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Tokenism in Psychology: Standing on the Shoulders of Small Boys

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Abstract

Tokenism is a situation in which a member of a distinctive category is treated differently from other people. This article is about the situation in which Tokens (people perceived as distinctive) are considered experts on something for having the properties of a token (the thing which makes them distinctive). Tokens who differ by appearance or by being born into another culture might be considered experts on cultures grouped into the same racial/cultural category. Tokens who differ by being skilled in number-related mathematics might be considered experts on the mathematization of phenomena. Tokens might say that some result is valid for all people in some racial/cultural category without sufficient evidence, or use number-related mathematics as a mathematization of psychological phenomena without trying to find more abstract mathematizations. This harms psychological research. A possible future genesis of cultural and number tokenisms is discussed, and some suggestions to improve the discourse offered. The effect of tokenism might be diminished if psychologists focus on more proper thinking about psychological phenomena.

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Notes

  1. Similar experience are reported from other environments. A German scholar of a Korean heritage might be considered a better expert on Korean culture than other Germans having longer experience with Korea just because of his half-Asian appearance (Froese 2010). Minority scholars in the United States may be given a job at university to be used as representatives of their race, or to be forced to research about diversity issues (Kim, Hall, Anderson, and Willingham 2011; Joseph and Hirshfield 2011).

  2. “A majority of social psychologist who currently self-identify as ‘Asian’ (rather than solely Chinese, Japanese, Pilipino, or Indian etc.) have the common shared intellectual experience of receiving their advanced social psychology training in Western or Westernized university departments.“(Liu and Ng 2007, p. 4)

  3. By the term mathematization I mean mathematical representation of objects.

  4. Furthermore, as shown by Radder (2001), current physics doesn’t contain any universal ontology which might be borrowed by psychology.

  5. Elster (2012) thinks that the utilization of statistical models in the economy is responsible for the bad decisions which led to current economy crisis.

  6. The research practice, where only external induction (empirical methods for collecting and analyzing data) is discussed and internal induction is omitted, is a direct cause of tokenism’s possible survival in psychology. When the discussion of why a psychologist chooses a certain representation of psychological phenomena, and why s/he groups subjects the way s/he does is not part of the standard research process in psychology, it is easy to defend a tokenist position.

  7. Scientific discovery based on introspection might be close to the intuitive scientific style of mathematician Henri Poincaré as discussed by Miller (1997). Poincaré never used notes, never had any plan or goal in mind, nor any idea if the problem is solvable when conducting research. He began writing his papers without knowing what his conclusion would be. For Poincaré, it was necessary to do science as something more than pure logic or evidence of the senses, because with increasing abstraction “the senses would soon become powerless” (p. 56). This something more he called intuition.

  8. The situation in this regard is improving, at least in the United States, since doctoral students’ training in statistics and numerical approaches is deteriorating there (Aiken, West, and Millsap, 2008). American psychologists are therefore thinking more and following algorithms less.

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Acknowledgments

I was a recipient of Taiwan scholarship received from MOE of Taiwan (R.O.C.) when I began writing this text. I thank Vladimír Marček, Jaan Valsiner, Todd Hammond and anonymous reviewers for advices on how to improve this text, and Kao Yuang-Kuang (高永光) for introducing me to Kaplan’s book. I also thank Lubomír Kostroň for inspiration.

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  1. College of Social Sciences, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan., Zahradníkova 26, Brno, 60200, Czech Republic

    Václav Linkov

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Linkov, V. Tokenism in Psychology: Standing on the Shoulders of Small Boys. Integr. psych. behav. 48, 143–160 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9266-2

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