Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese.
The article, “The development of Tibetan children’s racial bias in empathy: The mediating role of ethnic identity and wrongfulness of ethnic intergroup bias,” appeared in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology in April. It has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The authors listed affiliations with institutions in China, Australia, and Canada. The article describes experiments measuring the empathy – or lack thereof – Tibetan children expressed for characters with Tibetan or Han Chinese names who experienced either social or physical pain.
“Our study sheds light on the development of [racial bias in empathy] in Tibetan school-aged children and highlights the importance of identifying the appropriate timing for intervening in prejudice,” the researchers concluded.
The apology, published earlier this month, provides a detailed timeline of how a reader contacted the journal with concerns about the article soon after it was published, and how the editors responded. The reader had also asked the corresponding author to share the data reported in the publication, but hadn’t received a response.
The reader identified “biased language” in the article, such as the description of education in Tibet as “backward,” and “deficit-oriented interpretation of findings” attributing the development of racial bias in Tibetan children at least in part to “the geographical environment and traditional way of life in Tibet.” The area’s characteristics “limited its interactions with the outside world and contributed to a relatively closed mindset,” the authors wrote in the original article.
The editors wrote:
The reader rightly pointed out that this language and interpretation reinforce imperialism, particularly given the complex relations between Tibet and China. We sincerely apologize to our readers, and especially to our Tibetan colleagues, for failing to identify these issues prior to the publication of the article.
Eventually, the first author shared the study data, codebook, and syntax files on an online repository, and agreed to a correction retracting several sentences from the article. The correction notice stated:
The authors wish to remove biased language and inappropriate discussion surrounding the comparison between the Tibetan sample and the non-Tibetan samples, and the text discussing the development of Tibetan children’s awareness of their own racial prejudice.
Jun Chen, the corresponding author, did not respond to our request for comment.
Su Yeong Kim, the outgoing editor of the journal, said the authors addressed the reader’s concerns, so “we therefore decided to do an apology” instead of an expression of concern or retraction.
The apology also lists future actions the editorial team will take, and a section with “perspectives to guide the interpretation” of findings in the original article.
The editors concluded:
We (the journal) are deeply sorry about what occurred and are committed to ensuring that biased language and deficit interpretations are avoided in future publications. In addition, by requesting a retraction of biased sentences from the author and through resources provided on the interpretation of the original Sheng et al.’s (2024) publication, we have taken actions to help repair the damage caused by this publication. With these efforts, we commit more intentionally to our equity, diversity, and inclusion principles for the sake of producing anti-oppressive publications for our global readership. We acknowledge that the publication of this article may have caused readers to lose trust in the journal, and, together, we are currently taking action to reestablish reader confidence in CDEMP as outlined in the Future Actions to Be Taken by the CDEMP Editorial Team section.
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Do you have any more information on the authors? This sounds like Chinese state-sponsored propaganda. Backing that up? This is listed as the first paper published with the APA for most of the authors.
“the complex relations between Tibet and China”
I suppose that’s one way of describing “colonial occupation”.