Comment in 2023

It is normal to deal with difficult situations during PhD studies. Students and their advisors can set themselves up for success and minimize potential challenges with foreknowledge and by making expectations and workflows explicit.

Minoritized doctoral students are subject to cultural taxation — disproportionate expectations and obligations based on their race or ethnicity — that negatively impacts their PhD studies. Faculty members and departments should counteract this taxation to support students of colour.

The current system of peer review drives racial and gender disparities in publication and funding outcomes and can suppress the perspectives of marginalized scholars. Established researchers have an opportunity to help to build a fairer and more inclusive peer review culture by advocating for and empowering their trainees.

Who will achieve high marks in school, flourish in their career or become an Olympian? Current theories of achievement provide answers that are intuitively appealing but scientifically flawed. Consequently, most of what people believe about how to achieve success is likely to be incorrect.

The standard associative account of implicit bias posits that the mind unavoidably mirrors the biased co-occurrences present in the environment. The resulting fatalistic view of implicit bias as inevitable and immutable is both scientifically unwarranted and societally counterproductive.

Comparing effect sizes between studies is critical for evaluating empirical evidence and gaining a broader understanding of underlying phenomena. However, many effects in psychology are nonlinear, which causes problems for interpreting such comparisons and meta-analyses.

Large language models show remarkable capacities, but it is unclear what abstractions support their behaviour. Methods from developmental psychology can help researchers to understand the representations used by these models, complementing standard computational approaches — and perhaps leading to insights about the nature of mind.

Much of the study of cognition has focused on identifying universal principles and has thereby marginalized approaches that consider culture and context. However, embracing context can lead to better methods for identifying universality.

Scholarly harassment, or repeated mistreatment or threats towards one’s scholarly work, conduct or capabilities, poses a threat to scholars and might disproportionately impact women. The field must acknowledge and challenge the routine practices that stifle scholars’ voices and contributions.

Mentoring is a core part of training the next generation of psychologists. Recognizing how culture and social identities inform mentorship and science is essential for creating a diverse and therefore robust workforce of psychologists.

Indigenous psychology draws on the oldest continuing knowledge systems but remains largely ignored by dominant Western psychological theories and practices. This exclusion results in ongoing negative effects on Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and requires urgent decolonization efforts.

Universals of thought and behaviour across variable cultural experiences can reveal uniquely human cognition. However, culturally informed and theoretically motivated sampling is needed to reveal true universals.

Formal onboarding materials help to introduce new undergraduate researchers to a specific laboratory and the broader culture of the field. Research faculty members should be supported and encouraged to create these materials.