Dismantling the master's house: Decolonizing “Rigor” in psychological scholarship

The purported goal of social science research is to develop approaches and applications to the psychological study of social issues that allow us to know, accurately and inclusively, the lived experiences of all human beings. However, our current theoretical and methodological tools, while perceived as “objective,” were founded on ahistorical and context-eliminating perspectives that privilege research designs and analytic strategies that reflect biased racial reasoning with roots in European colonial knowledge formations. By analyzing how the language of “rigor” is deployed within specific instances of social science research, we assert that it is conceptualized and operationalized to maintain a Eurocentric worldview and conception of the “human.” In exploring the ways that the language of “rigor” furthers a European conception of knowledge production as normative, this manuscript provides a critical analysis that seeks to redress ongoing epistemic colonial violence by decolonizing a key term in psychological scholarship.