Sandra Murray, PhD

Murray is currently an associate chair at the Department of Psychology at University at Buffalo.

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience? 

I am a social psychologist. I received my PhD at the University of Waterloo, where I had the good fortune to be mentored by John Holmes and Dale Griffin and surrounded by a wonderfully vibrant and challenging faculty, including Mark Zanna, Mike Ross, Ziva Kunda, Geoff Fong, and Joanne Wood. Very broadly, my research examines motivated cognitive processes in romantic relationships. Across the years, my research has examined how the goal to feel safe from being hurt and the goal to perceive meaning and purpose in commitment influence both one another and ultimately how people think, feel, and behave in romantic relationships. Most recently, I have been examining how broad systems of relationship interdependence intersect and affect one another, such that the safety people find (or fail to find) in romantic relationships affects how they perceive the sociopolitical world, and vice versa.

I spent 3 years as an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes (JPSP: IRGP; when Jeff Simpson was editor). More recently, I completed a stint as an associate editor for Personality and Social Psychology Review (when Monica Biernat was editor).

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?

I am tremendously fortunate to have assembled an amazing and supportive group of associate editors. The associate editors on my team have been very active collaborators in developing our shared vision for the decision-making process we would like authors and reviewers to use when they submit and evaluate submissions for this section.

My team shares the perspective that relationships—whether between friends, romantic partners, parents and children, coworkers, ingroups, outgroups, communities, or cultural groups—constitute the essential fabric of human existence. Our hope is that submissions to this section will offer new insights into how the relationships people share with others affect their experience of themselves and the world around them, ultimately affecting their personal or collective well-being. We especially welcome submissions that increase understanding of how relationships function in diverse sociocultural contexts.

When I was in graduate school, the faculty at Waterloo impressed on us students that we could better understand basic social psychological processes by studying contexts that matter. My hope is that contributions to JPSP: IRGP will wield the field’s knowledge base and methodological tools to shed new theoretical light on personal and collective problems that need to be solved for humankind to thrive. Specifically, I hope the articles my team selects for publication in JPSP: IRGP will advance an inclusive understanding of interpersonal and intergroup relations by (a) identifying important real-world social problems, (b) seeking to identify mechanisms that explain why those problems exist and whether they might disproportionately affect particular groups of people, and then (c) using convergent research methods inside and outside the lab to answer these questions

My team and I also share the perspective that the articles published in this section need to be accessible to readers who are not deeply invested in the particular research question the article is examining. This is one of the reasons we made several changes to the submission guidelines: We are hoping to make it more likely that the articles published in this section will be easily appreciated and read by a broad and diverse group of scholars, which should help to widen readership for the journal and communicate the results of the research to the broader community.

Why is this journal important to the field? What is its relevance to society/public health?

JPSP: IRGP serves as the premier outlet for scholars studying interpersonal and intergroup relationships. Many of the ways that people feel, think, and behave on a day-to-day basis depend on the relationships they have or imagine they have with others—not just the relationships with those closest to them but relationships with strangers, outgroups, and societal leaders and broader institutions as well. Social relationships profoundly affect a person’s physical and psychological health and even the risk of early death. The research published in this section is important because the researchers conducting it are working to understand the forces that can either strengthen or imperil the very social connections that people rely on for survival.

What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?

In the past decade, the challenges to the field have come from within it, through the collective recognition that the rigor, transparency, and replicability of psychological science needed to be increased. In the future, I think the most significant challenges will come from outside the field—from a society that is becoming more distrustful of science and scientists and from lobbying and legislation that restrict the nature of the questions scientists can ask and the knowledge they can communicate. Psychologists require the cooperation and faith of the surrounding community to do their best work. An experience I had about 20 years ago made this really clear to me. I and a cognitive psychologist at another institution had our National Institutes of Health grants defunded by Congress as a result of an amendment that one representative attached to a Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill. With APA’s support, we visited various Congressional offices to talk about the importance of peer review and the research itself. Ultimately, the funding for both grants was restored in conference committee. This happened because the broader academic community joined together and people in Congress with the power to remove the amendment listened to our community. This required our community to trust in the process, and it required Congress to trust in our community and science in general.

When I think about what is happening in the world right now and look to the future, I see gaining and then retaining the trust of our collective community as the field’s most important and likely ongoing challenge. This is not an easy challenge to navigate, because a lot of forces are operating that we cannot control. But that does not change the fact that the communities that surround us need to trust us to participate in our research and support our research with their tax dollars. I do not have a magic bullet for gaining and keeping their trust, but I think our field is well positioned to figure this out. Applying our theories and methods to understand issues that meaningfully affect people’s lives and making sure we communicate the answers to those questions in ways that are respectful of people’s divergent perspectives and shared humanity, accessible to nonexperts, and sensitive to the limitations of our methods and samples seems like a good place to start in strengthening community trust.

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process?

Yes, my team and I have worked to fine-tune the excellent traditions set by our predecessors by instituting changes to both the submission and the review guidelines. With our new submission guidelines, we are hoping to recalibrate people’s mindsets about what a JPSP: IRGP submission should look like. Because of JPSP’s reputation as a highly competitive journal, it is easy for authors to fall into the trap of using the number of studies as a heuristic to judge whether a manuscript is ready to submit to the journal or appropriate for publication in the journal. We think this has contributed to “study creep,” such that the length and number of studies in JPSP: IRGP submissions have become unmanageable for authors, reviewers, and readers alike. In talking to students and colleagues over the years, I have found that many people have given up trying to publish in JPSP because they feel like the process is too punishing and the formula for the perfect JPSP: IRGP article is too unattainable. I have also had conversations where people have revealed that they did not send something they were really excited about to JPSP: IRGP because they did not think they had enough of the right kind of studies to be competitive.

