Abstract
Our 1 term as shepherds of Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR) began on January 1, 2022. At that time, I (Jonathan Adler) published an incoming editorial laying out a vision for “the next chapter at PSPR,” like many new Editors do (Adler, 2022). We are now at the halfway point in our term and we have decided to publish an update on this new chapter, which is not something that Editors typically do. While our job has been to handle manuscripts and to keep the daily operations of the journal running, we have also prioritized initiatives that aim to catalyze change in the field. Specifically, those initiatives have focused largely on creating a more inclusive personality and social psychology, geographically and demographically. We believe that the advancement of psychological theory benefits from a proliferation of perspectives and that the culture of any field is profoundly influenced by the people chosen to lead that field. Our goal in publishing this mid-term report is to demonstrate that it is possible to create real change at our field’s leading journals within the span of a single editorial term, in the hopes of encouraging other journals to make changes as well. In service of that goal, we see this report as both retrospective—sharing the work we’ve already done—and prospective, seeking to raise awareness of these initiatives in the hopes of amplifying their impact.
This prospective goal also led us to publish this report in the pages of the journal rather than on a Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) website. Working with scholars who face marginalization in our field has alerted us to the fact that the journal itself is sometimes more accessible (when papers are published open access, anyway) than posting it on a journal’s website, as finding websites requires knowing what to search for. Because we also present new data about the journal, we have had this report peer-reviewed prior to publishing it (we thank our peer reviewers, Christian Unkelbach and Michael Robinson, Editors of the other two current SPSP journals, Social Psychological and Personality Science and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, respectively).
We believe that our success in implementing substantial changes at PSPR is attributable to three features of our approach. First, we created a clear, shared vision for the journal that has attracted scholars to our broad team (Editor, Associate Editor, Editorial Board, Emerging Editor Board, and Editorial Fellows) who are similarly committed to intervening in the dominant processes that shape our field. Second, the dedication of meaningful time and effort has allowed us to develop, implement, and assess our initiatives. And third, we have adopted a collaborative, relational approach to pursuing our work. We hope our efforts will catalyze similar changes at other journals. Below, we will describe some of our major initiatives and their impacts.
Who: Pathways to Editorial Leadership
As described in our incoming editorial, we have conceptualized the journal’s editorial team as an essential tool for broadening the pathways toward editorial leadership. We would like to describe some of the ways we have worked toward this aim.
Editor
Serving as Editor of PSPR for the past two years has been one of the most meaningful experiences in my career. I continue to feel honored to have been chosen to serve the field in this way and immensely grateful for the wonderful team I have had the pleasure of collaborating with. While my selection as Editor did usher in some firsts for PSPR (first Editor who works at a small college, first Editor who identifies as a personality psychologist), I did not construe the position as a step on a pathway toward further editorial leadership roles for me. That being said, as a result of our work at PSPR, I have been invited to join the committee tasked with re-imagining Perspectives on Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science, and doing so has been an opportunity to share some of the initiatives and lessons from PSPR at a journal that reaches the whole field of psychology. I am grateful for this opportunity and hope it will help lead to an innovative reboot of Perspectives.
Associate Editors
The four Associate Editors on the initial team that helped imagine this chapter at PSPR remain dedicated to our shared vision. Three of the four Associate Editors will stay in their roles for the rest of our term, while Amber Gayle Thalmayer will rotate out of her role. (Professor Thalmayer will remain engaged with the journal as a Co-Editor of a Special Issue and as a member of our Editorial Board. We are so grateful for her central contributions to the journal’s initiatives over the past two years!) Given our goal to create pathways toward editorial leadership, we have made some shifts in the Associate Editors’ time allocation to open an additional Associate Editor position while also replacing Professor Thalmayer (and without costing SPSP additional salary support). We are thrilled to welcome Sarah Stanton and Eranda Jayawickreme to the Associate Editor team. Professor Stanton’s research on close relationships aims to promote positive interactions that lead to short- and long-term benefits for all involved. Professor Jayawickreme’s research focuses on positive personality change, moral personality, wisdom, well-being, and integrative theories of personality. Both have been generative and productive members of PSPR’s Editorial Board since the beginning of our term and, in the spirit of our goal to use the Editorial Board as a pathway toward editorial leadership, it was important to us to select our new Associate Editors from the Editorial Board team. We also believe both Professor Stanton and Professor Jayawickreme are well-positioned to help us share some of PSPR’s initiatives with other journals in the field, something we will prioritize in the second half of our term. In addition, our Associate Editors have been recognized with additional opportunities for leadership. As one example, Kathleen Bogart was invited to become an Associate Editor for Rehabilitation Psychology and is Co-Editor for a Special Issue of Teaching of Psychology titled “Disability Education: Creating an Anti-Ableist Psychology Curriculum.” We see this as evidence that each step toward more inclusive leadership helps shape subsequent changes throughout our field.
