Psychological Study Of Social Issues Research Articles

SPSSI and Poverty: Reflections at Seventy‐Five

This article highlights efforts by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and its members to increase understanding of poverty and social class, and to propose policies to reduce economic inequities. Our review is based on writings about poverty and social class published in SPSSI journals and newsletters, and other activities from SPSSI's beginnings in 1936 to the present. Both strengths and shortcomings in SPSSI's economic justice record are noted. Special attention is given to the 1930s and the 1960s–1970s, periods in which poverty was a salient topic in the United States. SPSSI's role in advocating for institutional change within the American Psychological Association is also considered. We close with a “wish list” for SPSSI's next 75 years.

The SPSSI Task Force on Sexual Orientation, the Nature of Sex, and the Contours of Activist Science

Drawing on published and archival materials, this article charts the history of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)‐sponsored Task Force on Sexual Orientation (1978–1982). The Task Force offers a lens through which to explore the assumptions about the nature of human sexuality at work in 1970s psychology. The concept of nature does not possess a stable meaning across disciplinary communities. Where for some nature connotes the normalizing sanction of natural laws, others associate the term with artificial claims about the constraints of a deficient biology. As an organization founded by social psychologists, SPSSI projects, such as its members’ work on race relations, tended to emphasize the latter strategy. Responding to conservatives who cast homosexuality as unnatural, a number of Task Force members turned to sociobiology as a normalizing natural science. In this regard, the Task Force was an important episode in defining what might constitute activist‐science.

SPSSI and Peace‐Building: A Participant's Perspective

A culture of peace promotes caring relations among individuals and groups based on full realization of their positive interdependence with each other and their environment—it entails social justice, norms of equity and multicultural sensitivity and social relations conducive to nonviolence, sustainable development, and human well‐being. This is a history of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)'s efforts to build such a culture in the United States, especially within and through organized psychology. The perspective taken is primarily my own as a member of SPSSI Council, an SPSSI Representative to the American Psychological Association (APA)'s Council of Representatives, SPSSI's first historian and first Public Policy Fellow at the APA, liaison between Division 9 and Division 48 of the APA, and SPSSI's Representative to the Southern California Regional Council of Organizations. I argue for the importance of applying public interest science to issues of cultural, structural, and direct violence.

“Society Very Definitely Needs Our Aid”: Reflecting on SPSSI in History

The year 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). One of the primary reasons SPSSI was established was the desire, on the part of its founders, to use scientific research for social action and to bring the insights of social science into national‐level debates about social issues. This anniversary affords us the opportunity to examine when, where, why, and how SPSSI has been more and less successful in its efforts to impact society. Historical analyses focusing on the long‐standing tension between scientific objectivity and political advocacy are used as a lens through which to examine SPSSI's legacy and to provide a more informed basis for future action.

Psychologists, Race, and Housing in Postwar America

Housing in postwar America became a critical focal point for issues of race and social equality. Housing and race relations became a real‐world laboratory for psychologists and other social scientists, including several of the leaders of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, to examine developing theories of intergroup relations, especially as potential means to reduce prejudice. Further, it is argued that psychologists sought to impact emerging housing policy and to ameliorate an enduring social problem. The author concludes that the efforts by social scientists to provide workable solutions, typically from an unacknowledged place of White privilege, proved largely ineffective.

“Cautious Courage”: SPSSI's Connections and Reconnections at the United Nations

The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has had official connections to the United Nations (UN) at two separate points in its history. In the period right after World War Two (1946–1960), SPSSI leaders were involved in the building of a global social science network through the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Otto Klineberg was heavily involved in creating connections between UNESCO and SPSSI. Changes at UNESCO as well as in academic research culture, combined with continued Cold War politics, minimized SPSSI's involvement at the UN throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid‐1980s, NGOs were increasingly a significant force in the UN through the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). SPSSI has had NGO status since 1987 and was awarded consultative status in 1991, allowing the Society greater input at the UN. Since that time, SPSSI has continued to bring a research focus to a range of projects at the UN aimed at improving global well‐being.

