Three New Papers on Wokeness in Psychology
How activist scholars are suppressing science, squandering public trust, and undermining psychotherapy
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Psychology has always been influenced by the moral fashions of the time. In the age of “wokeness,” however, this process has gone into overdrive. According to a growing number of critics, psychology has become increasingly ideological, increasingly activist, and increasingly hostile to dissenting views.
But the counterrevolution seems to be gaining steam. More and more psychologists are pushing back against the woke turn in psychology, and trying to reclaim a more empirically based, more politically moderate, and less identitarian approach to the field.
In this post, I highlight some important recent examples of this pushback: three papers that explore and critique different aspects of the woke trend. Specifically, they look at the suppression of politically inconvenient findings, the erosion of public trust in psychology, and the growing tension between therapeutic practice and politicized conceptions of human suffering.
You might not agree with every claim made in these papers. But I hope you agree that they all raise important questions - questions we ignore at our peril.
1. Suppressing Science
The first paper examines what authors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams call the “dominant gender narrative”: the widespread belief that women face pervasive discrimination at every stage of their scientific careers. The paper argues that the strongest available evidence no longer supports this claim, but that researchers who point this out often face hostility or attempts at silencing, rather than open scientific debate. Here’s an excerpt from the piece.
The “dominant gender narrative” in science holds that bias against women is pervasive and occurs in every domain, including tenure-track hiring, letters of recommendation, awards, grants, journal publications, authorship assignment, citations, salaries, promotions, and teaching evaluations. Many of these claims are repeatedly broadcast despite their nullification by larger, stronger studies and meta-analyses that do not find gender bias. Because these stronger studies are cited less often, there exists a false belief among many faculty that gender bias is omnipresent in the tenure-track academy. As an example of this false belief, 248 U.S. faculty were surveyed about their beliefs regarding gender bias. They overestimated the extent of such bias in every domain. We illustrate this misalignment of beliefs by focusing on just one of the many domains in which bias against women is alleged but has been nullified by stronger studies: tenure-track hiring. We show that the dominant narrative of pervasive bias in favor of hiring men is not supported by the evidence. The reality is the opposite of what is believed, with women preferred over comparable men: multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that in tenure-track hiring in the United States and many European countries, women have an advantage over equally-accomplished men. Yet, the claim of bias against hiring women faculty continues to be widely cited in the premier science media. Challenging the gender narrative should be part of normal scientific discourse; however, doing so often evokes a backlash—as documented in testimonials by researchers who have been attacked.
I was one of the researchers Ceci and Williams contacted for testimonials, and I shared details of my own (relatively minor) experience of backlash. Specifically, I shared an excerpt from my new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, in which I discuss the heated reaction I received to a paper I wrote with Lewis Halsey about the causes of sex differences in STEM. Ceci and Williams quoted some of the excerpt in their piece, making it the first academic paper to cite A Billion Years.
Finally, we received a summary about the current state of affairs by Steve Stewart-Williams, an evolutionary scientist who conducts research on gender (Stewart-Williams, in press), that is worth repeating here:
“A vocal minority see positing sex differences as more than a mere social faux pas or difference of opinion, and view it instead as a moral transgression. For individuals in this camp, the idea that the sexes are naturally identical has become a sacred belief. Disagreement is seen not as an honest mistake or interesting challenge to be evaluated, but as sacrilege. And the typical response to sacrilege isn’t a tolerant appreciation of the wonderful diversity of human lifeways: ‘Well, I’m not personally into sacrilege, but if other people are, who am I to judge?’ Instead, the typical response is to censor, to silence, to cancel, punish, and shun.”
Citation: Ceci, S. J., & Williams, W. M. (2026). Organized dogmatism controls the message about gender bias in the academy. Journal of Controversial Ideas, 6, 4.
You can access the paper here for free.
