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Civil Discourse In A Social Media Era | Webster Kirkwood Times | timesnewspapers.com Webster-Kirkwood Times, Inc.
Don’t try to change someone else’s mind. Instead, help them find their own motivation to change.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of having an argument with the most stubborn person I know. R., whose initial I’m using to protect his privacy, is a longtime friend, and when his family came to visit, he mentioned that his children had never been vaccinated — and never would be.
I’m no proponent of blindly giving every vaccination to every newborn, but I was concerned for his children’s safety, so I started debunking some common vaccine myths. After days of debate, I was exhausted and exasperated. Determined to preserve our friendship, I vowed never to talk with him about vaccines again.
Then came 2020. Fear of the vaccine may be the greatest barrier to stopping Covid-19. It stretches far beyond the so-called anti-vaxxer community: About half of Americans harbor questions about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines; 39 percent say they definitely or probably won’t get one.
I decided to see if I could open R.’s mind to the possibility. What I didn’t realize was that my mind would be opened as well.
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent the past few years studying how to motivate people to think again. I’ve run experiments that led proponents of gun rights and gun safety to abandon some of their mutual animosity, and I even got Yankees fans to let go of their grudges against Red Sox supporters. But I don’t always practice what I teach.
When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.”
When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.
That’s what happened with my friend. If I wanted him to rethink his blanket resistance to vaccines, I had to rethink my approach.
Several decades ago, when treating substance abuse problems, psychologists developed a technique called motivational interviewing. The central premise: Instead of trying to force other people to change, you’re better off helping them find their own intrinsic motivation to change. You do that by interviewing them — asking open-ended questions and listening carefully — and holding up a mirror so they can see their own thoughts more clearly. If they express a desire to change, you guide them toward a plan.
Say you’re a student at Hogwarts, and you want to help your uncle reject Voldemort. You might start like this:
You: I’d love to better understand your feelings about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Uncle: Well, he’s the most powerful wizard alive. Also, his followers promised me a fancy title.
You: Interesting. Is there anything you dislike about him?
Uncle: Hmm. I’m not crazy about all the murdering.
You: Well, nobody’s perfect. What’s stopped you from abandoning him?
Uncle: I’m afraid he might direct the murdering toward me.
You: That’s a reasonable fear — I’ve felt it too. Are there any principles that matter so deeply to you that you’d be willing to take that risk?
In controlled trials, motivational interviewing has helped people to stop smoking, abusing drugs and alcohol, and gambling; to improve their diets and exercise; to overcome eating disorders; and to lose weight. The approach has also motivated students to get a good night’s sleep; voters to reconsider their prejudices; and divorcing parents to reach settlements.
Recently, thanks to a vaccine whisperer, it has been applied to immunization. Arnaud Gagneur is a pediatrician in Quebec who encourages reluctant parents to immunize their children. In his experiments, a motivational interview in the maternity ward after birth increased the number of mothers willing to vaccinate their children from 72 percent to 87 percent; the number of children who were fully vaccinated two years later rose by 9 percent. A single conversation was enough to change behavior over the next 24 months.
I set up a conversation between Dr. Gagneur and my friend. After 90 minutes, it was clear to me that R.’s vaccination stance had not changed.
“I have tried to apply all the principles of motivational interviewing, but I have had the unpleasant feeling of not doing so well,” Dr. Gagneur wrote to me in email. “R. is very knowledgeable and always ends up finding arguments that support his decision.”
Strangely, I didn’t feel defeated or irritated. I wanted to learn how my friend’s views could evolve.
The pioneers of motivational interviewing, William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, have long warned against using the technique to manipulate people. It requires a genuine desire to understand people's motivations and help them reach their goals. Although R. and I both want to keep his children healthy, I realized I had never tried to understand his perspective on vaccines before. So the next morning, I called him.
In our past debates, R. had focused only on the potential downsides of vaccinations. With Dr. Gagneur, though, he acknowledged that vaccines could be good for some but not necessarily for others. If he lived in a country experiencing an outbreak of, say, malaria, would he consider immunization? “You weigh the pros and cons,” he said.