SPSSI and Racial Research

This review highlights the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)'s racial research contribution to public policy. Although not an initial focus of SPSSI, racial research has long been a central concern of the organization. Klineberg's work in the 1930s established an example of how social research could have widespread influence on social policy. SPSSI books and the Journal of Social Issues reveal the Society's unswerving interest in such topics as prejudice and authoritarianism. The year 1954 proved a watershed year. Gordon Allport published his agenda‐setting The Nature of Prejudice, and SPSSI played a key role in the momentous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that held racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Due to lack of funds, racial research declined sharply in the 1960s. Later, other concerns—such as an emphasis on cognition and the belated rise of attention to gender discrimination—competed with racial issues. Reactionary Supreme Court justices now often spurn social science evidence. The article closes with an assessment of the Society's racial policy influence in the future.

Foreground and Background: Environment as Site and Social Issue

To examine how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has engaged with environmental issues throughout its 75‐year history, we consulted five SPSSI‐based data sources. Our analysis, attentive to the larger sociopolitical contexts over time, focuses on SPSSI's attention to the physical environment, the places in which social living and interactions occur. In SPSSI's early years, social issues research was often situated within specific locales. Since 1960 and the emergence of environmental psychology and the environmental movement, SPSSI increasing focuses on environment as a social issue in its own right as well part of other social issues. Over time there has been a decline in mentions of the physical environment in SPSSI's methods texts. This historical analysis highlights the specifics of context in SPSSI's environmental research and urges attention to the physical as well as social aspects of environment in research and activism.

Psychological Perspectives on Immigration

We introduce this issue by describing recent trends in migration and immigration policy, and the challenges faced by immigrants and by immigrant-receiving nations around the world. We then discuss the many contributions that psychology can make to understanding and optimizing the benefits of migration from the perspective of both immigrants and members of host societies. The article concludes by providing an overview of the rationale, organization, and content of the issue, including a brief description of each article. 2010 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

Speaking Out on Immigration Policy in Australia: Identity Threat and the Interplay of Own Opinion and Public Opinion

This article presents a survey of 667 Australian voters examining support for a new conservative social movement in relation to attitudes toward Asian immigration, involvement in an evolving anti-immigration debate, and willingness to speak out politically. Supporters of the new conservatives were motivated to get involved and speak out by perceived threat to White Australians, as well as the perception of a favorable normative climate. In contrast, for opponents, higher education and welcoming attitudes toward Asian immigration were associated with political involvement, as well as the perception that the social climate was changing against them (becoming more conservative). The data show that in a time of changing public opinion, people may speak out more when they perceive that their views are losing ground, providing evidence for active resistance rather than a spiral of silence on the part of the losing side. © 2010 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Feminism and Women Leaders in Spssi

We look at women leaders in the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) as a case study to explore the roots of second wave feminist leadership in psychology and its impact on the acceptance of gender as an important part of the field. Although all psychological organizations excluded many women from leadership until the latter part of the 20th century, the SPSSI, despite the contradiction between its socially activist agenda and exclusionary practices, was unusual because its ideals attracted many accomplished women to become members. In order to provide a richer view of women's professional leadership and its consequences, we conducted a cohort analysis of the personal and professional circumstances of those women elected to office in the SPSSI over the past 70 years. We examine the complex interaction between the internalization of sexist norms, the use of formal and informal social structures (especially those involving collegial networking), political ideology, and social change. Based on our analysis, we suggest that the achievements of individual women appear to be less influential than the development of a critical mass of women leaders with a politically activist agenda and commitment to a social constructionist theoretical frame.

Jewish Quotas in Clinical Psychology? TheJournal of Clinical Psychologyand the Scandal of 1945

In 1945 Frederick Thorne, editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, proposed to limit the acceptance of Jewish applicants to clinical psychology graduate schools. A public scandal erupted over this proposed limit, which was modeled on Jewish quotas in medical education. Criticized by the mass media and most psychologists, Thorne's proposal was repudiated by the Eastern Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Using private correspondence, oral histories, and published articles, this mostly forgotten episode in the history of clinical psychology is recreated. It is argued that the 1945 campaign against Jewish quotas prepared activists for the 1950s campaign against racial segregation and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Because the participants in 1945 came from all specialties in psychology, it is suggested that this story is of significance to the field as a whole, rather than just to historians of social issues.

