Value Neutrality and<i>SPSSI</i>: The Quest for Policy, Purity, and Legitimacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I describe how the problem of “value neutrality” remained a central issue for SPSSI from the founding of the organization to the 1960s, as SPSSI leaders worked to maintain legitimacy in both scientific and public spheres. In 1930s psychology, notions of objectivity and political neutrality were intertwined in ways that produced substantial debate over SPSSI's aims. Under pressures from anticommunism and changes in public and private funding for research, the problem of neutrality intensified by the 1950s. In this new climate, the need to demonstrate value neutrality was a powerful constraint on the ability of SPSSI to respond to resurgent scientized racism after the Supreme Court Brown decision.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".