Psychologists find that when we listen carefully and call attention to the nuances in people’s own thinking, they become less extreme and more open in their views. I wondered how my friend’s ambivalence applied to Covid, and I knew that the kinds of questions I asked would matter. Social scientists have found that asking people how their preferred political policies might work in practice, rather than asking why they favor those approaches, was more effective in opening their minds. As people struggled to explain their ideal tax legislation or health care plan, they grasped the complexity of the problem and recognized gaps in their knowledge.
So for my second attempt, instead of asking R. why he was opposed to Covid vaccines, I asked him how he would stop the pandemic. He said we couldn’t put all our eggs in one basket — we needed a stronger focus on prevention and treatment. When I asked whether vaccines would be part of his strategy, he said yes — for some people.
I was eager to learn what might lead R. to decide that he is one of those people. In motivational interviewing, there’s a distinction between sustain talk and change talk. Sustain talk is commentary about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is referencing a desire, ability or commitment to making a shift. A skilled motivational interviewer listens for change talk and asks people to elaborate on it. This was my third step.
I asked R. what the odds were that he would get a Covid vaccine. He said they were “pretty low for many different reasons.” I told him it was fascinating to me that he didn’t say zero.
“This is not a black-and-white issue,” R. said. “I don’t know, because my views change.” I laughed: “This is a milestone — the most stubborn person I know admits that he’s willing to change his mind?” He laughed too: “No, I’m still the most stubborn person you know! But at different stages of our lives, we have different things that are important to us, right?”
I don’t expect R. or his children to be vaccinated any time soon, but it felt like progress that he agreed to keep an open mind. The real breakthrough, though, was mine. I became open to a new mode of conversation, with no points to score and no debate to win. The only victory I declared was against my own prosecutor tendencies. I had prevailed over my inner logic bully.
Many people believe that to stop a deadly pandemic, the end justifies whatever means are necessary. It’s worth remembering that the means are a measure of our character. If we succeed in opening minds, the question is not only whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.
I no longer believe it’s my place to change anyone’s mind. All I can do is try to understand their thinking and ask if they’re open to some rethinking. The rest is up to them.
Adam Grant (@adammgrant) is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School and the author of “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know,” from which parts of this article are adapted. His research focuses on motivation, generosity and creativity.
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Think dealing with Mitch McConnell will be tough? Managing a reckless Xi Jinping will be even harder.
The first thing to say is that a war with China probably won’t happen.
Yet if it does, it might begin in an obscure place few have heard of, like Pratas or Kinmen Islands. Both are controlled by Taiwan but are closer to China, and some Chinese and Americans alike worry that Chinese President Xi Jinping might invade one island or the other to pressure Taiwan.
Or Xi might send a submarine to snip undersea cables that carry the internet to Taiwan, or he could impede oil deliveries to Taiwan, or he might order a cyberattack to bring down Taiwan’s banking system.
Most experts don’t believe that such an assault is likely (an all-out invasion of Taiwan is even less probable), but it is a considerably greater risk than it had been for decades. And what began on Pratas or Kinmen wouldn’t end there: The United States would most likely be drawn into perhaps the most dangerous confrontation with another nuclear power since the Cuban missile crisis.
So while we try to calm partisan “warfare” in Washington, let’s work harder to prevent an actual international shooting war in Asia. The coming years represent the greatest risks since I began covering U.S.-China relations in the 1980s, partly because Xi is an overconfident, risk-taking bully who believes that the United States is in decline.
“I think it’s unlikely that there’ll be a military confrontation there, but I don’t rule it out,” said Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That seems right to me — but I also worry that we’re wrong. Few expected Xi to pick fights with India on their shared border, as he has several times in the past year, and heaven help us if he is similarly reckless toward Taiwan and sparks a war with the United States.
