What are the biggest problems/challenges for society that psychology should seek to solve right now?
One of the defining issues we will face in the coming years is the intergenerational reproduction of inequality in wealth and opportunity between groups and individuals, both within and between nations. Developmental psychology has a particularly important role to play because we can show the world how young people can, under some circumstances, develop in ways that reproduce inequalities — for instance, by forming essentialist or system-justifying beliefs — and under other circumstances, how young people can plan an active role in addressing social injustices they perceive or experience. Our field can also demonstrate the effects of inequalities on young people’s outcomes. Upward and downward social comparison, after all, is a subjective, psychological phenomenon; one that will only grow in importance as technology makes it easier than ever to compare our own circumstances to those of outliers. I’m excited to see the methods and theories from developmental psychology contributing to our understanding of inequality and hopefully to better-functioning societies.
What advice would you give someone starting out an academic position?
The main thing I would emphasize is that it’s important to continue to rely on mentors for writing and research and strategy. There’s sometimes a tendency to think that just because you have your PhD, that means you’re ready to do everything alone or to worry that you won’t be seen as independent if you work with senior people. But my perspective is that if the goal is to do the best science that we can, then why not have lots of people’s expertise contributing to the work? It does take work and planning to construct a group of mentors that can give you different kinds of expertise, whether it’s how to create a stable flow of grants or how to do an interdisciplinary project or how to do a new statistical technique. So, my advice is to seek out diverse people who can join your team and invest in keeping them engaged and collaborating with you.
The more minor thing is to fully invest in creating strong database and syntax archiving practices, especially using tidyverse/Rstudio, that will work for your style of research. Once you’re on the rush to tenure, it’s hard to change your routines.
What do you think is a current challenge for graduate students?
I think it’s hard to discern which of the methodological changes that the field seems to be going through regarding openness, replication and reproducibility are lasting improvements and which are fads that won’t work out and to do so at a time when people are increasingly critiquing work on the basis of in-process criteria on Twitter or blogs. This makes it hard to know what practices to invest in, in terms of developing your own skills or how to place your papers in the journals, and it creates a lot of worry about how your work will be publicly perceived even after publication, since the field hasn’t settled on workable standards yet. This is hard to manage while also making novel contributions to theory.
What do you wish you had more time to do?
We have three kids age eight and under, so there are a million things. I love teaching my kids stuff, like new games or about bugs or how to play a sport, and I wish we had more time to do that. I also wish I had more time to read and re-read classical texts, the foundations of Western intellectual history and some more contemporary philosophy of science.
Professionally, I wish I had more time to spend on data visualization and more time to learn advanced programming skills in R so I could write better functions. I’d also like to have the time to write better prose.
What are some ways that you strive for work-life balance?
This question is hilarious. I’m writing this on a Sunday morning.
What is something you did not know but wish you knew when you started your career?
I wish I knew how to use the resources at my university to create a sustainable infrastructure to support our work. I now know which colleagues to ask for advice and which aspects of our (fabulous) Population Research Center at UT can support my work. But I did a lot of work for my grant proposals and subcontracts, etc., on my own initially and that was unsustainable.
Was there a particular piece of advice you received that really has stuck with you/helped you make decisions along the way?
Jim Stigler at the University of California-Los Angeles, also a McCandless winner, once told me this: “David, there are three things. It doesn’t matter what they are, but there are always three.” It’s great advice. I try to use this advice: (1) in talks, (2) in papers and (3) in casual conversation.
What advice do you have for how to effectively balance research, teaching and service?
My advice is to find teaching or service that “counts twice.” When I first got to UT, I got asked by the vice-provost to contribute to some of the student success initiatives. We ended up doing an RCT to evaluate a freshman-orientation intervention, and that turned into great data that we eventually published. For teaching, I got advice from Ron Dahl, a neuroscientist at Berkeley. I asked him how I could learn a new sub-field to improve my research, specifically about pubertal hormones. He said, “Teach or co-teach a class.” It was good advice. For two semesters, I taught a PhD seminar where I worked with a terrific group of PhD students. We learned new content, taught it to each other and tried to build a shared understanding of the field. Then with a few of those students, Melanie Netter and Fortunato Medrano, we developed a new, advanced undergraduate class, which we just taught for two semesters. This has given us a ton of research ideas.