Journal of Social Issues最新文献

In this concluding commentary for our special issue, Neurodiversity-Affirming Intersectional Approaches that Target Public Policy: Moving the Focus from Changing Individuals to Changing Systems of Power, we seek to ameliorate the pervasive omission of nonspeaking Autistic people and those outside the Global North from research, services, and policy. In our special issue, we tried to nurture the often-neglected intersectional roots of the neurodiversity movement by amplifying perspectives of multiply marginalized Neurodivergent people. However, nonspeaking people remain underrepresented in our special issue. Therefore, we assembled people with diverse connections to the autism constellation, including nonspeaking and minimally speaking people and people from the Global South, to write this concluding piece. Together, we generated neurodiversity-affirming policies and organized them according to these themes arising from articles in our special issue: justice, representation, and systems change. To foster justice, we call for full access to individualized, holistic communication supports, cross-disability alliances, and decolonial approaches. To improve representation, we recommend melding Universal Design, Open Scholarship, and indigenous frameworks to support Neurodivergent representation in all aspects of research and advocacy, particularly leadership. To promote systems change, we call for accessible multimodal resources and valid assessments. Across all themes we stress tech equity, transparency, and community oversight. Accessible and detailed summaries of our policy recommendations that administrators, editors, clinicians, educators, researchers, and advocates can adopt now to make inclusion the default are provided in tables (please share widely). For the most marginalized, inclusion will not come from incremental adjustments but from radical solutions and systemic overhauls.

Does violent oppression weaken collective commitment, as dominant models of state power predict, or strengthen it? This paper addresses this question and a second, related one: what is the primary psychological pathway—outgroup hate or ingroup love? Using survey and behavioral data from Palestinians (N = 386) in the West Bank, I investigate the effects of exposure to Israeli violence. Findings directly challenge deterrence-based assumptions: violence exposure was associated with stronger, not weaker, collective commitment, including endorsement of sacred values and willingness to engage in collective action. The results also adjudicate the psychological pathway. Exposure to violence was associated with greater ingroup warmth and generosity, but was not associated with outgroup hostility. The association between violence and collective commitment was consistently explained via ingroup warmth, not outgroup hostility. Findings challenge dominant narratives by showing that oppression strengthens rather than weakens commitment, and suggest that this commitment is sustained not by outgroup hostility, but by ingroup love.

This article aims to introduce geopolitical psychology as an emerging interdisciplinary perspective in psychological science. Broadly defined, this perspective (a) synergizes insights from geography, political economy, and psychology, and (b) broadens and deepens the understanding of the society–psychology nexus and its transformations vis-à-vis the transactions of the person and the historical, current, and imagined geopolitical contexts. We propose eight propositions to organize currently disparate research on geopolitical psychology and guide future investigations in this field. We also elaborate on the methodology of geopolitical psychology. We believe that geopolitical psychology can deepen the understanding of key social and psychological phenomena, offer new theoretical insights, lead to critical interrogations of received social representations, and inspire collective actions to change the status quo. We also expect geopolitical psychology to be able to address past critiques of intrapersonal psychology as a socially indifferent science, and conceptually and methodologically connect psychological science with its cognate disciplines in humanities and social sciences.

Meritocracy refers to the ideology that reward should be allocated to individuals based on their merits (effort and abilities). Social psychologists have studied it as a universal justice principle in reward allocation and a belief that justifies merit-based social stratification. Taking a geopolitical stance, we further contextualize meritocracy is a socially and historically situated hierarchy-legitimizing construct used to reinforce social division of labor and justify social inequality in the post-industrial neoliberal society, so that the society can excel in global competition. As such, subscription to meritocracy should be associated with higher institutional trust in more mature market economies only. To test this hypothesis, we collated World Values Survey (WVS) data related to institutional trust and meritocracy beliefs from 84,638 participants in 57 societies (47.34% males, mean age = 42.89, SD = 16.43) and society-level data of these societies’ economic freedom, economic performance, and economic inequality. Institutional trust data were analyzed both at the society level and the individual level. The results showed that at the society level, institutional trust was higher in a society that stronger shared beliefs in meritocracy and had many more economic freedoms. At the individual level, in societies with more economic freedoms, people trusted public institutions more if they held stronger meritocracy beliefs. In contrast, in societies with fewer economic freedoms, institutional trust was higher among people who opposed to meritocracy beliefs.

To what extent are preferences for individual versus collective rights shaped by historical experiences, particularly colonialism? To answer this question, we conducted field studies in Fiji, a former British colony, home to two populations with distinct histories of colonial subjugation. We reasoned that for Indigenous iTaukei, for whom collective rights were stripped, prioritizing group rights on issues tied to colonial harm would be seen as essential for cultural survival. Contrastingly, we reasoned that Indo-Fijians (descendants of indentured laborers brought to Fiji under colonial rule) would prefer equal rights for all. In Study 1, we assessed attitudes toward equality across various social and political issues, finding that iTaukei were less likely to endorse equality, particularly concerning land ownership. Study 2 explored iTaukei perceptions of land rights, revealing that they view granting Indo-Fijians land access as a threat to their identity and survival. Study 3 explored support for democratic norms, themselves an artifact of Western legal thinking imposed upon Fiji. While support for democratic norms was high in abstract, members of both groups were more supportive of democratic violations when such violations served their group's interests. Findings highlight the lasting psychological impact of colonialism, demonstrating how historical grievances shape reasoning about rights and governance in postcolonial societies. Understanding these dynamics provides insight into contemporary intergroup conflict and the tension between universal democratic principles and Indigenous collective rights. This work contributes to broader discussions on decolonization and underscores the need for culturally sensitive approaches to human rights discourse.