Dealing with Mitch McConnell will be a piece of cake for President Biden compared with dealing with Xi. Biden’s challenge will be to constrain a Chinese leader who has been oppressive in Hong Kong, genocidal in the Xinjiang region, obdurate on trade, ruthless on human rights and insincere on everything, while still cooperating with China on issues like climate change, fentanyl and North Korea (which many experts expect to resume missile launches this year). Oh, and we don’t have a China strategy.
I’m just not sure we’re up to this task.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has, rightly, signaled that he will continue what he called Donald Trump’s “tougher approach” toward China, albeit adding human rights concerns and working with allies to make the toughness more effective. Still, Republicans see China policy as a vulnerability for this administration, with some ridiculing “Beijing Biden,” and Senator Ted Cruz denouncing “Team Biden’s embrace of the Chinese Communist Party.”
That’s nonsense, for Biden has recruited an excellent, tough-minded team of Asia experts, but the criticisms reflect a hardening toward Beijing across the political spectrum that leaves little room for diplomacy. That makes me nervous.
I was in Tiananmen Square when Chinese troops opened fire on protesters in 1989, and I have had more Chinese friends imprisoned than I can count. I have no illusions about Beijing. But I worry that two trains are rushing toward each other, for several reasons:
We Americans have a pattern of exaggerating threats. We fixated at various times on Nasserism, Southeast Asian dominoes and “Japan as No. 1.” In retrospect, these fears had some basis but were too simplistic; let’s not repeat that mistake in the case of China.
We should bring a dose of humility to our discussions of China. The criticisms of Xi are deserved, but it’s also true that an infant born in Beijing today has a longer life expectancy (82 years) than a baby born in Washington (78). China badly bungled its initial handling of the coronavirus outbreak, but then moved heaven and earth to halt the virus and save hundreds of thousands of lives. China is a complex and contradictory place, not a caricature.
Let’s distinguish between Xi and China, criticizing the former without demonizing the latter. Senior Chinese officials and their family members in private denounce Xi to me in scathing terms (one told me a few days ago that Xi is “a crazy person”). So we should avoid insulting the entire country and forcing officials to rally around their leader.
Biden needs to manage Xi and reduce the risk of war without pulling his punches: Biden should denounce cultural genocide in Xinjiang but not seek a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Olympics, and he should strengthen ties with Taiwan but not gratuitously poke Xi in the eye. We can send Army Green Berets to train with Taiwan armed forces without releasing video of the training, as the Trump administration did. We can also work with China to reduce the risk of accidents and escalation.
“We learned with the Soviet Union how to keep the Cold War cold,” noted David Shambaugh, a George Washington University scholar and author of several excellent books on U.S.-China relations. He suggests dusting off the Cold War toolbox to see whether arms control agreements, hotlines and military-to-military consultations can lower temperatures.
“We’re in really dangerous waters now,” Shambaugh noted.
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The proposal would diminish the building’s role as a symbol of American democracy.
The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, said on Thursday that Congress must build permanent fences around the Capitol. The impulse is understandable: Ms. Pittman got the job after her predecessor failed to stop the Jan. 6 attack on the building by supporters of former President Donald Trump. However, the proposal must be weighed against the public interest. There are important reasons to find other ways of protecting the Capitol.
Washington, D.C., is the seat and symbol of American democracy. Its great buildings, most of all the Capitol, are manifestations of the nation’s power and prosperity and of its peculiar form of government: of the people, by the people and for the people.
The Capitol complex is a place where Americans can go to watch their representatives, to speak with those representatives, to petition for the redress of grievances.
The building and its grounds also are part of the fabric of the city. Streams of bikers pass through on morning and evening commutes. Tourists gather for concerts on the lawn. When it snows, the front face of Capitol Hill becomes a popular sledding spot, with neighborhood children sometimes transforming discarded protest signs into makeshift sleds.
This is not just an amenity for neighbors and visitors. It is the tangible manifestation of the idea that the government is a part of American life, rather than something separate and apart.
In recent decades, while much of the federal government was encased in layers of security fencing, bollards and concrete barriers, Congress largely resisted the trend. The Capitol’s defenses were strengthened, but it remained possible for members of the public to walk the grounds and to pose for pictures on the front steps.
