to all members more-or-less calling her presentation racist.

I’ve since learned that Tracy and the complainant had already resolved the issue directly, with the complainant accepting her personal apology and saying nothing more needed to happen. But the executive committee insisted on making a public statement anyway. I have no idea why they could not recognize this as a minor issue resolved between two professionals, but I suspect that they were too scared of appearing insufficiently anti-racist. Her life was in their hands, and they chose to sully her reputation over what was, at worst, an unfortunate choice of examples. Strike that. It takes a complete lack of grace to construe what Tracy did as wrong, and the executive committee should have known that. If you ask me, they owe her a public apology.

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This is the worst of anti-racism in action: hypervigilant, active, and punitive. Tracy wasn't promoting racial stereotypes; she was making a scientific point. But in the new anti-racist framework, there was no grace, no charity, no benefit of the doubt.

When people see colleagues publicly shamed for innocent mistakes or reasonable academic examples, it doesn't inspire them to embrace anti-racism. Instead, it makes them want to distance themselves from it entirely, to reject it. It might even push them to do the exact opposite of what those on the right side of history think is best.

Back in 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm described psychological reactance to explain a puzzle that every parent knows: why do children sometimes do the exact opposite of what they're told? Brehm discovered that when people feel their freedom is being threatened, whether by parental commands, government edict, or social pressure, they resist. More than that, they actively rebel, often moving in the direction they're being told not to go.

Reactance is a predictable response to feeling controlled. So predictable, in fact, that the patricians of our society should have known there would be a backlash to anti-racism.

There's a different way forward, and it was articulated beautifully in an interview last year with Sarah McBride, who is the first openly transgender Congresswoman in the US. Speaking with Ezra Klein, McBride argued for a politics of grace, which focuses on meeting people where they are rather than demanding ideological purity. She suggested that we should be forgiving of each other’s missteps and be more, not less, sensitive to intent.

This reveals a major flaw in the anti-racist approach: intent has been thrown out the window, and only outcomes matter. If someone feels hurt, the motives become irrelevant. When Tracy used Kanye West as an example of hubristic pride, the fact that someone took offense was enough to condemn her, regardless of her clear scientific intent. Her critics lacked grace.

Grace means giving people the benefit of the doubt when their actions could be interpreted multiple ways. The anti-racism approach does the opposite: failing to assume good faith or recognize that people are fallible. It also fails to distinguish between malicious behaviour and honest mistakes.

I wish we could have extended more grace to Tracy and others. So yes, I think we made a terrible mistake. In our urgency to address injustice, we embraced an approach that worked against human psychology. I’m not saying anti-racism messaging led to rising hate crimes, but the experimental evidence suggests these approaches can backfire.

But it's not too late to correct course. We can still pursue the important goal of reducing prejudice and creating a more equitable world.

We just need will and determination, and grace, too.

In this new piece Victória gets at something deeper, the permissibility of moralization itself. She interrogates the assertion that the deontological moralization of artificial intelligence is a perfectly reasonable position. She agrees it could be reasonable, but then asks whether it actually is, given what we know about AI and about how moralization works. You’ll also see that she doesn’t spare me in her analysis. Ouch!

I think the essay is brilliant, but I think that about nearly everything Victória does. I’m grateful she decided to let me reprint her essay here for your enjoyment.

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After taking Introduction to Social Psychology with the legendary McGill professor Donald Taylor, I knew I had found my calling. Taylor—who sadly passed away during the pandemic—was a natural performer and storyteller who inspired countless young Canadian undergraduates to pursue careers in social psychology. For me, Taylor’s material came most alive when he talked about the psychology of prejudice.

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Before Taylor’s class, I had not realized there was a big part of an entire discipline devoted to studying discrimination in the hopes of not just understanding it but remedying it. As a Jewish kid, with Holocaust survivors on one side of my family and Yemeni refugees on the other, I had a keen eye for injustice. My family had been on the wrong side of hate more than once, including, I later learned, at the hands of pale-skinned Ashkenazi Jews. My formal education in Jewish history taught me that judging people…

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It happened on social media, naturally. Someone commented on one of my essays and, in my reading, ascribed bad intent to what I wrote. Uncharitable interpretations are the internet’s native tongue, so I almost scrolled past. Then I saw who wrote it. The commenter was an infamous psychologist who has been singing the same sad song for over a decade. Suddenly it was 2016 again. I could almost smell the sock puppets.

