About

We are scholars and practitioners in the behavioral sciences committed to free inquiry and truth seeking. In healthy scientific fields, ideas are debunked rather than censored, and their proponents are debated rather than punished. We are dedicated to maintaining open inquiry, civil debate, and rigorous standards in the behavioral sciences. Our activities include hosting academic conferences, publishing an open inquiry peer-reviewed journal (JOIBS), and producing other scholarly content such as books and popular press pieces.

SOIBS Leadership and Founding Members

Officers of the Society

Richard E. Redding, J.D., Ph.D., Founder and President

Professor of Psychology and Education, and Ronald D. Rotunda Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, at Chapman University. Professor Redding was previously a professor at Villanova University, Drexel University, and the University of Virginia, and he received his degrees from Washington and Lee University (J.D.), Vanderbilt University (M.S.), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D.).

He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Psychological Science, and he has published extensively on the topic of sociopolitical and intellectual diversity in social science, including his 2001 American Psychologist Article ("Sociopolitical Diversity in Psychology: The Case for Pluralism"), which was the first academic publication to address the problem in the field as a whole, setting the stage

Sally Satel, M.D., Vice President

Dr. Sally Satel is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at a local methadone clinic in D.C. Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993 and remains a lecturer at Yale. From 1993 to 1994 she was a Robert Wood Johnson policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine, and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. She has testified before Congress on veterans’ issues, mental health policy, drug courts,and health disparities.

Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999), and PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001). She is coauthor of One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), co-author of The Health Disparity Myth (AEI Press, 2006), and editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors (AEI Press, 2009).

Her recent book, co-authored with Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic, 2013). Brainwashed was a finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles TimesBook Prize in Science.

Nathan Honeycutt, Ph.D., Secretary

Nathan Honeycutt is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). A native of California, Nathan earned a B.S. in psychology from California Polytechnic State University, a M.A. in social psychology from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Rutgers University.

Nathan’s research has primarily investigated political diversity and discrimination among university faculty and students. He has also published, and contributed to, research on political bias, political polarization, censorship and scholarship suppression, and scientific integrity.

Lee Jussim, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science

Dr. Jussim is Distinguished Professor, Psychology, Rutgers. He has published over 100 articles and chapters and six books. His book, Social Perception and Social Reality, contested and debunked the psychological canon that people were mostly big bad bags of bias, and showed that, instead, across many of the types of situations, people’s judgments were often reasonable, rational and accurate.

This book received the American Publishers Award for best book in Psychology in 2012. He is a founding member of Heterodox Academy and the Academic Freedom Alliance. Just after visits to his old Psychology Today blog site exceeded a million, he move to Substack where he now posts his own and others’ essays,

unsafescience.substack.com

Executive Board

J. Michael Bailey, Ph.D.

J. Michael Bailey is Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. His research has primarily focused on the origins and expression of sexual orientation and gender identity. During the 1990s his research on sexual orientation were attacked by the Right. These attacks culminated in 2003, when his research on sex differences in sexual arousal patterns was made a poster child for government waste. Coincidentally, in 2003 he published his book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexuality, which caused an entirely different controversy, and invoked attacks from the Left. Besides conventional sexual orientation, Bailey’s research has focused on topics including bisexuality, autogynephilia, gender dysphoria, pedophilia, and furries. He insists that he doesn’t choose controversial topics to engender controversy. Rather, he believes that controversial areas such as these are precisely where open inquiry is most necessary and valuable.

Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D.

Dr. Baumeister is president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association, as well as professor of psychology (emeritus) at the University of Queensland, with ongoing connections to Florida State University, the University of Bamberg (Germany), and Jacobs University (Germany). He received his PhD in experimental social psychology from Princeton University in 1978 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.

He has roughly 700 publications, and his 42 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, Meanings of Life, and the New York Times bestseller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. As of summer 2021, Google Scholar tallies that his works have been cited over 230,000 times in the scientific literature, with annual tallies routinely over 18,000 and an H-index of 188. His research interests include self and identity, belongingness and interpersonal rejection, finding meaning in life, sexuality, aggression, self-control and self-esteem, uncertainty, addiction, decision-making, and thinking about the future.

Cory Clark, Ph.D.

Cory Clark is the Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Scholar in the Psychology Department. She received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology and Quantitative Methods from University of California, Irvine and formerly worked as an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the Director of Academic Engagement for Heterodox Academy.

Among other things, she studies political biases (on both the left and right) and how moral and political concerns influence evaluations of science among everyday people and scientists alike. She writes a Psychology Today blog called The AntiSocial Psychologist and occasionally co-hosts the YouTube channel and podcast, Psyphilopod. Follow her on Twitter @ImHardcory.

Leda Cosmides, Ph.D.