Editorial Board
PSPR’s operation over the past two years would not have been possible without the vital contribution of our Editorial Board. This group of scholars from all over the world has demonstrated a deep commitment to the mission of the journal. Despite academia-wide concerns about “the peer reviewer crisis,” the PSPR Editorial Board has been an intrepid set of reviewers for your work. Indeed, in the past two years, Editorial Board members have had a 97% rate of accepting our review requests. We attribute their engagement to the articulation of a clear vision of inclusivity and to our relational, collaborative approach. For example, we hold an annual event for the Editorial Board (on Zoom, twice during the same day to facilitate participation from all time zones). The first such meeting was attended by a majority of the Editorial Board, who rated it as meaningful. During this event, we updated the Board on the journal’s major initiatives and provided time for Board members to get to know each other and to help shape the journal’s goals for the coming year. We believe that fostering professional networks is essential to becoming a leader in the field. And the feedback we received from this event helped us prioritize the journal’s work following the meeting. For example, we intend to publish a Special Issue of PSPR—an idea that emerged from this meeting (more information below).
In addition to Professor Stanton and Professor Jayawickreme’s transitions from the journal’s Editorial Board to the role of Associate Editor, we are delighted to report that, since joining the PSPR Editorial Board, other members of the Editorial Board have been invited to leadership positions elsewhere in the field. As just a few examples: Sun Park has been named Editor of the Korean Journal of Social and Personality Psychology (official journal of the Korean Social and Personality Psychological Association), Angelo Brandelli Costa has been named Editor of Trends in Psychology (official journal of the Brazilian Society of Psychology), Kim-Pong Tam has been named an Associate Editor at the journal Royal Society Open Science, Kira McCabe was named Editorial Fellow at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, and several other Editorial Board members have been invited to join other journals’ Editorial Boards. We celebrate their accomplishments and are proud to have these scholars continue as members of the PSPR team. We also want to note that we invited some of our most responsive and generative reviewers, as well as some of our most impressive applicants for the Editorial Fellowship to join the Editorial Board as recognition for their service to the journal. We are happy to formally have them on the PSPR team.
Emerging Editor Board
In our incoming editorial, we described the seeds of an idea that has now blossomed into the PSPR Emerging Editor Board. The Emerging Editor Board is composed of advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are committed to the advancement of theory in personality and social psychology. Emerging Editor Board members joined us for the journal’s annual event in 2023 and held a meet-up at SPSP’s 2023 conference.
We send every manuscript that goes out for peer review to a member of the Emerging Editor Board. Authors are not alerted to which review came from an Emerging Editor Board member, but action editors are aware and provide an email with developmental feedback to Board members about their review. This developmental feedback is crucial to the design of the Emerging Editor Board and Board members have told us that the feedback they receive enhances their development far beyond the impact of just reading the decision letter with the other reviewers’ comments on the manuscript. When we discussed the formation of this Board, our primary concern was that Board members might allocate time to reviews they might otherwise use for activities that more directly advance their career. In practice, we have found this problem to be minimal. We track the work of Emerging Editor Board members and none of them conducted more than four reviews in the two years of our term (the modal number was one). We believe this avoids posing an undue burden and instead creates a new pathway into editorial leadership. For example, one Emerging Editor Board member wrote that “Reviewing manuscripts has given me a chance to engage with cutting-edge theoretical work and provide feedback to authors, which has helped me to develop my own critical thinking and evaluation skills.” Although our invitation emails to Emerging Editor Board members make it clear that they should only accept if they have the bandwidth to take on additional work, we had a 99% acceptance rate to our review requests over the past two years. Emerging Editor Board reviews tend to be extremely thorough and rigorous. We believe the Emerging Editor Board serves the journal by fostering high-quality, reliable reviews, serves the Board members themselves by offering formal reviewing opportunities, and serves the field by providing a developmental experience aimed at cultivating future editorial leaders.