From the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States to regional instabilities throughout Eurasia, we are living in a geopolitically dynamic time. Despite the relative neglect of international relations as an influence on domestic political behavior, geopolitics can play a critical role in domestic politics and citizens’ societal engagement. This is likely pronounced in Australia as a middle power in a geopolitically uncertain and dynamic environment. Using the lens of utopian thinking, the present research investigates ordinary Australians’ utopian visions of geopolitical, economic, and social institutions, and their role in domestic political behaviors and societal engagement. Across two studies, we find that a newly developed measure of the Utopian Institutions Scale can capture utopian institutions in terms of geopolitical, economic, and social conservatism or progressivism and that these visions differentiate supporters of different political parties in Australia and predict motivations to engage in political processes. Nevertheless, a nationally representative sample in Australia showed a general tendency to endorse a geopolitically progressive vision of a Multilateral world order and to reject a geopolitically conservative vision of a Hegemonic world order. The finding is interpreted in terms of Australia's geopolitical location in its spatial geography, temporal history, and economic and cultural relationships.

In this closing commentary, we consider the contents of this special issue in full and contemplate the lessons learned in the process of its composition. Ultimately, the goal of racial justice intervention research is to meaningfully and tangibly reduce real-world discrimination and inequity. We offer guidance to researchers in three thematic domains that we hope will be in service of these efforts. In the first section, the second and the third authors reflect on the editorial process—and in particular, note an interplay between reviewers’ uneasiness with the “messiness” of applied work and authors’ tendency to, at times, overpromise about their work's advancement through the Translational Research Framework (TRF). In the second section, we examine the value of the TRF itself, focusing on its utility for formally structuring the development of an intervention, as well as for effectively addressing the challenges that arise when transitioning from highly controlled experimental contexts to unpredictable real-world domains. In the final section, we review the feedback we received from our authors themselves, which highlighted the necessities of interdisciplinary collaboration, building relationships with stakeholders, and flexibility in the face of uncertainty.

The neurodiversity movement challenges traditional deficit-oriented models of autism. However, inclusion efforts often prioritize individual attitudinal change over structural reform (e.g., policies and research practices) or exclude Autistic people with intersecting marginalized identities. Just research requires scientific inquiry to challenge the oppressive systems from which it emerges, and can sometimes reinforce, by directly addressing interlocking structures of power. Otherwise, research can fail to serve, and even perpetuate harm against, the most marginalized Neurodivergent people, including those with intellectual disabilities, nonspeaking individuals, and racial, ethnic, and gender minorities who remain underrepresented in broader research and policy generation. This special issue, Using Neurodiversity-Affirming Intersectional Approaches to Build More Equitable Societies and Shape Public Policy, therefore, seeks to challenge the systems of inequality dominant in autism research by uniting neurodiversity and intersectional frameworks with a focus on policy recommendations. In this introductory article to our special issue, we share the strategies we used to improve representation in our special issue and an overview of the papers in the special issue. We, the guest editors of the special issue, intentionally used our networks to seek contributions from scholars, advocates, and communities traditionally excluded from academic publishing, such as nonspeaking people and those from the Global South. This resulted in a special issue organized into three thematic sections: grounding neurodiversity in intersectionality to improve policy, addressing underrepresentation in research, advocacy, and publishing, and promoting systems-level and grassroots approaches to wellbeing. Across contributions, authors offer empirical and/or theoretical insights with actionable policy recommendations and demonstrate a range of approaches such as community-led methods, Open Scholarship practices, and decolonial and critical race frameworks that can shift power, improve measurement and access, and guide equitable resource allocation. Together, we call for a field-wide pivot from changing individuals to transforming systems, so that justice, participation, and self-determination are attainable for all neurominorities, especially those at multiply marginalized intersections.

This paper discusses the consequences of cultural misunderstandings, institutional and structural obstacles, and ableism on non-speaking autistic people and their families in post-conflict Liberia and Sierra Leone, based on the global neurodiversity literature and gaps in diagnosis, support, and inclusion in the West African context. The research question will focus on whether intersectional neurodiversity perspectives can improve public policy for diverse people. The objectives will be (1) to assess social, educational, and family concerns; (2) to analyze cultural stigma and beliefs; (3) to test neurodiversity-inclusive interventions. The study utilized a thematic analysis-based qualitative and feminist multimodal design to purposely select 30 participants (10 non-speaking autistics aged 5–18, 10 parents, 10 caregivers) living in urban (60%) and non-urban (40%) areas in both countries, using interviews, focus groups, arts-based approaches, and observations as methods over the 8 months. Results revealed 90% attributing autism to supernatural causes, only 1/30 of the participants were formally diagnosed, 80% female caregivers facing isolation and financial strain, and less than 20% primary school completion due to inadequate resources. The results point to systemic injustice, and the implications include culturally responsive policies that incorporate traditional healers, diagnostic expansion (which may increase the rate of diagnostics by 50%), and equitable caregiving practices to build more equitable societies.