Candice Hargons will be the next APA president. People are going a little mad about it.
I had a look at Candice Hargons’s publication record after learning about the APA presidential announcement. Like many others, I found it pretty remarkable. Hargon seems reasonably accomplished in her particular corner of counseling and sexuality research, but her intellectual profile is very different from what many would traditionally associate with the leadership of the American Psychological Association.
Her research profile has also caused quite a stir online. Admittedly, much of the discussion have centered around the subject matter of her work, not content, but here are some titles of her more-cited publications:
- “Make Sure You Wash Your Monkey”: Multigenerational Vaginal Hygiene Messages from Black Women"
- “#HotGirlScience: A Liberatory Paradigm for Intersectional Sex-Positive Scholarship”
- "That’s probably what euphoria feels like: Nonbinary Black womxn’s gender expression in an antitrans (and anti-Black [womxn]) America."
To many people, these titles sound almost like parody or satire of the social sciences, but they are actual publications associated with her research program. As many have remarked, it all comes across as incredibly wishy-washy. One notable reaction to the APA announcing Hargons’s election on Twitter was simply: “Are you i n s a n e?”.
The bigger issue for me, though, is her take on epistemology. In her APA candidate statement, Hargons explicitly says that she “rejects the positivist paradigm’s assertion of objectivity” and instead argues that researchers should be “accountably subjective”:
That seems like a pretty consequential position for someone about to lead the APA, an institution that is still wrestling with questions of methodological rigor in the wake of the replication crisis.
I’m curious what people here make of this, particularly experimentalists and psychometricians and so forth. Is this simply a different and legitimate conception of scientific psychology, or are we watching the APA move further away from conventional ideas about objectivity, rigor, and falsifiability? Also interested in the recent media/social-media discussion of her election, because some of the reactions have been extremely critical.