Several members of our Emerging Editor Board have demonstrated excellence in their reviewing and, during their term on the Board, secured faculty positions. In recognition of their contribution to the journal and this major accomplishment, we transitioned them from the Emerging Editor Board to the Editorial Board. In addition, members of our Emerging Editor Board have also taken steps toward other editorial leadership positions. As a few examples: Niclas Kuper was invited to join the Editorial Board at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, Benedek Kurdi was invited to be an Editorial Fellow at Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Lotte Pummerer was invited to join the Editorial Board at the British Journal of Social Psychology. Our Emerging Editor Board members have also told us that their service to the journal has positively impacted the way they approach being an author, providing a step on a pathway toward authorial leadership. For example, in a recent survey of our Boards, several Emerging Editor Board members noted that they decided to author a theory paper as a result of their service to the journal and that reviewing manuscripts for PSPR broadened the theoretical foundation of their own scholarship. One Emerging Editor Board member wrote, “I am now thinking about submitting a paper to PSPR, as that doesn’t seem like an impossible thing anymore.” We are so grateful to have the commitment and rigor of all members of our Emerging Editor Board and encourage other journals to consider this vehicle for fostering pathways toward editorial leadership.
Editorial Fellowship
We were delighted that PSPR was chosen for SPSP’s inaugural Editorial Fellowship. As described in the call for applications, this program was designed to “create a supportive pathway to editorial leadership for psychologists from communities that have been historically excluded from these roles. The goal of the fellowship is to identify and support someone who (1) is interested in editorial leadership, (2) wouldn’t otherwise come into it at this moment in their career, and (3) may not have easy access to professional support systems that facilitate and support editorial experience and mentorship from centrally positioned scholars in the field.” Whereas many psychology journals have created fellowship opportunities as pathways for academics from underrepresented groups, in practice many of these fellowships go to people who have already landed a tenure-track job at a competitive Western institution, already a marker of immense professional success. Instead, we sought to use this opportunity to collaborate with a scholar who has been profoundly and systematically excluded from participation in the Western journals system. We targeted our call for applications at the Global South and Indigenous scholars, making proactive outreach to many organizations outside the typical Western channels.
We developed three goals for the fellowship. First, the fellow will develop their own editorial skills, understanding how manuscripts are handled at PSPR and at Western journals more broadly. Second, the fellow will make a plan for disseminating what they learn in their local networks. Third, the fellow will discuss their fellowship experience with the broader SPSP community. We feel it is vital that this fellowship produce insights that not only help academics working in the Majority World better navigate Western journals but also generate insights that might reshape the systems and structures of Western journals that have excluded scholars from the Majority World (the term “Majority World” helpfully reminds us that societies in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are where most humans live (e.g., Kagitcibasi, 2002)).
Our inaugural Editorial Fellow for 2023, chosen from more than 60 applications, was Stephen Baffour Adjei, Senior Lecturer at Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development in Kumasi, Ghana. He will be sharing his insights at the 2024 SPSP conference. We are thrilled to report that Dr. Adjei has been selected to become an Associate Editor at Psychological Science, beginning the day after his term at PSPR ends. The field will certainly benefit from Dr. Adjei’s work in this role. We see his selection as evidence of our success in creating pathways to editorial leadership. Dr. Adjei will continue to work with the PSPR team, co-editing a Special Issue and serving on our Editorial Board.
We are also delighted to announce that our second Editorial Fellow will serve the journal in 2024. Pegah Nejat is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Shahid Beheshti University, in Tehran, Iran. Her research focuses on social cognitive approaches to moral psychology and received the Professor Kazemi-Ashtiani Award, a research grant for early-career scholars, from the Iranian National Science Foundation. Dr. Nejat will pursue similar goals to those Dr. Adjei worked on during his fellowship year and will also serve as a Co-Editor on our Special Issue.
Demographic and Geographic Study of the PSPR Editorial Team
In pursuit of our goal to foster pathways toward editorial leadership, we have also sought to prioritize the cultivation of pathways for scholars who face additional barriers based on their demographic and/or geographic categories. To assess the impact of those efforts, we have carried out a small, institutional review board (IRB)–approved, descriptive study. With the help of PSPR Editorial Board member Angela Bahns and some of her undergraduate students at Wellesley College, 2 we collected the names and contact information for every individual who has served in an editorial role at PSPR since it was founded in 1997 (Editors, Associate Editors, and Editorial Board members), a total of 153 people.
