The Personal And Political Economy Of Psychologists' Desires For Social Justice

From an anticapitalist perspective we examine the personal and political economy of the desires for social justice expressed by psychologists associated with either the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) or Behaviorists for Social Responsibility (BSR). First, we consider terms and concepts related to social justice and acknowledge our conceptual debts to critical theory, poststructuralism, feminist epistemology, and liberation psychology. To provide context, we briefly review North American psychologists' historical relationship to the state. Then, after discussing the implications of different accounts of SPSSI's past expressions of interest in social justice, we assess three collections of articles in the last decade of SPSSI's house organ, the Journal of Social Issues. Next, we examine the interests in social justice shown by B. F. Skinner and subsequent generations of operant behaviorists, known as behavior analysts. Overall, our review of these two bodies of literature indicates that authors tended to use the language of social justice loosely and to present liberal political visions, abstracted from direct political involvement and aimed at reforming social conditions. Furthermore, we infer that the privileged socioeconomic status of academic psychologists compromises aspirations to contribute to social action that challenges the status quo. Accordingly, we propose abandoning attempts as psychologists to practice social justice. Instead, we advocate joining emancipatory struggles in solidarity with other citizens, while striving to overcome socioeconomic and intellectual hierarchies in academic psychology.