After the Jan. 6 attack, though, temporary fencing was hastily installed around the Capitol and the surrounding congressional office buildings — a tall black barrier topped with loops of razor wire and patrolled by armed troops. It has transformed the Capitol into a symbol of the nation’s fears.
The attack on the Capitol is sobering evidence of the need for stronger measures to protect members of Congress and the work of government. It cannot be dismissed as an aberration. But a permanent barrier is an inappropriate corrective.
The attack on the Capitol could have been prevented or mitigated in severity by the timely deployment of an adequate number of police officers and National Guard troops — in effect, a temporary barrier. Any similar threats in the future can and should be met in the same manner. The basic failure was one of policing. It was not a failure of architecture.
The poet Robert Frost had it right when he wrote, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out/And to whom I was like to give offense.” A wall would create a symbolic barrier between Congress and all of the American people, not just the minority that is unwilling to accept and obey the rules of the republic.
By taking down the temporary fencing around the Capitol as soon as possible, and by pursuing other measures to ensure the security of the building and all those who enter it, Congress can restore its full splendor as a symbol of American democracy.
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Community Voices: Our national discourse needs to improve SW News Media
An often-overlooked free resource available to employers and practitioners, the Department of Labor’s opinion letters provide guidance to interpret federal wage and hour law. However, just as the Obama administration placed the practice of issuing opinion letters on hold during a seven-year window, many have speculated the Biden Department of Labor (DOL) will again end the practice. Doing so would deprive courts, employers, employees, unions, trade groups, practitioners, and the public at large of an invaluable resource. This article aims to provide a brief overview of what opinion letters are and the history behind them, how they provide a valuable resource, and why the Biden DOL should continue the practice.
What Are Opinion Letters And Why Are They Valuable?
The DOL Wage and Hour Division’s practice of issuing opinion letters regulations began in 1938, at the inception of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Those who have attempted to interpret the FLSA and apply the law and regulations to the modern workplace know this is not always an easy task. In some ways, the FLSA is antiquated when applied to different business models that did not exist and could not be contemplated 80 years ago.
Unfortunately, there is an inherent presumption that if an employer can run a business, they should know and understand how to apply this complicated body of law. This is particularly problematic when you consider that small businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees) make up 99% of the U.S. businesses and employ about 47% of private sector employees. 98% of small businesses have fewer than 100 employees; 89% have fewer than 20. Laws and regulations that are often passed and developed with the large employer in mind do not contemplate the level of legal sophistication required to administer them and the impact on small employers.
The reality is that the FLSA is murky, filled with potential pitfalls, and often fails to provide clear answers. As a shining light in this darkness, the DOL website describes opinion letters as “official written explanations of what the FLSA or the FMLA requires in fact-specific situations” and “serve as a means by which the public can develop a clearer understanding of what FLSA and FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] compliance entails.”
Put simply, if an employer, or anyone for that matter, has a compliance question under the FLSA or the FMLA that is not addressed clearly in the existing regulations, the employer can ask the DOL for guidance. In response, the DOL may provide official written explanations of the intent and application of the law under the facts presented by the employer. The DOL exercises discretion in determining which requests for opinion letters it responds to and which type of opinion letter it will issue in response.
Generally, the DOL is less likely to respond to a run-of-the-mill issue or answer questions which may be found in prior opinion letters, existing regulations, field guidance or case law. Whereas the agency is more likely to issue opinion letters in response to new or hot-topic issues or nuanced questions to which it has not previously provided clear and unambiguous guidance. Additionally, the DOL will not provide opinion letters in response to requests that “raise questions about current open compliance evaluations or ongoing litigation in which the requester is involved.” In providing the written response, the DOL also will publish the opinion letter so others can use it as guidance in similar situations.
Additionally, if an employer is investigated or sued under the FLSA (or FMLA) but relied on a DOL opinion letter in developing the disputed practice, that employer may have an affirmative good faith defense to liability. Put simply, if an opinion letter applies and an employer relied upon the opinion in good faith, that employer may get a “pass” even if a court, or the DOL, later determines the opinion was incorrect. Therefore, opinion letters have been widely used for decades and serve not only to limit liability, but perhaps more importantly, provide employers assurance that their pay practices are consistent with the nuanced provisions of the FLSA.
