APS in Today’s World

We need to talk. 

In my first presidential column, I suggested that APS was in trouble. Regular membership has dropped from nearly 9,000 in 2014 to fewer than 3,800 today. Convention attendance and student membership have fallen at a similar pace. Although our journals thrive, APS is not serving the central role for most psychological scientists as it did in the past. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that APS has remained relatively stable while the world around it has changed radically. Standing back, we need to assess some of the big shifts in the academic job market, the international growth of psychological science, the increasing importance of interdisciplinary work, and the question of APS’s value proposition in today’s world. If APS is to thrive, we must come to terms with each of these issues. 

The changing academic job market 

When APS was founded in 1988, our natural constituency was clear. Most research-oriented PhD graduates went directly into tenure-track jobs at research universities. APS was created as their scientific home focused primarily on research, methods, and the advancement of psychological science. 

That world has changed dramatically. Over the last 20 years, U.S. universities have steadily reduced tenure-track positions while increasing non-tenure-line faculty, lecturers, and adjuncts. Even the best graduate programs now place fewer than half of their students into tenure-track positions. A growing proportion of our research-trained PhDs now pursue careers in government, tech, health care, non-governmental organizations, or other applied fields. 

At the same time, though, our graduates working outside of the academic world are still doing psychological science. They design experiments, build measures, analyze data, and translate insights into products, policies, and programs. They are part of our field—but APS rarely sees or acknowledges them. Our conferences, publications, and awards have done very little to invite their expertise into our club. 

We must change this. It’s vital that we welcome psychological scientists wherever they work. That means redesigning our conventions to highlight psychological research outside academe. We need to provide networking for industry and government careers, and membership models that serve people outside academia. At the same time, we must help graduate programs rethink graduate training. If most of our students end up in non-academic positions, we have an ethical responsibility to help train them for their future roles. 

The globalization of psychological science 

From its earliest days, psychology was international. Think of the early labs in Germany (Wilhelm Wundt), Switzerland (Jean Piaget), Russia (Ivan Pavlov), and the United Kingdom (Charles Darwin and Francis Galton). After World War II, the United States started to become a more dominant force because of surges in federal funding and academic hiring. With these and other cultural changes, American psychology and APS gradually adopted a U.S.-centric perspective. 

In 2006, APS took a symbolic but important step by changing its name from the American Psychological Society to the Association for Psychological Science. The goal was to project a more international identity. Yet, in practice, APS remained primarily American. Most of our conferences have been held in the United States. Our governing boards and award recipients continue to be disproportionately U.S.-based. Our online events run mostly on U.S. time zones. All conferences and publications are conducted in English, and we offer limited support for nonfluent English speakers. 

Meanwhile, psychological science outside the United States has grown dramatically. Psychological societies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America have expanded. Our own journals are filled with articles authored by international teams. In the last five years, about 57% of corresponding authors for articles published in Psychological Science and Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) have been from outside the United States, while only 28% of all APS members are from outside the United States. 

In interviews and informal discussions, our international colleagues routinely tell us, “APS doesn’t see us.” To change this, we need more than symbolic gestures. We should rotate virtual and in-person programs across time zones, build collaborations with societies outside the U.S., make our boards and committees more international, and provide captioning or translation for selected events and publications. And we need to make a habit of meeting outside the United States. APS should expand international membership, with a stronger presence in leadership, talks, and awards. 

The interdisciplinary turn 

APS was created to bridge subfields and emphasize science. Our journals were deliberately designed to publish work across the spectrum—from cognitive to social, clinical to developmental, neuroscience to health. Yet many academic structures still reinforce silos. Departments often discourage students from taking courses outside their area. Conventions and journals sometimes reproduce narrow subfield boundaries rather than challenge them. 

The reality is that the most exciting breakthroughs are happening at the intersections of disciplines. Psychology today interacts with computer science, neuroscience, public health, informatics, and policy. Funding agencies increasingly favor team science and cross-disciplinary approaches. The psychological scientists who are cited the most, win the most awards, and get the most grants generally publish across areas of psychology and other disciplines. 

Crossing disciplines is not a liability—it is APS’s opportunity. Our conventions, our publications, and our online programs should emphasize the interstitial space where ideas cross-fertilize. When someone says, “APS doesn’t have enough of my subarea,” the answer should be that our job is to connect, to cross-pollinate, and to accelerate the science that can’t be done in silos. 

Rethinking APS’s value 

When APS was just beginning, its value was straightforward. It provided us with an identity that signaled a dedication to psychological science in a way that the American Psychological Association could not. Membership came with subscriptions to Psychological Science and other journals. At the time, those subscriptions were expensive and hard to access. Membership felt like a bargain. 

Today, though, nearly every university provides free access to journals for faculty and students. Meanwhile, dues feel high, conference costs are rising, and university travel budgets are shrinking. If journal access is no longer the main benefit, what exactly is the value of APS? 

We need to answer this question honestly. Members should see their dues not as a subscription fee but as an opportunity to build a career where you collaborate and learn from scientists with interests in psychology across disciplines, borders, and backgrounds. Being part of the APS of the future should help you find jobs, funding, and training opportunities in new methods, theories, and applications. Above all, it should be a home of outstanding publications, conventions, and online resources that you can turn to across your career. 

The vitality of our science is not in question. APS is in crisis because our structures, habits, and offerings have not kept pace with the community we are meant to serve. 

If we want APS to thrive, we must recognize psychological scientists beyond the tenure track. We must embrace international colleagues not just in name, but in practice. While continuing to champion cross-disciplinary science, we must clarify and strengthen the value of belonging to APS. 

I don’t pretend these are easy shifts. But they are possible—and urgent. APS was founded to rethink what a scientific society could be. Nearly four decades later, it is time to do so again. 

I leave you with a question: What would it take for you—or your students, or your colleagues abroad, or your collaborators in industry—to see APS as their organization? Because that, in the end, is what APS must become—the home where all psychological science belongs.

Feedback on this article? Email [email protected] or login to comment.