Dear Margo Monteith,
it is very disappointing that you are not willing to retract an openly racist article that was published in your journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) when Simine Varzire was editor of the journal and Lee Jussim was the action editor of the article in question (Cesario, Johnson, & Terrill, 2019). I have repeatedly pleaded with you to retract the article that draws conclusions on the basis of false assumptions. I am even more stunned by your decision because you rejected my commentary on this racist article with the justification that a better criticism was submitted. This criticism was just published (Ross et al., 2020). It makes the same observation that I made in my critique; that is, the conclusion that there is no racial bias in policing and the use of force rests entirely on an invalid assumption. The original authors simply assume that police officers only encounter violent criminals or that they only encounter violent criminals when they use deadly force.
Maybe you are not watching the news, but the Black Lives Matter movement started because police often use deadly force against non-violent African Americans. In some cases, this is even documented on video. Please watch the murder of Tamir Rice, George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Eric Garner and then tell their families and friends that police only kills violent criminals. That is what SPPS is telling everybody with the mantel of scientific truth, but is a blatantly false claim based on racists assumptions. So, why are you not retracting this offensive article?
Philando Castile: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/06/22/philando-castile-facebook-and-dashcam-full-mashup-video-ctn.cnn
Tamir Rice: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/nov/26/cleveland-video-tamir-rice-shooting-police
Eric Garner: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/dec/04/i-cant-breathe-eric-garner-chokehold-death-video
George Floyd:
So, why are you not retracting an article that makes an obviously false and offensive assumption? Do you think that a retraction would look badly on the reputation of your journal? In that case, you are mistaken. Research shows that journals that retract articles with false conclusions have higher impact factors and are more prestigious than journals that try to maintain a flawless image by avoiding retractions of bad science (Nature). So, your actions are not only offensive, but also hurt the reputation of SPPS and ultimately our science.
Your justification for not retracting the article is unconvincing.
“Just how to analyze data such as this is debated, mostly in criminology journals. (One can wonder what psychology was present in Cesario et al.’s study that led to publication in SPPS, but that’s another matter.) Cesario et al. made the important point that benchmarking with population data is problematic. Their methodology was imperfect. Ross et al. made important improvements. If one is interested in this question of police bias with benchmarking, the papers bring successive advances. ”
Your response implies that you did not fully understand Ross et al.’s criticism of the offensive article. The whole approach of “benchmarking” is flawed. So, publishing an article that introduces a flawed statistical approach from criminology to psychology is dangerous. What if we would start using this approach to study other disparities? Ross et al. show that this would be extremely harmful to psychological science. It is important to retract an article that introduces this flawed statistical approach to psychologists. As an editor it is your responsibility to ensure that this does not happen.
It is particular shocking and beyond comprehension that you resist retraction at the very same time many universities and academics are keenly aware of the systemic racism in academia. This article about an issue that affects every African American was based on research funding to White academics, reviewed by White academics, approved by White academics, and now defended and not retracted by a White academic. How does your action promote diversity and inclusion? It is even more surprising that you seem to be blind to this systemic racism in the publication of this racist article given your research on prejudice and the funding you received to study these issues (CV). Can you at least acknowledge that it is very offensive to Black people to attribute their losses of lives entirely to violent crime?
Sincerely,
Ulrich Schimmack
I’m not qualified to criticize your points about damage of flawed statistical approaches (though it is my (dilettante) opinion that a large proportion of psych papers rely on flawed statistics, and they do not get retracted). I wanted to comment on “beyond comprehension” – simply, the likely reason is that they want to avoid being seen to be influenced by political movements and thus maintain the mantle of scientific disinterest.
I agree that politics are likely to play a role in the background, but science should trump politics. The article makes a clearly identified scientific mistake. It couldn’t be any clearer than this. The article also makes no empirical contribution. The statistics are not new. The only novel contribution is to use the statistics with false assumptions to draw false conclusions. Just another example of psychologists not understanding what they are doing. A sad reason to not retracted it would be that this is the norm.