2010 – 2017: When The DOL Abandoned The Practice In Favor Of “Administrator Interpretations”
The practice of issuing opinion letters continued for over 70 years until it was temporarily suspended by the Obama administration from 2010 to 2017. In support of ending the practice, the DOL contended that it was not an efficient or productive use of its resources to “provide definitive opinion letters in response to fact-specific requests submitted by individuals and organizations, where a slight difference in the facts may result in a different outcome.” Likewise, in 2015, a DOL administrator defended its cessation of the practice, claiming opinion letters were somehow neither “transparent” nor “fair” in light of their fact-specific nature.
Instead, the DOL chose to issue “Administrator Interpretations,” which require fewer resources and provide broad guidance on a topic to the public at large, as opposed to specific guidance tailored to an individual situation. However, Administrator Interpretations failed to prove a viable replacement for opinion letters, whether viewed in terms of content or the nature or number topics addressed. Opinion letters may be requested by anyone, at any time, for any issue. In contrast, Administrator Interpretations only are issued when “it is determined, in the Administrator’s discretion, that further clarity regarding the proper interpretation of a statutory or regulatory issue is appropriate.”
During the practice’s seven-year hiatus, the DOL issued only seven Administrator Interpretations. By comparison, the DOL issued 318 opinion letters between 2003 and 2009. This sharp decline in regulatory guidance essentially left employers, employees, practitioners, and others stranded in limbo on several important issues for nearly a decade, even though compliance questions and issues of interpretation neither fell in number nor become less complex or important.
Ironically, the very first Administrator Interpretation issued in 2010 cited and relied upon opinion letters from prior administrations. This illustrates that, despite the nature of opinion letters as focusing on particular facts, situations, employers, employees, or industries, they provide far-reaching guidance on a broad range of analogous situations, even if an issue at hand was not addressed specifically or the opinion letter was issued many years prior. This is perhaps why the DOL maintains opinion letters on its website stretching back to 2001 and employers, employees, and practitioners alike continue to reference opinion letters when current disputes arise, even where there are no opinion letters precisely on-point or the opinion was issued decades prior.
Unfounded Criticism
Following the seven-year hiatus, the Trump administration breathed new light into the practice, issuing 69 opinion letters since resuming in 2018. These letters addressed a wide range of topics – from broad gig economy questions to narrow guidance on which types of compensation should be factored into the regular rate for an overtime calculation. However, the value and practicality of DOL Wage and Hour Division opinion letters has remained a hotly debated issue.
Criticism of opinion letters from those outside of the DOL itself are based on faulty understanding on the process and purpose of opinion letters. For example, some believe DOL opinion letters apply only to the specific facts and situations presented in the letter, exist to mostly serve the interests of employers, or are simply incorrect. However, these aspersions could not be further from the truth.
Opinion letters may be requested by and serve the interest of everyone, providing guidance on the FLSA’s boundaries, implications, requirements, and prohibitions in innumerable situations. Although opinion letter topics generally are raised by a specific person or entity, many of the situations they present have broad applicability to a range of employers. The benefit of receiving clarification of issues arising under a less than straightforward law is shared by all, and the FLSA's aims are best served when all affected by the law understand what the rules are and how to comply.
Frankly, if the law and regulations were clearly written, there would be no need for the additional sources of guidance. The reality is, however, the facts make the law walk and talk. Absent opinion letters, the resources provided by the DOL (such as its Fact Sheets and Field Operations Handbook) leave a lot to be desired in providing clarity in the more complicated fact patterns.
