Peter Harvey writes…
We are told every month that our house journal, The Psychologist, aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, “…to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied.” . I assume that the same laudable and worthy aim applies to its various manifestations on social media. So can someone please explain to me, simply and in words of one syllable, why the following tweet appeared this week…
Apart from the fact that we are the BRITISH Psychological Society (I am not sure how our Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish colleagues feel about such partisan statements), I cannot for the life of me see how football punditry and simplistic sporting ‘patriotism’ has now become part and parcel of the function of the BPS (I would remind you this is an official BPS outlet). This doesn’t even have the dubious distinction of being a sort of virtue signalling (something that is increasing apparent in some of the BPS social media posts).
This says nothing about the psychology of sport (about which our sports psychology colleagues may well have something helpful to say), of group identity (ditto for our social psychology colleagues), how mass gatherings might impact on the spread of COVID (ditto our health psychology colleagues) – I will not go on.
This is trivial nonsense, juvenile and unworthy of a society that purports to be the serious face of British psychology.
BPSWatch 
I don’t see what the issue is? I don’t think you’re helping your cause by picking on this (of all the things you could pick at). I’d like to think the editor of the psychologist would also be supportive of any of the other home nations if they were to progress that far (I could be wrong though). Also the tweet does contain a link to articles about sports psychology and so does meet the aims at f the account. There’s no rule that says every tweet us to be boring and miserable and I welcome a bit of triviality.
Lastly… “meat pie, sausage roll, C’mon England give us a goal!”
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Surprisingly trivial, laddish, narrowly nationalistic, and inappropriate tweet from the @psychmag, I agree. Maybe they’re strapped for copy since it seems they may be censoring any tweets critical of the Society?
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Surprisingly trivial, laddish, narrowly nationalistic, and inappropriate tweet from the @psychmag, I agree. Maybe they’re strapped for copy since it seems they may be censoring any tweets critical of the Society?
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Pete is the tweet from JS missing? ________________________________
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