For those who weren’t there, the mid 2010s were when psychology went to war with itself over replication and reform. The battles played out daily on Twitter and Facebook, and for one regrettable year, I volunteered as referee. I moderated a Facebook group meant to keep the fights civil. Oh what a fool I was!

I wrote about that time as a paid post over a year ago, but think it deserves a second life in light of last month’s exchange. Below is a lightly edited version, now free for everyone. The wars are mostly over, but some co…

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First, numerous essays were widely read but didn’t generate any real disagreement. So even though I live for conflict, I’ll take it as a win. To my surprise, hardly anyone batted an eye when I suggested that academic contests like selecting which students deserve grants or deciding which faculty applicants to move from a longlist to a shortlist would be better done by artificial intelligence. My argument was that AI is good at following rubrics and, you know, actually reading the application materials. Humans get swayed by prestige and name recognition far too easily. AI could be explicitly prompted to ignore that. I suspect Claude will be less impressed than I am by a candidate Harvard’s Dan Gilbert vouched for. I consider this a plus.

So, I take the lack of vitriol online or in my comment section to mean that many readers might quietly agree with my argument. If so, would anyone be brave enough to actually recommend AI (with human guidance) to adjudicate, say, applications to the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), which is open for submissions right now? If we blinded applicants and gave AI the SPSP reviewer rubric, would we trust the results of that contest more? Something tells me folks are not even close to ready for this.

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Victória is the first author of a new working paper called The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence. I adore this paper. So much so that I want to claim it as all my own. I talk about it at conferences and invited talks all the time because it illuminates something real about the moment we’re living in. Conversations about AI have stopped being normal conversations. They’re fever-pitched, with people holding strong opinions they sometimes refuse to interrogate. Otherwise smart people lose their minds if someone dares say something appreciative about a technology that is, despite all the hype and doom, normal technology.

Victória’s paper explains why. She shows how attitudes toward AI have shifted from mere preferences into something moral, something good-versus-evil. I’ll say no more, because her own words are all you need.

Before I go, a few words about Victória herself. She is not merely brilliant…

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A year ago I wrote an essay arguing that we’ve turned reading into a moral virtue when it’s really just one good way among many to spend an afternoon. I still believe that. So I’m republishing it today for you all to enjoy.

Please tell me why I’m wrong in the comments!

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That would mean our issues would be more or less settled, and I could continue to conduct normal science. But recently I had a set of experiences that made it clear that our issues are not settled. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at The Ohio State University, and the question period and private discussions after gave me whiplash.

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I delivered my talk at Ohio State’s new Chase Center for Civics, one of these new conservative-leaning civics centers popping up across American campuses. The political bent of the audience is an important detail here. I talked about my lab’s work on moralization, mostly an analysis of news headlines and polling of Americans on their views. The details are unimportant, save to say the research was mostly descriptive, and we’ve replicated parts of it already.

One of the first questions came from Hollis Robbins, a very impressive professor of English at the University of Utah, who also served as a dean at various universities for nearly a decade. Her question was direct: “Why should I trust anything you say?” At first, I was taken aback, uncertain how to respond to a brilliant woman doubting the results of basic polling. But then she mentioned the new Nature replication paper, which showed that attempts to replicate basic social science findings succeeded only about half the time—a paper I know well, as I am one of its (many) authors. She was wondering why she should trust anything I say because I work in a field that’s generally unreplicable. I suspect many conservatives feel the same way. And honestly, after the past few weeks, I’m starting to think they have a point.

I’m writing this angry. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve watched senior colleagues, in private but also in print and on social media, treat the past decade of methods reforms as a sort of overreaction. It’s 2026, but the past weeks have given me flashbacks to 2016’s greatest hits: accusations that replications were poorly executed, failed replications blamed on hidden moderators, social media drama that construes a defense of criticism as a defense of bullying.

I’m fucking angry.

Angry enough to name names. Paid subscribers get the rest.

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Several professors in the audience shared my concerns and asked tough but respectful questions that gave the student pause. The student’s advisor probably should have pushed them harder before the talk, but in the room itself, other professors did what academia is supposed to do: they productively challenged a student to think more carefully about their work. A normal day at a university. And I’m glad to see normal days again, because for a while there, they weren’t.

In recent years, a strange norm took hold. Critical feedback from someone with more power directed at someone with less became suspect, an example of punching down. Critiquing student work was a professor’s job, sure, b…

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Yes, a post by a mid-career psychology professor with a modest social media following was being widely circulated, discussed, liked…and loathed. This was a disorienting experience, but honestly kind of fun.

