President's Column

Brent Roberts

University of Illinois

Brent Roberts

Change is hard they say. I think it might also be true that institutional change and personal change are quite similar. They both take longer and are harder to do than you expect.

I set out what I thought were three modest goals to pursue when I became president of ARP. I'm happy to report that one of those goals has been met. The other two... Let me tell you the story so as to keep you up to date on what ARP has been up to, what it is trying to do, and what I hope it can do in the future.

Goal #1. A code of conduct.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock (e.g., not on twitter), it is abundantly clear that our colleagues in psychology, mostly men, have been pretty crappy to people, mostly women, and mostly early career women.

In an effort to curtail, diminish, or borrow normative sanctioning from other scientific guilds, we have created and posted a Code of Conduct. Here are the guts of the code.

Please don't do the following:

The sentiment is simple. Let's try to be good to each other at our conferences and in our professional settings. All of us deserve respect, in equal portions.

Goal #2. An ARP Journal.

This goal has not been met; not for a lack of trying.

Let me provide a little back story, some of the sordid details, and where we stand.

Back story. Our previous journal was the Journal of Research in Personality. We had a very nice run with JRP, but things came to a head in the last few years for many reasons. One of which was that our membership/subscription numbers had grown such that we were paying Elsevier for the right to have our name on the journal—the opposite of most groups that profit handsomely from their affiliated journal. Despite lengthy and involved negotiations, Elsevier refused to change the arrangement. So, we dropped JRP at the end of 2017.

Sordid details. The plan was to flip quickly to a new, open-access journal in early 2018. We had everything set up to go with UC Press when an unforeseen development arose—an "Angel Investor" emerged on the scene and said they would love to support a new open-access personality journal and they would pay for it (at least for a few years). Not wanting to create two new open-access personality journals (many people were skeptical that we needed one), we shelved the UC Press option and entered into negotiations. After another protracted period of negotiating we got an agreement. Off it went to a journal publisher, where, after another long period of waiting, it was summarily rejected. By the fall of 2018 our "Angel Investor" grew disenchanted with the ordeal, pulled their support and the deal died by the end of 2018. Another year of our time wasted.

Where we stand. Since the beginning of 2019, we have been mulling our options. Our current idea is that we should leverage our already strong relationship with Collabra Psychology. You might notice that there are already a disproportionate number of personality researchers who serve as Senior Editors or Editors at Collabra Psychology. Collabra Psychology is an open access journal. So, rather than starting a new journal altogether, we thought it would be prudent to leverage our representation at Collabra Psychology, and ask them to create a "Collabra Personality" subsection that we share with the governing organization, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. The relationship would entail that we see eye-to-eye with SIPS on values. Last time I checked, personality science was not "pro-closed science" or pro "don't replicate science" so we don't foresee this being a problem. Nonetheless, once again, we are in negotiations. Hopefully we will know more come the ARP convention in Grand Rapids.

Goal: #3 Do what we can to strengthen personality science and ARP

This goal is admittedly more ambitious and less well-defined than the first two goals. Fittingly, less work has gone into this one.

From my vantage point, personality science and ARP are chugging along just fine, but with no notable change for the last few years on indirect markers of success—membership numbers, conference goers, and ARP finances are all about the same. Thanks to the tireless efforts of previous ARP leaders (yes, that's you Lynne Cooper, Rebecca Shiner, and Dan McAdams), and the generosity of some of our more well-healed members, our organization is doing just fine financially and as an institution. Having worked for ARP before we even had our own stand-alone conference, I think that is noteworthy.

Things that I'd like to see change.

  1. Increase our numbers. Our #s are flat—our membership numbers and conference participants have tended to stay pretty much the same for the last few years. Not that I think we necessarily need to be huge, but for a field that is making serious contributions to clinical science, industrial/organizational science, economics, biology, and educational science, you would think we would be able to draw more people and more excitement. We do cool research and we should be better at sharing it with others such that they would want to join us to find out about it.
  2. Strengthen our financial situation. While our financial situation is stable, we don't have a steady stream of income. Other guilds entered into profitable relationships with their publishers way back in the 20th century and are making a pretty penny from the arrangement (for now). We didn't, and therefore really don't have any income stream that could be harnessed to do good things, like make the conference cheaper for ECRs, provide scholarships for new students, etc.
  3. Increase the number of high quality faculty positions for personality science. The number of R1 faculty lines for personality researchers is also flat if not falling. According to a current participant on the personality academic job market, there has not been a job opening for a personality psychologists at a research 1 university for the last 3 years. While this may be a blip on the radar, I fear it is the inevitable consequence of where we are positioned—married to social psychology, and not doing fancy neuroscience or cognitive science. It is hard to get your colleagues to advocate for a personality scientist when the social psychology folks seem to be getting pushed aside already—everything flows downhill.

Here are some random ideas for how to address these issues. Take them for what they are, and feel free to let me know if you have some creative ideas.

  1. To increase our numbers and maybe the number of jobs we have, we need to reach out more to more and different fields. Close to home, we have a much more natural alignment with clinical science, for example. It could be argued that we provide invaluable research and teaching for clinical programs. We should be doing more with clinical science organizations and units. Further away, personality science is being picked up by many other fields as noted above. Why not reach out to those groups and try to do something concrete with them? Joint conferences, workshops, you name it.
  2. To improve our financial situation, let's take our expertise on the road and/or provide continuing education workshops for needy PhDs. Many people need ongoing training. We have a lot of knowledgeable people who can share their knowledge of psychometrics, sophisticated statistical modeling, open and reproducible science methods, etc. Why not share this knowledge in pre-conference workshops on behalf of ARP?
  3. Do more with our web site to highlight what are are doing, not what we have done. One way to increase our reach is to have a dynamic, interesting internet presence that highlights what we do, not just our past decisions (award & conferences), and membership details. The world should know that Chris Soto found that 80% of the personality psychology findings reported in Ozer & Benet-Martinez (2006) replicate. The world should know that Wiebke Bleidorn and Chris Hopwood just started the Personality Change Consortium to bring personality developmental scholars together and to support the next generation of longitudinal research.

Like I said, change is hard. That said, I think ARP is in a good place. I hope the next president can take it to an even better place.