Leda Cosmides is best known for her work in pioneering the field of evolutionary psychology. She developed her interest in rebuilding psychology along evolutionary lines while an undergraduate at Harvard, where she got her A.B. in biology (1979) and her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (1985). Cosmides did postdoctoral work with Roger Shepard at Stanford and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has been on the faculty since 1991.

Cosmides won the 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, the 1993 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, a J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Human Behavior Evolution Society. In 1992, with John Tooby, she published The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, an edited volume designed to be a state-of-the-art survey of what was then a new field.

Leda Cosmides is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychological Brain Sciences at UCSB. She and John Tooby founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

Craig Frisby, Ph.D.

Dr. Craig Frisby recently retired from the School Psychology training program at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the past Associate Editor for the journals School Psychology Review and the Psychological Assessment. He currently serves on the American Institutes for Research (AIR) National Center on Intensive Intervention Academic Screening Technical Review Committee.

He is the co-editor for the Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology, Cultural Competence in Applied Psychology, and is the author of Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students.

Glenn Geher, Ph.D.

Dr. Geher is Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of Evolutionary Studies at the State University of New York where he directs the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab.

Glenn has received SUNY Chancellor Awards in Excellence for both teaching and scholarship. He is a fierce advocate of open inquiry in behavioral science.

Robert Maranto, Ph.D.

Robert Maranto (B.S. Maryland, 1980; Ph.D. Minnesota, 1989; rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and previously taught at Villanova and served in government in the Clinton years. He researches education reform and has served on his local school board and on a charter board. He edits the Journal of School Choice.

With others Bob has produced 15 scholarly books which have sold dozens of copies and are so boring his own mother refused to read them, including Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice (Routledge, 2020), Homeschooling in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2018), President

Obama and Education Reform (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), and The Politically Correct University (AEI, 2009). With Wilfred Reilly and Patrick Wolf, he is now writing as a summer book project The Irony of Black Lives Matter, and How to Make Policing Better. With Craig Frisby he co-edited the forthcoming NAS report Social Justice Versus Social Science: White Fragility, Implicit Bias, and Diversity Training, which was serialized in 2020-21 in Minding the Campus. He has had success publishing several bad poems about academia, most notably Department Chair (Department Chair*), and To His Coy Coauthor (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-017-9689-6).

Michael Mills, Ph.D.

Michael Mills is an evolutionary psychologist at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). He earned his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. He has served as Chair, and as the Director of the Graduate Program, at the LMU Psychology Department. He serves on several editorial boards including Evolutionary Psychology; Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology; Sexuality and Culture; The Sage Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology; Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science. His research and teaching interests focus on adaptationist approaches to human behavior, including the development of a novel evolutionary theory of motivation (competing with Maslow’s model), evolutionary approaches to sustainability, as well as explorations of evolved sexually dimorphic psychological adaptations and their manifestations across cultures (open access textbook).

Leda Cosmides is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychological Brain Sciences at UCSB. She and John Tooby founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

Steven Pinker, Ph.D.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT.

He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American

Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, to be published in September 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Catherine Salmon, Ph.D.

Dr. Salmon received her BSc in Biology and her PhD in Evolutionary Psychology from McMaster University. After a number of blissful years as a post-doctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, she fled the frozen north to join the faculty at the University of Redlands in southern California where she is currently a professor in the Psychology department and the chair of the Human Animal Studies Program. She is the co-author (with Donald Symons) of Warrior Lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality and The Secret Power of Middle Children (co-authored with Katrin Schumann).

Her primary research interests include birth order/parental investment/sibling conflict, reproductive suppression and dieting behaviour, and male and female sexuality, particularly as expressed in pornography and other erotic genres. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.

Nina Silander, Psy.D.

Dr. Nina Silander is a rehabilitation psychologist in Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital – University Campus and Behavioral Medicine. She graduated with her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Regent University. Dr. Silander completed her internship at the Syracuse VA Medical Center where she trained in multiple evidence-based psychotherapy approaches, was certified in Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for trauma/PTSD, and provided psychological assessment and intervention services in primary care and general outpatient mental health clinics.

Dr. Silander completed her clinical health psychology postdoctoral residency in the trauma surgery department at UF Health-Jacksonville, a level 1 trauma center. At Brooks, she provides inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy, conducts pre-surgical evaluations, and consults with a neighboring hospital’s trauma service.

Dr. Silander became increasingly concerned about ideological bias in psychology during her doctoral internship. Since, she allocates time to connect this research base to clinical practice and trace the major threat it presents to the APA through publications and engagement in media.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Dr. Tetlock is the Annenberg University Professor chair at the University of Pennsylvania. His work crosses the boundaries of social, organizational, and political psychology, addressing topics such as accountability systems, value conflict, counterfactual reasoning and taboo trade-offs. He has received awards from many scientific societies, including the American Psychological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His most recent work focuses on forecasting tournaments and their potential to improve the accuracy of intelligence analysis and to depolarize unnecessarily polarized debates on domestic as well as national security issues.