The post crossed 500,000 views within 24 hours. Every time I checked my socials, I kept on seeing lots and lots of engagement. I clicked on what was trending that day and my little post was there. I screenshotted it immediately because I assumed it would vanish.

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It didn’t vanish. And my post wasn’t ratioed either. But lots of people disagreed and they didn’t mind being loud and angry and sometimes unhinged in expressing their disagreement. I want to talk about it. But, because I’ll be dishing more than doing science, I’m putting this behind a paywall. Among the replies: someone who wanted me lined up at the guillotine, a eugenics comparison, and a surprisingly good philosophical argument. I want to talk about all three.

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The Power of Us

We share science and the stories about social identity, group dynamics, and collective behavior in organizations and society. Hosted in collaboration with the Center for Conflict & Cooperation.

By Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

I've known Dominic and Jay for over 20 years. We first met when they were both graduate students at the University of Toronto and I was a visiting speaker. I left that visit energized and, frankly, jealous. The intellectual culture in the psychology department was exactly what I'd been looking for—lively, rigorous, genuinely curious. I applied for a job at UofT a few weeks later and have been here ever since.

But as I reflect on my remarkable visit and the wonderful time I had, I realize that Jay and Dominic played an outsized role. A major reason I found the culture so stimulating is that I found Jay and Dominic so stimulating—they loved discussing ideas, were open to different perspectives, and liked lively debate. I was later amazed by how varacious a reader Dominic was and is and how charismatic and curious Jay was and is. I am now convinced the reas…

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I wrote the piece below about 18 months ago. A few weeks ago, my friends Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel republished it in their newsletter, The Power of Us, under the title “The Downfall of Stereotype Threat.” That republication landed in the inbox of roughly 10,000 people, which is fine. What happened next is more interesting.

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Mary Murphy, a prominent stereotype threat researcher, wrote a lengthy public rebuttal on her own Substack, taking issue with my conclusions and the timing of the republication. She makes some arguments I want to engage with seriously, and maybe I will in a future post. This isn’t the place for that. But I will say this: Mary's rebuttal left me wondering when stereotype threat stopped being about the Black-White or male-female testing gaps and started being about how people feel in uncomfortable rooms. Vibes, basically. Important vibes, yes, but vibes nonetheless. If that’s where we’ve landed, that’s worth talking about.

For now, I'm putting the original piece behind the paywall, with a few small additions. If you're a free subscriber and want access, now is a good time to upgrade. You'll get the essay, the drama, and eventually my response to Mary. Consider this your warning that things might get a little spicy.

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There was a well-attended session asking whether SPSP is a healthy scientific organization, a presenter who had enough chutzpah to deliver his talk using 100% AI-generated slides, and a heartfelt memorial for a dearly departed psychologist. I’m going to get personal and name some names, so I’m putting this behind a paywall to give me the freedom I want and you, the gossip you expect.

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But for others, conferences are a source of anxiety and despair. They invite all kinds of upwards social comparisons—there is always someone better than you doing more interesting research no matter how well established or how cool your research is—that leave one deflated. And then there are all those people to talk to!

Because conference season is here, I thought I’d reprint (with light edits) my essay on what conferences are really for (hint: it it not to learn about the latest research) and how to do it well even if small talk is not really your thing.

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I hoped—prayed, even—I would never have to write about research on ego depletion again. But then a new paper comes along that forces me to take notice. And now I feel obliged to say something.

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I won’t go through the whole sordid story; not only is it a long one, but I’ve recounted it a few times already in different venues, including right here in this Substack. So, here is the Cliff’s Notes version.

Ego depletion was social psychology’s golden child for nearly two decades. People went gaga over the idea that self-control runs on a limited resource that depletes with use. Resist that cookie now, fail at the gym later. Simple and intuitive, but ultimately unsupported by strong evidence. The cracks in the resource model of self-control, as it came to be known, appeared in the early 2010s. First came theoretical problems (what exactly was this so-called resource?), then came replication failures. The death blow arrived with not one but tw…

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But I’m no longer convinced that was the responsible choice. Like Paul Bloom, I am starting to wonder if not using AI in such cases is the right thing to do.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I have little confidence in the quality of my comparative judgments, even in my grading of a pile of student papers. I know my evaluations are skewed by whether a candidate came first or last in the pile, whether I am in a good mood or nursing a headache. I usually get a feeling about a paper or candidate and then just go on vibes. I’ve been doing this for decades, and every time I finish, I’m left with…

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