A More Just, Compassionate Society

The Contending with Societal Inequality (CSI) lab conducts research on the psychological processes that maintain and perpetuate societal inequity. Beyond the basic functions of our research and scholarship is a core commitment to caring for others, and to working to create a more just and compassionate society. This commitment is part of how we conduct research and it is also a guiding principle for how we treat the people who participate in our studies, the community members located at our university and city, our own students and trainees, and ourselves. The CSI lab will actively reach beyond research and the university to assist schools, governments, organizations, and communities to develop a more just and equitable society.

A Healthy Lab

Our commitment to our values is expressed through our lab’s rules and actions. A primary commitment is to ourselves as students, faculty, and trainees. In the CSI lab our first order of business is your overall health and wellbeing. This means that taking care of yourself and those around you is more important than the work you are doing to pursue your degree. This is true both because without your health you cannot perform your studies well and because your health, self-worth, and wellbeing matters in and of itself. If there are aspects of the degree program, lab activities, or mentorship activities, both physical and psychological, that cause damage to your wellbeing, it is one of the lab’s priorities to mitigate that aspect of the program through whatever means and authority we have collectively available. This also means that we expect lab members to take an active role in promoting their own health and wellbeing, and when appropriate, the health and wellbeing of other lab members.

A Community

We also commit to each other with the same values. In the CSI lab, we have no space or tolerance for forms of harassment, abuse, and violence of any kind because these acts harm our members and prevent them from pursuing a healthy degree-- which is a core mission of our lab. Instead, we will cultivate a community space where all of us will feel safe and supported in our work. This means we show up for each other; we provide careful and honest feedback to each other; we deliver the feedback at appropriate times (and in ways that allow us to take it on); and we support setbacks as learning opportunities. We will also celebrate each others’ victories because when one of us succeeds we all do. This is not a competitive lab where people vie to be the top student, if you need competition to fuel your work the CSI lab is not your lab.

Equity and Justice

At the CSI lab, we recognize that our university and our field is not a neutral party, and that these organizations actively marginalize many members of our community. We recognize that we cannot hope to conduct the pathbreaking work we seek to conduct in the CSI lab without diversity in all aspects of our research, teaching, or service. We are also unable to conduct this work if some members of our lab have their participation impeded by societal status markers. Thus, a primary goal of our lab is to create and protect a space that reduces or minimizes these active forces of marginalization so that our students, faculty, and trainees can be fully present in our lab.

A Social Science Laboratory

The primary work of the CSI lab is the production and dissemination of social science research which we will hold to our own rigorous and ethical standards, as well as to the standards set by the university and our discipline. Each of our lab members is tasked with completing projects with the highest care and attention. Our members are encouraged to use a variety of methods and approaches and to develop their own expertise. Our members are also required to be accountable to each other in the development of mastery, to pass on skills and training to each other so that we all learn and grow. Importantly, our science is not guided but what garners news headlines or what might land a book deal. If fame and notoriety are your goals, then the CSI lab is not for you. Instead, we are committed to using our science to upend societal inequality. Critically, insights informing a more just society can be developed through highly public scholarship as well as through null results that, nevertheless, tell us something we did not know before about the world.