Opportunities for Regulatory Changes to Promote Pediatric Device Innovation in the United States: Joint Recommendations From Pediatric Innovator Roundtables.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this report is to provide insight from pediatric stakeholders with a shared desire to facilitate a revision of the current United States regulatory pathways for the development of pediatric healthcare devices. METHODS: On August 5, 2020, a group of innovators, engineers, professors and clinicians met to discuss challenges and opportunities for the development of new medical devices for pediatric health and the importance of creating a regulatory environment that encourages and accelerates the research and development of such devices. On January 6, 2021, this group joined regulatory experts at a follow-up meeting. RESULTS: One of the primary issues identified was the need to present decision-makers with opportunities that change the return-on-investment balance between adult and pediatric devices to promote investment in pediatric devices. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: Several proposed strategies were discussed, and these strategies can be divided into two broad categories: 1. Removal of real and perceived barriers to pediatric device innovation; 2. Increasing incentives for pediatric device innovation.

Undisciplined beginnings, academic success, and discursive psychology.

This paper reflects on the conditions under which Discourse and social psychology, Common knowledge, and the author's Arguing and thinking were written. These books, which were independently conceived, were not specifically written as contributions to 'discursive psychology', for discursive psychology did not exist at that time. Their authors were rejecting conventional approaches to doing psychological research. The paper discusses what it takes for a new academic movement, such as discursive psychology, to be successfully established in the current climate of 'academic capitalism'. Two requirements are particularly mentioned: the necessity for a label and the necessity for adherents to be recruited. Of the three books, only Discourse and social psychology was outwardly recruiting its readers to a new way of doing social psychology. Arguing and thinking, with its celebration of ancient rhetoric, was much more ambiguous in its aims. It was turning away from present usefulness towards the past. By claiming to be 'an antiquarian psychologist' the author was rejecting disciplinary thinking. The paper also considers the intellectual costs of establishing a new specialism or sub-discipline. The 'first generation' may have freedom, but success can bring about a narrowing of perspectives and the development of orthodoxies for subsequent academic generations. This applies as much to the development of experimental social psychology as to discursive psychology. These processes are particular enhanced in the present socio-economic situation of contemporary universities, which make it more difficult for young academics to become, in the words of William James, 'undisciplinables'.

Writing social psychology: fictional things and unpopulated texts.

This paper presents the author's position on the question how to write social psychology. It reflects the author's long-term interest in rhetoric and his more recent concerns about the writing of social scientists. The author argues that social psychologists tend to produce unpopulated texts, writing about 'fictional things' rather than people. Social psychologists assume that their technical terms are more precise than ordinary language terms. The author contests this assumption. He suggests that when it comes to describing human actions, ordinary language on the whole tends to be more precise. The paper analyses why this should be the case, drawing on ideas from linguistics and Vaihinger's notion of fictions. The author presents examples to show how psychological writers, by using passives and nominals, can omit information about the agents of action and the nature of the actions that they are performing. Although their texts may appear impressively technical, they can, in fact, be highly imprecise. Moreover, social psychologists, by using this nominal style of writing, tend to write about processes as if they were things and then attribute actions to these things. In so doing, they create 'fictional things', which they treat as if they were real things. The author offers six recommendations for writing in simpler, clearer ways.

Henri Tajfel's 'cognitive aspects of prejudice' and the psychology of bigotry.

This paper pays tribute to Tajfel's classic article 'Cognitive aspects of prejudice' and re-examines its central arguments. Tajfel's paper is important for outlining a social cognitive approach to the study of prejudice and also for refuting of what Tajfel called the 'blood-and-guts' approach. Taking Tajfel's proposition that social psychology is not value-free, the current paper examines the moral and political view of 'Cognitive aspects' and also the gaps in its approach to the study of prejudice. It is suggested that this cognitive approach has difficulty in accounting for extreme bigotry, at least without recourse to the motivational themes that the approach seeks to exclude. In particular, there would be limitations in applying this approach in order to understand the Holocaust. Indeed, Tajfel did not attempt to do so, for reasons that are discussed. Tajfel's Social Identity Theory (SIT) has similar limitations. The paper also examines Tajfel's use of the term 'depersonalization', which he described as a 'milder' form of dehumanization of out-groups. Later social identity theorists have tended to use 'depersonalization' differently, shifting their attention to in-groups. Their perspective moves away from understanding the topic of prejudice in the way that can be found in Tajfel's 'Cognitive aspects of prejudice'. Finally, the present paper suggests how extreme prejudice might be studied without returning to the motivational 'blood-and-guts' approach that Tajfel so cogently criticized.