Prof. Kimberly Rios, a new faculty member in the Psychology Dept. SPO program area, will lecture "Understanding academics' perceptions of identity-related research: The role of intellectual humility."
Abstract: Identity-related research (i.e., “me-search”) often elicits mixed reactions among both academics and laypeople. For example, clinical/counseling/school psychologists stigmatize their colleagues who claim to have pursued the field because of personal experiences with mental health issues (Devendorf et al., 2022), and laypeople perceive women (vs. men) who study sexism and racial/ethnic minority (vs. majority) group members who study racism as more biased (Thai et al., 2021). However, little is known about how academic social scientists perceive entire identity-related subfields (e.g., gender, religion). We built upon preliminary findings that social/personality psychologists view religion and gender research as less rigorous than subfields not closely tied to identities, such as attitudes/persuasion and judgment and decision-making (Rios & Roth, 2020). In a survey of US tenured and tenure-track faculty, social scientists across disciplines viewed religion research as least intellectually/scientifically rigorous, followed by gender research, then health/medicine research. Furthermore, faculty viewed religion and gender researchers as mostly religious and mostly female, respectively, and as more biased than health/medicine researchers. Perceptions of bias in turn predicted perceptions of lower rigor. In two experiments, psychology faculty recommended lower starting salaries to ostensibly real job candidates who studied religion (vs. health/medicine), especially when the job candidates disclosed that they themselves were religious. Notably, though, participants with high intellectual humility showed reduced tendencies to evaluate identity-related research less positively and as more biased than other areas of research.
