The first author takes it all? Solutions for crediting authors more visibly, transparently, and free of bias

With the seventh edition of the publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), the APA style now prescribes bias-free language and encourages accessibility even to non-academic audiences. However, even with the newest guidelines, the way we credit authors in psychology remains anachronistic, intransparent, and prone to conflict. It still relies on a sequence-determines-credit approach in the byline, which concurrently is contradicted by the option to consider the last author as the position of the principal investigator depending on the field or journal. Scholars from various disciplines have argued that relying on such norms introduces a considerable amount of error when stakeholders rely on articles for career-relevant decisions. Given the existing recommendations towards a credit-based system, ignoring those issues will further promote bias that could be avoided with rather minor changes to the way we perceive authorship. In this article, we introduce a set of easy-to-implement changes to the manuscript layout that value contribution rather than position. Aimed at fostering transparency, accountability, and equality between authors, establishing those changes would likely benefit all stakeholders in contemporary psychological science.

Why Self-Report Measures of Self-Control and Inhibition Tasks Do Not Substantially Correlate

Trait self-control is often defined as the ability to inhibit dominant responses including thoughts, emotions, and behavioral impulses. Despite the pivotal role of inhibition for trait self-control, a growing body of evidence found small-to-zero correlations between self-report measures of trait self-control and behavioral inhibition tasks. These observations seem puzzling considering that both types of measures are often seen as operationalizations of the same or at least closely related theoretical constructs. Previous explanations for this non-correspondence focused on psychometric properties of the measures. Here, we discuss three further factors that may explain the empirical non-correspondence between trait self-control scales and behavioral inhibition tasks: (1) the distinction between typical and maximum performance, (2) the measurement of single versus repeated performance, and (3) differences between impulses in different domains. Specifically, we argue that a) self-report measures of trait self-control are designed to assess typical performance, and relative to these, behavioral inhibition tasks are designed to assess maximum performance; b) self-report measures of trait self-control capture central tendencies of aggregates of many different instances of behavior, whereas behavioral inhibition tasks are momentary, one-time state measures; and c) most self-report measures of trait self-control are designed to measure general, cross-domain inhibition, whereas behavioral inhibition tasks also measure narrower, domain-specific inhibition to a substantial degree. In conclusion, we argue that it is implausible to hypothesize more than a low correlation between self-report measures of trait self-control and behavioral inhibition tasks as they genuinely focus on different aspects of the theoretical construct of self-control. We also discuss the broader implications of these issues for self-control as a theoretical construct and its appropriate measurement.