Psychological Research and Public Policy: Bridging the Gap

Opportunities for communicating psychological findings beyond the discipline are limited and often under‐rewarded. In this article, we discuss reasons why psychological research often fails to be communicated beyond the discipline, and we provide suggestions for what needs to be changed in order to bridge this gap. Specifically, we identify barriers to communicating beyond the discipline, and we note that more effectively and broadly disseminating knowledge requires a different style than conveying information within the profession. We further illustrate how psychology offers unique perspectives and information that are of considerable value to lay audiences and policy makers. We conclude by articulating the potential benefits for society and psychology of efforts and venues whose explicit intention is to understand social problems and inform policy through the psychological study of social issues.

A Tribute to Allport: Surveying the Last 50 Years of Research on Prejudice

There is no debate that Gordon W. Allport's (1954/1979) The Nature of Prejudice is the foundational work for the social psychology of We wholeheart edly agree with this opening sentence (p. 1) of On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport, edited by John Dovidio, Peter Glick, and Laurie Rudman. Gordon Allport's seminal work did indeed guide much of the social psychological research on prejudice throughout the last 50 years. And in a fitting tribute to Allport's con tributions, this follow-up volume aims to review that substantial body of research and outline an agenda for the future of research on prejudice. On the 50th anniversary of Allport's original text, the editors of this book as sembled an impressive collection of scholars to reflect on the history of the social psychological study of prejudice, speculate on the future of the field, and contem plate Allport's contributions. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) is the official sponsor of the book, with its royalties going toward SPSSI's educational and scientific programs, a detail that we strongly applaud. Although intended to celebrate Allport's insights, this book is not a blatant dis play of adulation. Rather, the editors and authors examine his assertions through a critical-but fair-lens, applauding his hits without sugarcoating his misses. This is clearly an asset of the volume, leaving the reader with an accurate impression of the theoretical foundations laid by Allport, the areas where empirical research has failed to support his analysis, and his hypotheses that remain yet untested. The book's editors intended it to serve as a companion to Allport's text. We think the current volume would indeed benefit from being teamed with the original work because there is an implicit assumption that the reader has at least a passing familiarity with Allport's analysis of prejudice. To facilitate the pairing of these books, the editors have followed the same sequence of topics and chapters as in Allport's work, with each team of authors tackling its own specialty. This explicit substantive parallel between the original and subsequent works was certainly a wise decision. Just as the original work did, this book covers a lot of ground on the topic of prejudice, from social cognitive to motivational to sociocultural processes. Howev er, the current volume is necessarily terser than the original, because these authors aim to cover Allport's perspective, developments since that original analysis, and projected topics for future discovery. In an attempt to unify the large number of chapters, each written by a different research team, the editors chose a common expository structure to frame each chapter: a summary of Allport's analysis on the focal topic, a description of theoretical and empirical developments since Allport, a description of new conceptual frameworks for the relevant topic, an examina tion of extant support for Allport's analysis, and suggestions for fruitful future directions. We think most readers will find this consistency very helpful. However, because this volume covers so much ground in a cursory way, our general sense is that the most appropriate audience includes graduate students and beyond.

Editor's Forward to the Article “Psychologists and the Use of Torture in Interrogations” and Invited Comments about That Article

In early 2006, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), the society that produces Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP), charged a task force with examining the research on interrogations and drafting a statement for Council review. During the Council discussion of the proposed statement, President Shinn raised a fundamental general issue to consider, asking, “To what extent do we want to say that torture shouldn’t be done because there is research that says so, and to what extent will we say so based on an ethical point of view?” The task force report was shared with the Council at its June 2006 meeting. The report, focused on research on interrogation and confessions, was presented by task force chair Mark Costanzo, and its other members, Ellen Gerrity and M. Brinton Lykes. The report and its recommendations were endorsed by the SPSSI Council at that same meeting. The article that appears here, co-authored by Costanzo, Gerrity, and Lykes, is a revision of the task force report. Even though it is not exactly the document endorsed by the Council, it is substantively consistent with what was endorsed. Although the SPSSI Council seemed largely of one mind in support of this perspective, it has not been so for all psychologists. As a result, ASAP invited