We contacted these scholars and asked them to complete a nine-item survey, reporting their demographic and geographic information at the time they served the journal. We sent a similar survey to the current editorial team. We had a 47% response rate among prior editorial team members and a 100% response rate among current editorial team members.
For the 53% of prior editorial team members who did not respond to the survey, we followed procedures similar to those reported by Roberts and colleagues (2020) in their study of racial representation in journal editorial teams across subfields in psychology. (We want to note that this project was underway months before the Roberts and colleagues paper became the subject of controversy at the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.) Briefly, we used internet searches to identify team members’ demographic and geographic information (gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, nationality of birth, country of work, institution type, sexual orientation, and disability identity). For each individual, we had two Research Assistants separately compile demographic and geographic information and then computed interrater reliabilities, which were extremely high (for all categories kappas were over 0.90, with some kappas as high as 0.99; the one exception was for racial identity, where the kappa was 0.62). Whenever raters were not able to identify information on a scholar’s own website or in published writing about that scholar, they did not record any information. Ability to identify this information spanned from 100% for gender identity to 44% for disability identity.
Descriptive results, juxtaposing the current editorial team (Editor, Associate Editors, Editorial Board, and Editorial Fellows) with all prior editorial teams, are presented in Table 1. (We did not include data from our current Emerging Editor Board, to keep the comparisons consistent, given that the journal has not had an Emerging Editor Board prior to our term.) We chose not to separate Editors and Associate Editors from Editorial Board members in this Table, despite their different roles in overseeing the journal, because the number of Editors and Associate Editors is so small that doing so would render some of them individually identifiable. In addition, it is important to note that the composition of the prior editorial teams from 1997 to 2022 included 153 people, whereas the composition of the current editorial team includes 107 people. There are two primary reasons for this. First, there was substantial continuity in the composition of the Editorial Board across prior editorial terms, with some individuals serving across multiple editorial terms. Second, we have expanded the size of the Editorial Board from roughly 80 members to roughly 100 members.
Demographic Characteristics of PSPR Editorial Teams Since the Founding of the Journal.
Note. PSPR = Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Team includes Editors, Associate Editors, and Editorial Board Members. b Team includes Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, and Editorial Fellows (who function as an Associate Editor). We have not included the Emerging Editor Board Members, to facilitate comparison with past teams. c In descending order of representation, these countries include Nigeria (5), Hong Kong (4), Chile (3), Turkey (3), Iran (2), Philippines (2), Singapore (2), as well as single-members from: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Republic of Georgia, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, and Zimbabwe.
In comparing the prior composition of the past PSPR editorial teams with the current editorial team, the results indicate a substantial shift in the gender identity of our editorial team as well as the inclusion of people who identify as transgender or nonbinary, a notable shift in the racial identity of our team, shifting from almost 90% White to less than 40% White, the inclusion of many more scholars who work at non-doctoral degree granting institutions, and large shifts in the geographic representation of our team, compared with prior editorial teams at PSPR. Yet, despite substantial shifts among the Editorial Board, it is notable that every Editor of PSPR has worked at an institution in the United States. This is also the case for every Associate Editor from past editorial teams, except for four who worked in Canada and one who worked in New Zealand. Our current Associate Editors are also predominantly based at institutions in the United States, with one in Switzerland, yet our Editorial Fellows, who function as Associate Editors during the term of their Fellowship, represent Ghana (2023) and Iran (2024). This means that there was not an Editor or Associate Editor at PSPR who worked in a non-English-speaking country until 2022. It is fair to say that PSPR has been, and continues to be, run almost exclusively by scholars in the United States. And we also want to note the continued minimal representation of Indigenous scholars.
Overall, these results indicate a substantial shift in the demographic and geographic composition of PSPR’s editorial team during our term, but with important global representation still lacking. We see this as vital work for our field, aimed at diversifying the representation of scholars whose important research does not always present them with opportunities to serve as editorial leaders.
Authors
We feel immensely grateful for the privilege we have had to engage with your scholarship since our term began! Reading your work and helping to shape it is such an honor. The first issue of manuscripts handled by our editorial team came out in August 2023 (journals—at least those that still publish separate paper issues—need to carry an editorial backlog to support editorial transitions and the fluctuating rate of submissions and acceptances)—you may have noticed the journal’s cover changed from blue to purple with that issue. This means only eight manuscripts handled by our editorial team have yet to be slated into an issue, but they are each stellar—and there are more wonderful accepted papers in the queue!
