Blair T. Johnson, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Social Psychology Program in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
He has been an Associate Editor with Psychological Bulletin since 2015 and is a Senior Editor with Social Science & Medicine.
Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?
I grew up on a busy, successful farm. Farmers have a knack for making things work, so I grew up knowing how things work and how to fix them. (I am grateful to my parents for this intensive education.) Thus, all my life, I have been a practical generalist.
I initially decided to specialize in social psychology because it seemed clear to me that you can study just about anything with it. Training with Alice H. Eagly, an early leader of psychology’s meta-analytic revolution, ultimately led me to collaborate with psychologists in other subdisciplines and with epidemiologists, kinesiologists, statisticians, and geographers.
Retraining as a health psychologist to better understand HIV prevention and AIDS care convinced me of the importance of allied disciplines, such as biology, medicine, and sociology. Much of my recent scholarship focuses on ecological contexts that can be gauged using geographical principles and used in models of individual and collective behavior.
I was an Associate Editor with Psychological Bulletin between 2015 and 2019, and have been a Senior Editor with Social Science & Medicine since 2014. Editing these journals has been a highly stimulating, interdisciplinary experience. I look forward to more of the same during my term as editor of the Bulletin.
Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?
Psychological Bulletin has long been the best place for scholars to publish their reviews of psychological phenomena, and the methodological quality of these reviews has steadily improved. Scholars have an obligation to practice the best possible science, with great transparency, or else it may not be possible to replicate their findings.
But a high-quality systematic review does not result from simply running a macro in a statistics program. Many more steps ought to precede and follow the statistical analyses. First-time systematic reviewers should team up with experienced systematic reviewers to learn the ins-and-outs of the process.
I would also like to see the Bulletin invite commentaries from leaders in other related disciplines, which can help to integrate science across fields.
Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now?
Unfortunately, mental health remains a problem, and thus studies related to mental health continue to be important. Similarly, studies of prejudice, stigma, intersectionality, and similar topics continue to be conducted because these reflect important problems in society, thus, there is a great need for carefully conducted reviews on these subjects. One can examine generation differences using meta-analytic methods and investigate how changes in society may explain why one generation differs from another.
Reviews of such phenomena amount to empirical or scientific histories of their subjects.
Psychological Bulletin is crucial because, as noted, of its reputation for publishing high-quality reviews. There are more studies available on every subject than anyone can possibly understand without using methodological tools like systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Systematic reviews at their best summarize the evidence and work on a subject; they can reveal trends that would be difficult if not possible to isolate in individual studies.
These lessons can inform relevant policies and thus improve human welfare. Moreover, excellent systematic reviews often reveal gaps in knowledge. As a result, resources can be targeted for the most needed new primary-level research. High-quality systematic reviews are thus a powerful resource and will certainly become increasingly important in the future.
What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?
The Open Science movement is a positive development for psychology and other disciplines. Yet, some scholars distrust all work on a subject that appeared before pre-study registrations existed. Scholars ought to examine all of the evidence and then see how registered and unregistered results compare.
Psychology has experienced replication crises in the past and grown from them. For example, in the late 1960s and 1970s, attitudes and personality traits were thought to be failures in predicting behavior; by the 1980s, scholars had improved their methods and were robustly predicting behaviors using both attitudes and traits.
Unfortunately, scholars with no training in systematic reviews still try to conduct them; then, they learn from the expert feedback they receive from peer reviewers. In such cases, more extensive revisions are necessary in order to become published, which strains reviewers.
Finally, psychologists train to be psychologists, but why not put science first and learn about a phenomenon from any discipline that studies it? Many other scientists use the same methods as psychologists and study the same or similar phenomena. We talk about areas of science being “silos,” but silos have been disappearing from farms for decades! Borrowing a perspective from, for example, sociology or social epidemiology to inform a systematic review focused on mental health interventions could well lead to advances for both psychology and outside fields.
Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Are you making any changes?
Mostly, the process will remain the same as during the current editor’s term. Submissions must connect across the boundaries of particular subdisciplines or link to allied scientific disciplines. Cross-disciplinary submissions that keep psychology as the primary focus will be welcome.
My office and I will be very attentive to transparency and methodological quality. Readers must be able to understand the methods undertaken, and we need to see that the methods used are acceptable for the problem investigated.
Editor Spotlight features interviews with the newly-appointed editors of APA Journals.
APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology and feature the latest research in the field.
Psychological Bulletin publishes evaluative and integrative research reviews and interpretations of issues in scientific psychology. Both qualitative (narrative) and quantitative (meta-analytic) reviews will be considered, depending on the nature of the database under consideration for review.