science

OpenPsych

OpenPsych is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand OpenPsych rather than just read about it. In short: OpenPsych is an online collection of three pseudoscientific open access journals covering behavioral genetics, psychology, and quantitative research in sociology. Many articles on OpenPsych promote scientific racism, and the site has been described as a "pseudoscience factory-farm".

Key takeaways

OpenPsych belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect OpenPsych to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of OpenPsych from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

OpenPsych is an online collection of three pseudoscientific open access journals covering behavioral genetics, psychology, and quantitative research in sociology. Many articles on OpenPsych promote scientific racism, and the site has been described as a "pseudoscience factory-farm". The journals were started in 2014 by a pair of nonprofessional researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer, who had difficulty publishing their studies in mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journals. The website describes its contents as open peer reviewed journals, but the qualifications and neutrality of its reviewers and quality of reviews have been disputed.

Founders OpenPsych was founded by Danish far-right white supremacist Emil Kirkegaard in 2014. Kirkegaard is also the founder of the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation which publishes Mankind Quarterly, another pseudoscientific journal. The Mankind Quarterly was published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was presided over by Richard Lynn until his death in 2023. Kirkegaard was the registrant of the Mankind Quarterly website between 2017 and February 2023, after which the WHOIS was anonymised. In February 2024, Kirkegaard filed his Mankind Publishing House LLC with the state of Wyoming under the name William Engman (his legal name since 2021). Co-founder Davide Piffer has written on remote viewing which is widely dismissed by scientists as parapsychology.

Journal contents and quality OpenPsych consists of three journals—Open Differential Psychology, Open Behavioral Genetics, and Open Quantitative Sociology & Political Science—founded by Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer in 2014. Journal contents are free to access and there is no cost associated with submission. The founders of the website believed that their articles were being regularly rejected by mainstream scientific publishers because of bias against their contentious submissions. Many of the articles are about "race realism", a form of scientific racism, and advance related views which are rejected by mainstream science, such as the idea that there is a genetic basis for group-level differences in measures such as crime and IQ. Unlike typical scientific journals, OpenPsych accepts anonymous manuscripts.

Academic reception The quality of peer review at OpenPsych has been disputed. Reviewers do not need advanced academic qualifications, nor need to specialise in what they review. For example, Kirkegaard reviews paper submissions to two of the journals, but has only a BA in linguistics, claiming he is entirely "self-taught". Most of the reviewers are also authors of articles in the same group of journals. Of the thirteen known members of the review board in 2020, two were anonymous and eight seemed to have doctorates. Members of the review teams include Gerhard Meisenberg, Heiner Rindermann, Peter Frost, John Fuerst, Kenya Kura, Bryan J. Pesta, Noah Carl and Meng Hu.

Political positions The journals act as a research network for far right, alt-right, and White nationalist causes, following in the footsteps of the Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly; of its top 15 contributors in 2018, 11 had written for Mankind Quarterly in the preceding three years. Several members of its editorial board hold far-right political views and have attended the controversial London Conference on Intelligence. The Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article discussing proponents of scientific racism including Kirkegaard, describes OpenPsych as a "pseudojournal". Kirkegaard is regarded by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right to be a "figure on the radical right fringe". Landis MacKellar has described Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst as "both outright cranks" noting OpenPsych are "tenderly peer-reviewed online journals specializing in scientifically controversial (bordering on dubious) politically incorrect pieces derived in part from (Roger) Pearsonian hereditarianism."

Review process Eric Turkheimer in a coauthored paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science criticises the review process of OpenPsych's journals and describes them as "pseudo-scientific vehicles for scientific racism":

Notably, Fuerst and Dalliard (2014) was published in Open Behavioral Genetics, an online journal created and edited by another author of Pesta et al. (2020; Kirkegaard). Open Behavioral Genetics and related journals in the OpenPsych network (also created and edited by Kirkegaard) have been dismissed by experts in the field as pseudo-scientific vehicles for scientific racism (Panofsky et al., 2020). Per online records of the review process for Fuerst and Dalliard (2014) (OpenPsych, 2014a, 2014b), Kirkegaard was one of the reviewers of Fuerst and Dalliard (2014), and Fuerst himself was one of only a handful of reviewers for the journal at the time. Thus, neither of Fuerst's original analyses has undergone rigorous peer review.

Controversies

OkCupid In May 2016, Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær published a paper in Open Differential Psychology that includes the data of nearly 70,000 OkCupid (a dating website) users, such as their intimate sexual details. The publication was widely criticised at the time and been described as "without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases." Although Kirkegaard claimed the data was public, this was disputed by data ethics scholar Michael Zimmer who pointed out that the data is restricted to logged-in users only:

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with OpenPsych

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what OpenPsych claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to OpenPsych before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about OpenPsych ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of OpenPsych

In research: OpenPsych appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses OpenPsych in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: OpenPsych is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2014 establishments in Denmark, Academic journals established in 2014, Academic publishing companies, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for OpenPsych outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study OpenPsych in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what OpenPsych means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain OpenPsych out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is OpenPsych in simple terms?

Why does OpenPsych matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study OpenPsych?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on OpenPsych.