George Yancey, Ph.D.

Dr. George Yancey is a Professor of Institute for Studies of Religion and Sociology at Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, atheists, cultural progressives, academic bias and anti-Christian hostility.

His books include Compromising Scholarship (Baylor University Press) a book that explores religious and political biases in academia, So Many Christians, So Few Lions (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that assess Christianophobia in the United States, Beyond Racial Gridlock (Intervarsity Press) a Christian book which articulates a mutual obligations approach to racial issues, and, with Michael

Emerson, Transcending Racial Barriers (Oxford University Press) an academic book that articulates a mutual obligations approach. He has a forthcoming book One Faith No More: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America (New York University Press) which examines the schism between conservative and progressive Christians. He has recently finished a book, Beyond Racial Division (InterVarsity Press) that examines the use of collaborative conversations to reduce racial tensions.

Founders of the Society

SOIBS was founded in the summer of 2021 by

J. Michael Bailey Northwestern University
Cory Clark University of Pennsylvania
Glenn Geher State University of New York, New Paltz
Nathan Honeycutt Rutgers University (now at FIRE)
Lee Jussim Rutgers University

Robert Maranto University of Arkansas
Michael Mills Loyola Marymount University
Richard Redding Chapman University
Catherine Salmon University of Redlands
Sally Satel American Enterprise Institute

Distinguished Founding Members

Abbott, Dorian The University of Chicago, Geophysical Sciences
Amitay, Oren Ryerson University
Aquino, Karl University of British Columbia
Blanchard, Ray University of Toronto
Bleske-Rechek, April University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
Boyce, Benjamin Public intellectual
Brandon, Marianne Private Practice
Browne, Kingsley Wayne State University Law School
Burch, Rebecca SUNY Oswego
Buss, David University of Texas
Campbell, Keith University of Georgia
Cantor, James Private practice
Cantu, Edward University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law
Caplan, Bryan George Mason University
Casasanto, Daniel Cornell University
Cesario, Joseph Michigan State University
Connor, Paul Postdoctoral Research Fellow, New York University
Crane, Harry Rutgers University
Davison, Alan University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Del Giudice, Marco University of Trieste, Italy
Ditto, Pete University of California, Irvine
Dreger, Alice Public Intellectual
Erec Smith York College of Pennsylvania
Ferguson, Chris Stetson University
Foss, Nicolai J. Copenhagen Business School
Frey, Komi Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Geher, Glenn
State University of New York, New Paltz
Geary, David University of Missouri
Goldberg, Zach Manhattan Institute
Graso, Maja Otago University
Haier, Richard University of California Irvine
Haidt, Jonathan
New York University’s Stern School of Business
Halpern, Diane Claremont McKenna College (Emerita)
Hanania, RichardCenter for Study of Partisanship and Ideology
Harris, Christine University of California, San Diego
Herzog, Katie Co-host of the Blocked and Reported Podcast
Hooven, Carole Harvard University
Hsu, Kevin Penn State, Abington
Hsu, Stephen Michigan State University
Joshi, Hrishikesh Bowling Green State University

Kaufmann, Eric Birkbeck College, University of London
Khan, Razib Public Intellectual
Kling, Arnold Public Intellectual
Lee, James University of Minnesota
Lieberman, Debra University of Miami
Loftus, Elizabeth University of California, Irvine
Mackey, Jacob Occidental College
Maestripieri, Dario University of Chicago
McWhorter, John Columbia University
McGue, Matt University of Minnesota
McNally, Richard Harvard University
McCullough, Michael University of California, San Diego
Monahan, John University of Virginia
Morandini, James University of Sydney, Australia
Moskos, Peter John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Navarette, Carlos David Michigan State University
Pashler, Hal University of California, San Diego
Pendergrast, Mark Public Intellectual
Rahman, Qazi King's College, London
Rebellon, Cesar George Mason University
Reilly, Wilfred Kentucky State University
Reynolds, Tania University of New Mexico
Saad, Gad Concordia University
Shackelford, Todd Oakland University
Shermer, Michael Chapman University/Skeptics Society
Singal, Jesse Co-host of the Blocked and Reported Podcast
Smith, Vernon
Chapman University (Nobel Laureate in Economics)
Soh, Debra Journalist and public intellectual
Struppa, Daniele President, Chapman University
Stanovich, Keith University of Toronto
Stevens, Sean Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Stewart-Williams, Steve University of Nottingham Malaysia
Sullivan, Alice University College London
Sylla, John University of Chicago Law School, American Institute of Bisexuality
Tavris, Carol Journalist and public intellectual
Tooby, John University of California, Santa Barbara
Vasey, Paul University of Lethbridge
von Hippel, Bill University of Queensland
Wilcox, Brad University of Virginia
William O'Donohue University of Nevada-Reno
Wilson, Anne Wilfrid Laurier University