My team and I are hoping that rather than using the number of studies as a heuristic to gauge whether they have enough for a JPSP: IRGP submission, authors will put the innovativeness and generativity of their ideas first in deciding whether their work should be submitted to JPSP: IRGP. We also hope authors will think about whether they have found support for their hypotheses using more than one method, including methods that are grounded in real-world processes. I would like to see researchers move away from testing hypotheses only through vignette- or scenario-based studies conducted with online samples. Although such studies can be valuable, asking people to imagine how they think they might behave in response to a completely hypothetical scenario or event is unlikely to reveal enough about how people actually behave in such situations. These types of studies provide a piece of the puzzle, but interpersonal and intergroup relationships are complex, and researchers are going to need to get in the weeds a bit by doing research in real-world, messy contexts to truly understand them. Reflecting this philosophy, our editorial team will weigh the difficulty of testing the hypothesis test when evaluating submissions, recognizing that more rigorous (e.g., experiment vs. correlational study), behavioral, and time-intensive methodologies may yield compelling conclusions with fewer than five studies. That is, all else being equal, we will prioritize the quality over the quantity of the studies.

In terms of submission guidelines, I would like to highlight the following changes (which are spelled out in more detail in the submission guidelines found on the JPSP webpage). We have made these changes because we want submitting to JPSP: IRGP to feel like an attainable goal, and we want the articles published in this section to be read and gain the attention they deserve.

First, we are now limiting the number of studies reported in the manuscript text to a maximum of five (with any other studies reported in the supplemental materials). By capping the number of studies authors can report in the main text, we hope to make it easier for members of our field to read and enjoy more articles, widening the section’s reach. We also hope to encourage scholars who are using more immersive and time-intensive methodologies that limit the number of studies that can be run to submit to the journal.

Second, we are limiting the total word count for all introductory and discussion sections to no more than 5,000 words. We hope this will increase the number of people who will ultimately read an article, broadening the impact of the published work.

Third, we are encouraging authors to write their Results sections so that they are accessible to readers with general statistical expertise. We suggest relying on figures and explanatory text to communicate the findings and relegating any more complex and detailed justification of the statistical methods to tables, notes, or supplemental materials. We would also like authors to prioritize integrative analyses across data sets and meta-analyses.

Fourth, we would like authors to discuss salient alternative explanations for the reported findings. Alternative explanations may include questions of construct validity (e.g., an alternative conceptualization of the meaning of a manipulation or measure), alternative or additional mechanisms or mediators, or alternative causal models.

Fifth, we would like authors to acknowledge (a) points of theoretical connection or disconnection to related theories and (b) how readily the findings may generalize to nonstudied populations.

In terms of review guidelines, we have also made some changes that we hope will ease reviewer burden and afford greater transparency about editorial decisions.

First, we are very actively triaging submissions. The associate editor and I have already vetted the submissions we send out to reviewers, so reviewers will be investing time in evaluating only those submissions that stand a reasonable chance of being published in the journal. Second, whenever possible, the action editor will render decisions about revised manuscripts without soliciting further or new reviews. If the editor needs additional consultation, such consultation will generally be sought from the most appropriate of the original reviewers.

Second, we have introduced a branch reviewing structure that we hope will streamline the process for reviewers and make editorial decisions clearer for editors and authors alike. As a first step, we are asking reviewers to evaluate and describe whether the submission’s underlying ideas capture interest and imagination for their high potential to make an innovative and generative contribution. In making this judgment, reviewers are to consider just the theory or ideas, not the strength of the studies or the data. As is the case with JPSP: ASC, we explicitly tell reviewers that submissions can make innovative theoretical contributions in numerous ways, including but not limited to (a) developing a new theory and offering evidence to support it, (b) using an existing theory to explain a new phenomenon, (c) making novel connections between two theories to address new questions, (d) using an existing theory to integrate previously unconnected phenomena, (e) providing a new mechanistic explanation for established phenomena, (f) conceptualizing moderators that explain conflicting predictions in the literature or reveal the conditions under which an established phenomenon occurs, (g) introducing new elements to a theory that failed to explain a phenomenon, and (h) introducing a new theoretical construct and demonstrating its importance.

The content of the remainder of the review then depends on the reviewers’ answer to the question of whether the submission makes an innovative contribution. If the answer to the innovation question is no, then we ask reviewers to explain why the submission falls short of the bar for JPSP: IRGP consideration and to comment on any major methodological limitations the editor or authors should consider. If the answer to the innovation question is yes or probably yes, then we ask reviewers to thoroughly evaluate the persuasiveness or sufficiency of the theoretical justification, studies, and data. That is, we ask reviewers to (a) identify the submission’s strengths and (b) identify and categorize its limitations as central or peripheral. Central limitations are ones that authors must address for the studies and data to be interpretable (e.g., incorrect analyses, confounds, missing literature, unclear justifications). Peripheral limitations are ones that authors could address to make already compelling studies and data unassailable, providing the proverbial icing on an already well-executed cake.

Our team will be willing to extend an “accept with revision” invitation on the first round of reviews if reviewers identify the submission as sufficiently innovative and having no central limitations. We will extend a “revise and resubmit” invitation only when central limitations can be addressed using the existing studies and data. We will decline submissions that require new studies or data to address central limitations. However—and this is really important—authors can submit manuscripts with new studies or data that remedy central limitations in rejected submissions. Our decision letters will make our level of enthusiasm about seeing a new submission clear to the authors.

Our hope is that these guidelines will make it easier for reviewers to structure their comments and for editors to render transparent decisions. My team and I see ourselves as ambassadors for the field, and we are really excited to be in the position to help showcase our field’s best ideas and methods. Please submit!