2. The Cost of Woke Psychology
The second paper argues that psychology’s increasingly activist and identitarian public face may be undermining trust in the field. According to author Travis Proulx, many people - including many on the political left - feel alienated by the discipline’s moralizing tone, unrealistic worldview, and ideological conformity. The proposed remedy is simple: less moral grandstanding and more intellectual humility. As Proulx writes:
Given the predominant role of taxpayers in funding our research, we should be concerned that the voting public may justifiably perceive our science as emphasizing activist visions of what should be over the empirical complexities of what is. Ensuring public trust will depend on re-embracing persuasive intellectual humility and eschewing the identitarian vernacular and deficit model pedagogy that currently characterizes our public-facing messaging…
Psychologists know that public trust decreases to the extent that manifest ideological leanings diverge from their own. We also know that progressive activism within our science represents views that diverge from ≈90% of the Western public – including most left-wingers. Alarming, when roughly 90% of research funding ultimately derives from a public whose enthusiasm for funding scientific research decreases with perceived social distance from scientists. Western cultural institutions are moving on from monomaniacal identitarianism, re-embracing the intellectual humility to acknowledge that it depends. Will we join them in escaping this ‘identity trap’, or spiral into an ‘Endless Summer 2020’?
Citation: Proulx, T. (2026). An ‘outgroup’ public won’t trust a progressive ‘ingroup’ psychology. Current Opinion in Psychology, 70, 102316.
You can access the paper here for free.
3. How Victimology is Killing Therapy
The third and final paper focuses on cognitive behavioral therapy (aka CBT). Authors Richard Redding, Robert Maranto, and Nathan Honeycutt argue that therapists and clinical psychologists increasingly emphasize oppression and victimhood over personal agency - a shift they fear could undermine one of psychology’s most effective treatments, and make therapy less accessible to clients who don’t share progressive political views.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) rests on the premise that individuals possess personal agency to change their life circumstances. At the same time, given growing political homogeneity within psychology, views of individual agency are increasingly being displaced by greater emphasis on conceptualizing distress as reflecting systemic oppression. Drawing on research concerning these frameworks, this article briefly examines the implications of these trends for CBT in the United States. Specifically, we outline three potential concerns, including declining interest in traditional CBT, reduced value alignment between therapists and non-liberal clients, and possible shifts in the theoretical and practical focus of CBT. We conclude by discussing implications for graduate training and the importance of sociopolitical competence and diversity in clinical education…
It would be quite unfortunate if fewer young therapists are attracted to learning or practicing CBT, given its proven effectiveness. Or, if they corrupt it through a politicization that alters its fundamental approach, aims, and therapeutic strategies in favor of strategies that serve a political agenda. This will result not only in reduced therapeutic efficacy but in some cases therapy that is harmful or iatrogenic. It would also be unfortunate if politically moderate or conservative clients cannot find a therapist in their community who understands their values and problems or only one who practices a politicized form of CBT that is a very poor match for their sociopolitical values…
[W]e are hopeful that enough clinicians will “resist the ideological encroachment into the field to rebuff politicized narratives, to re-assert the primacy of individual clients in all their complexity.”
Citation: Redding, R. E., Maranto, R., & Honeycutt, N. (2026). Is the victimology worldview of many young therapists ill-suited for cognitive behavior therapy? Current Opinion in Psychology, 70, 102313.
You can access the paper here for free. Note that it’s part of a special issue in Current Opinion in Psychology focusing on identity and politicization in behavior therapy.
Will papers like these be enough to turn the tide on wokeness in psychology? I’m not sure. But with the number of such papers growing steadily, I feel more optimistic today than I did when I had my own taste of ideological backlash five or so years ago.
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In psychiatry its driving people nuts by the day
Have you written about the stereotype threat? It plays such a big part in explaining differences between groups, but to an intelligent outsider there is clearly something suspicious in the claim that if we just tell women they are good at math, the will magically perform equal to men.
And blacks perform equal to whites and so on.
It's as if we as humans just need some magical thinking, even academics who think they are so smart and scientific.
It's strange that this one little trick, of it were true, isn't used everywhere. Imagine how easy school results could be improved if we could just tell kids they are smart and then magically they become smart.