The Final Opinion On DOL Opinion Letters
President Biden recently tapped Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to head the DOL. Upon Walsh’s nomination, Fisher Phillips forecasted that the Biden/Walsh DOL would “rescind several Trump administration letters covering a wide range of topics, including certain employees’ exempt status, determining non-exempt employees’ hours worked, and calculating the regular rate for overtime purposes.” This was according to Matt Simpson, a member of the firm’s Wage and Hour Law Practice Group. His words were prescient. The Biden DOL made quick work to make this prediction come true on January 26, revoking three opinion letters on independent contracting and tip-pooling rules that were published in the Trump administration’s final hours.
Whether this move is a signal that the Biden-era DOL will once again decline to issue opinion letters remains to be seen. After all, Walsh has not yet even assumed leadership of the agency, so it may be premature to speculate about whether early administration actions fall in line with his thinking. However, no one in the employment law community would be surprised if we learn soon after Walsh’s confirmation that opinion letters are once again shelved for the foreseeable future.
Since their inception, DOL opinion letters have proved an invaluable resource. The new administration should welcome any practice that is designed to provide clarity on complicated laws like the FLSA and foster broad compliance therewith. Opinion letters do just that and are well-worth the DOL’s efforts. It’s a win-win-win for employers, employees, and the government. We urge the new administration to continue to use of opinion letters, recognizing the benefit outweighs any burden on agency resources.
This opinion was written in response to “Opinion: Peer Review Study Compromises Response to Gender Bias”In January, Science Advances published a massive project analyzing the peer-review outcomes of 350,000 manuscripts from 145 journals that found no evidence of gender bias following manuscript submission. Just a month earlier, my colleagues and I published in mBio a similar, though smaller-scale, study that analyzed the peer-review outcomes from 108,000 manuscript submissions to 13 American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journals. Our study found a consistent trend for manuscripts submitted by women corresponding authors to receive more negative outcomes than those submitted by men. Both projects analyzed six years’ worth of submission data that are only available to journal publishers but came to different conclusions. |
Estimating possible sources of gender inequalities in peer review and editorial processes at scholarly journals is a difficult endeavor for various reasons. There are serious obstacles to solid, cross-journal experimental studies testing causal hypotheses by manipulating information and contexts of manuscripts, authors, and referees. So performing retrospective studies is the only option, and this is also far from simple due to the lack of a data-sharing infrastructure between publishers and journals. While this makes any generalization of findings problematic and limited, I believe it is essential to study peer review with large-scale, cross-journal data, to avoid overemphasizing individual cases. This is what we have tried to do in our recent Science Advances article.
While we knew our findings could be controversial, I am surprised by the way Ada Hagan has misinterpreted our research and would like to comment on the three points on which she based her opinion.
The lack of randomization in journal selection is a weakness of our study, but we never claimed to have followed a randomized sampling strategy. Moreover, the size, distribution, and quality of our dataset is unprecedented, and the use of different statistical models on the same dataset increased the rigor and robustness of our analysis. Previous research of this type was only performed on single journals or a small cohort of similar journals, and never at such a cross-domain scale. It is also important to note that the decision to restrict our sample only to journals indexed by Web of Science was to ensure comparability and avoid adding further controls to our models (e.g., to account for potential differences in editorial and peer review standards). This meant that we excluded a small number of journals, but these did not affect the distribution of journals by research area, and therefore our dataset included a broad representation of scientific journals. I will also point out that small-scale studies claiming to have found unequivocal traces of gender inequalities were never accused of being based on a non-randomized, representative journal sample, despite clearly being limited to only one or a few journals under review.
I do agree with Hagan that we could not reconstruct the fate of rejected manuscripts later resubmitted elsewhere to estimate whether women were delayed in the publication process by multiple rejections. However, this would require a dataset covering thousands of journals from multiple publishers—something impossible to reach. We did control for the round of reviews—i.e., whether reviewers and editors were more demanding in case of manuscripts by women—and found no significant negative effects. Moreover, I believe that the decision of starting from individual manuscripts—rather than aggregate gender groups, as many previous studies, including Hagan’s, have done—allowed us to control for any confounders on which we had data, while estimating the effect of authors’ gender in all steps of the peer review process.