One of our major initiatives since the start of our term has been to ensure that authors who might not have considered submitting their work to PSPR know that we welcome it. When our term began, we reached out to more than 40 professional organizations around the world to share our incoming editorial and invite their membership to submit work to the journal. These included professional affinity groups, associations focused on specialized areas of inquiry and international psychological organizations, as well as those focused on scholars who work in Majority World regions. We also ran an event at the 2023 SPSP conference titled “PSPR is for YOU!” and we have run similar events at the meetings of other professional organizations, including organizing and sitting on panels of journal editors for conferences of the Association for Research in Personality and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. Ultimately, no matter what broader initiatives we undertake, the journal can only be as good as the scholarship we publish. Please continue to think of PSPR as the premier outlet for your best theoretical work!
How: A Collaborative, Relational Approach
One of the most meaningful—and least publicly visible—interventions we have made into the running of PSPR is developing and nurturing a collaborative, relational approach. We (the Editor, Associate Editors, and Editorial Fellow) have been meeting every six to eight weeks on Zoom to work together on setting the journal’s priorities and navigating the challenges that have arisen. This includes celebrating each other’s professional accomplishments and sharing personal joys and sorrows while also co-developing the processes and structures that govern the journal. We are aware of the pressures and affordances each member of the team is facing at any given moment and collaborate to dynamically manage the workload of our shared project of running the journal. While each manuscript is still handled primarily by one action editor, our coordination means we have a greater sense of alignment across the journal than we have experienced in prior editorial roles at other journals. As described above, this sense of coordination extends to the Editorial Board and Emerging Editor Board, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree (we have been in contact with Board members working in war-stricken places in the world to check on their safety and determine their workload preferences). We are confident that this approach meaningfully impacts the content of our work.
In addition, we have established a strong positive culture of peer review that we bring to each manuscript. Our invitation emails to potential reviewers make our values explicit. One version of the template we use for this letter reads, in part:
“As you conduct your review, please remember that PSPR is dedicated to cultivating an editorial culture that supports four core qualities:
Kind. Whatever you want to say to the authors, please say it kindly. We’ve all received feedback on our own work that didn’t feel great; let’s not perpetuate that experience. Any message can be conveyed with kindness and PSPR places kindness as our top value. Reviews deemed unkind will not be forwarded to authors and Reviewers will be notified by the Editor about this decision.
Constructive. Kindness does not need to conflict with constructiveness. Reviews that are kind, but don’t offer any real feedback, are unhelpful.
Generative. All manuscript reviews represent a very particular type of communication, but reviews of theory manuscripts are unique. Unlike a review of an empirical paper, it can be hard to point to specific deal-breakers with theory manuscripts. It can also be hard to avoid advancing your own agenda when engaging with theory. When conducting your review please ask yourself: “What is this manuscript trying to do and how can I help it do that as well as it can (whether I think it should be accepted at PSPR or not)?” This is a better frame of mind than asking yourself, “What’s wrong with this manuscript?” or “What do I wish this manuscript was trying to do?”
Actionable. When reviewing theory manuscripts, it can be easy to paint in broad strokes. Your feedback for the authors should be specific and actionable. What are the concrete steps the authors could take as they proceed with this work?”
While we have received a wide range of reviews over the past two years, we have only had to intervene in the peer review process once based on a violation of these criteria: lacking kindness. In this case, the review was returned to the reviewer with a reiteration of the journal’s values, and it was revised and ultimately forwarded to the manuscript authors. We believe making our values explicit in the review process has led to an overwhelmingly positive experience for authors, reviewers, and action editors alike. Our approach is beginning to inform the work of other journals and initiatives, including Reviewer Zero, an NSF-funded initiative aimed at rethinking peer review culture. Indeed, Associate Editor Kathleen Bogart spoke on a panel organized by Reviewer Zero at SPSP’s 2023 Convention titled “Hidden Stories of Marginalized Scholars and Scholarship: Reflections and Ways to Move Forward.”