This is a good point. We had data on desk rejections only on a sub-sample of journals, due to the fact that some manuscript submission systems recorded this information while others did not, and we reported on this in the preprint version of the paper published in February 2020. The results suggested that manuscripts with a higher proportion of women among authors had a lower chance of being desk rejected in health/medicine and social science journals, while they had a higher chance of being desk rejected in physical science journals. We originally included this analysis in the manuscript, but reviewers suggested to remove it as the focus of our study was on peer review.
In conclusion, we did not claim to study all the sources of inequalities and bias that affect women in academia, and indeed, we have contextualized our findings in the conclusions to avoid any misinterpretation. Our goal was to find traces of bias against women in the way peer review treats manuscripts submitted in a sample of journals from various research areas. In the end, we found no evidence of such bias. We should, in my opinion, continue to do our best to publish rigorous studies—even if controversial. As scientists, at the end of the day we believe in the power of evidence.
Flaminio Squazzoni is professor of Sociology at the University of Milan, Italy, where he leads the BEHAVE Lab. From 2014 to 2018, he chaired a large-scale EU project on peer review (PEERE).
Nearly one year into the pandemic, California’s infection rate has risen to one of the worst in the world, with health care systems in major hubs such as San Diego and Los Angeles fast approaching capacity.
At the same time — and in some of the very same areas — another public health crisis is readying itself to overwhelm the Golden State. There’s a mental health epidemic occurring within this pandemic, and early evidence shows that California is at risk of losing more lives to preventable causes — overdose and suicide deaths — if this dual crisis continues unchecked.
Not long after our battle with COVID-19 began, it was predicted that because of the novel virus, the state of California could see 10,509 additional deaths of despair — and that’s under a moderate economic recovery scenario. In 2018, there were more than 18,500.
Unfortunately, looking at data from San Diego, the state seems to be on track to meet that tragic statistic. In 2019, monthly deaths linked to opioids in San Diego were around 28 per 100,000 people. When the pandemic first peaked from March 2020-June 2020, monthly deaths linked to opioids in San Diego jumped up to the 36-43 range per 100,000 people.
The good news is that together, California residents, business leaders and policymakers can make sure the state doesn’t bear witness to that tragic number. By learning from what has not worked during this pandemic and embracing a strategy similar to what COVID requires — all of us playing a role — we can prevent additional deaths of despair.
Step one is deceptively simple. It involves taking an inward look at ourselves, assessing our own feelings and actions in response to them and being unafraid to ask for help if we need it. There are websites that offer screening tools like those at Mental Health America. In addition, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the Substance Abuse and Mental Help Services Administration Helpline both provide free and confidential support from licensed mental health professionals, while California’s Mental Health Services Division offers programs for children and adults throughout the state.
Step two is checking in on our friends and our families. If we lead by example, they may feel comfortable enough to talk to us about how they’re having a hard time. If they don’t, but we see them exhibiting warning signs such as mood changes or increased substance misuse, we need to let them know that it’s OK to be anything but OK, that they are not alone, and that help is out there.
Step three calls on local business leaders — especially those at companies the rest of the world watches, such as Twitter, Google and Facebook. Google has already made progress toward mental health by destigmatizing conversations with its Blue Dot program, and if they and others continue to be open and honest about mental well-being and look out for signs of struggle in their employees, we could potentially connect thousands of people to the care they need.
Business leaders can further by making sure their health benefits cover services for mental and substance use disorders. This key will unlock tremendous mental health improvements in the persistent absence of federal enforcement for existing mental health parity laws. Herein lies step four, which falls on policymakers’ shoulders.
California policymakers already have a head start compared to the rest of the nation. They recently passed SB 855, which expands coverage by requiring insurers to make medical necessity determinations consistent with generally accepted standards of behavioral health care. Now, they must continue to push for legislation that makes the treatment of mental health and physical health truly equal in their communities.
The threat of despair in California is real. However, mental health has had victories here, and so long as Californians work together, the state can be successful in preventing its next public health crisis.
Benjamin F. Miller is the chief strategy officer for Oakland-based Well Being Trust and an advisory board member of Inseparable, two of the nation’s leading mental health organizations.