What: The Scholarship We Have Published, and Want to Publish
PSPR has had the highest impact factor of the 65 journals ranked alongside it in personality and social psychology for the past 15 years. As such, we continue to receive an overwhelming number of excellent manuscripts for review—far more than we can accept (over the past two years, our acceptance rate has hovered around 4%). One of the central criteria we have developed for accepting manuscripts is the magnitude of their contribution to the advancement of theory in personality and social psychology. We receive many stellar manuscripts that do the hard work of summarizing a field of scholarship, using both qualitative/narrative and quantitative (meta-analysis, systematic review) methods. These papers make a vital contribution to the field, but summative work alone is not sufficient for publication in PSPR. We ask authors to build on the existing literature to present a new theoretical horizon. Beyond a straightforward list of research questions the field should ask next, we seek to publish manuscripts that help us understand the field in fundamentally new ways. We ask manuscripts to describe what is possible now, that wouldn’t have been possible without their contribution, and how substantive an opportunity that provides the field. This is one of the most common reasons our editorial team declines to move forward with a manuscript; it is admittedly a high bar and an inherently subjective one. Yet, we believe it is central to the project of “prophetic frame shifting” that we described in our incoming editorial.
In addition to this central criterion, we have developed five new requirements for all PSPR manuscripts aimed at enhancing the impact they will make. We ask authors to include (a) both an Academic Abstract and a Public Abstract (aimed at making manuscripts more interpretable to a lay audience); (b) Increased TOP Guideline Adherence to Levels 2 or 3, where relevant (aimed at elevating open science practices); (c) a Constraints on Generality Statement (aimed at appropriately describing the applicability of a manuscript); (d) a Citations Statement (aimed at appropriately characterizing the foundational literature a manuscript is built upon); and (e) a Positionality Statement (aimed at interrogating authors’ perspectives as they relate to the current work). More information about these five requirements can be found in the PSPR Submission Guidelines on the journal’s website. (We also want to note that PSPR Emerging Editor Board member Flora Oswald is working on a study analyzing the positionality statements that have been published in PSPR since the beginning of our term and results will be forthcoming.)
We have not enforced adherence to these requirements until a manuscript is about to be accepted. In other words, no manuscript was negatively impacted by failing to adhere to these requirements during the initial peer review process. All manuscripts we have accepted required additional attention to these new requirements in their final revised resubmission and we offered authors support in successfully adhering to these requirements. Our hope is that future authors will become more familiar with these requirements and adhere to them when they initially submit their work (and that other journals will adopt similar criteria).
As we begin the second half of our editorial term at PSPR, we want to encourage submitting authors to continue to send us manuscripts that do the work of prophetic frame shifting. Despite our low acceptance rate, we continue to seek out more manuscripts that take up this lofty aspiration. Indeed, we would love to receive more work that helps us think about the field in fundamentally new ways. Toward this end, we have decided to publish one Special Issue during our term, with proposals due in early 2024. The Special Issue will focus on highlighting social and personality psychological theory from Majority World contexts, while bringing these advancements to Western audiences that might not otherwise encounter them. In doing so, we seek to catalyze more regular dialogue between Western and Majority World scholars in social and personality psychology. These Majority World perspectives are mature and thriving in other outlets, but are often systematically excluded from participation in journals that dominate Western psychology. The Special Issue will thus illuminate ongoing, impactful psychological theory development from Majority World settings. The Special Issue will be co-edited by Stephen Baffour Adjei (PSPR 2023 Editorial Fellow), Pegah Najat (PSPR 2024 Editorial Fellow), Amber Gayle Thalmayer (outgoing PSPR Associate Editor), and Jonathan Adler (PSPR Editor).
Why and When? Our Hope for PSPR
The job description for Editors and Associate Editors focuses almost exclusively on the daily work of maintaining the journal’s operations. But, as scholars whose own personal and professional identities have often felt somewhat marginalized by the mainstream of our field, we have been acutely aware of the ways in which journals play a key role in determining the culture that impacts all of us. For the past two years, we have seen our mission as not only to maintain a top-quality journal for our field but also to make meaningful interventions to try and shift the culture of the field. We cherish the opportunity to engage with your scholarship through the manuscript editorial process and we also feel pride in the steps we have taken to impact the culture of personality and social psychology. Our term at PSPR will finish at the end of 2025 and we intend to keep using our position of privilege and power to work toward culture change. We sincerely hope other journals will reach out to us for partnership in making similar changes. And we look forward to collaborating with you—as authors, as reviewers, and as readers of the journal—to carry the work forward.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: There is an inherent conflict of interest when the editoral team publishes in the pages of the journal. As described above, we believe this is the best way to disseminate this information, despite this conflict of interest.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