Teaching Students about Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination: An Interview with Susan Fiske

Susan T. Fiske is professor of psychology, Princeton University (PhD, Harvard University; honorary doctorate, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). She wrote Social Cognition (with Taylor) on how people make sense of each other. Currently, she investigates emotional prejudices (pity, contempt, envy, and pride) at cultural, interpersonal, and neural levels. She won the American Psychological Association's Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest for antidiscrimination testimony and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues' Allport Intergroup Relations Award for ambivalent sexism theory (with Glick). She edits the Annual Review of Psychology (with Schacter and Kazdin) and the Handbook of Social Psychology (with Gilbert and Lindzey). She just finished Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology and a year as President of the American Psychological Society. Amy Hackney received her BA in psychology from Indiana University and her MS and PhD in social psychology from Saint Louis University. She began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at Georgia Southern University in the Fall of 2003. She teaches courses in social psychology, psychology and law, psychology of gender, and research methods. She conducts research on racial and gender stereotypes and prejudice. She is particularly interested in how stereotypes and prejudice affect jury decision making and how minority members experience and cope with prejudice.

Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the Twenty-First Century

I would like to start with a question that I have borrowed from colleagues in the Humanities who are interested in the history of science (de Santillana 1959). What was Galileo’s crime? Most responses to this question would focus on his revolutionary discoveries about the movement of the planets around the sun. Another view of his crime, however, was that he chose to communicate his Žndings about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium of the educated elite, but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo. My address today is a call to the Society for the Study of Social Problems to build on its legacy and move toward committing Galileo’s crime. I will examine different approaches to making the knowledge generated by scholars in SSSP available to a public outside of the academy and our professional community. I believe that a search for this new direction has beneŽts not only for inventing social justice, but also for reinventing and energizing the sociological enterprise. Let us begin with a brief look backward. As we all know, the founding of SSSP in 1951 was grounded in its opposition to the American Sociological Society’s commitment to a “pure science” model of sociology, and the belief that sociology had lost sight of humanistic goals (Galliher and Galliher 1995; Skura 1976). The early opposition to ASS was often grounded in personal animosities, but there was also the concern that ASS was not democratic and was dominated by an “Eastern establishment” not very open to the aspirations of younger sociologists. But SSSP was not alone in its emergence as an alternative or oppositional movement. At least a decade before the founding of SSSP, some of the newest generation of professional psychologists were concerned about the narrow professionalism of their Želd and in 1936, they formed the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). These early opposition movements looked like attempts to reform the larger and more dominant professional associations of their disciplines. It was not until the early 1960s that SSSP set in motion the beginnings of a critique of mainstream sociology that went to core issues of epistemology and methodology—How do we know what we know? And what is the role of the sociologist in the process of creating new knowledge? In 1961, Alvin Gouldner’s presidential address to SSSP examined the doctrine of a value-free sociology and judged it to be a group myth that, among other things, served to marginalize the role of sociologist as critical intellectual and to elevate to center stage the sociologist as value-free professional.

Creating a Consensus: Psychologists, the Supreme Court, and School Desegregation, 1952–1955

SPSSI psychologists' involvement in the early civil rights movement in the postwar United States was epitomized by their involvement in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. This article examines how social scientists sought to maintain the persona of objective, scientific expert when asked to prepare briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court for the Brown case. The social scientists believed that only by collapsing what they saw as an artificial distinction between objectivity and advocacy could the social scientist become a social activist. This article is based on extensive research in numerous archives, including the papers of Gordon W. Allport, Kenneth B. Clark, Stuart W. Cook, David Krech, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Theodore M. Newcomb, Robert Redfield, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

The Perils of a Public Intellectual

In 1939 George W. Hartmann was Chairman of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and a prominent activist‐scholar. By the end of World War II, his teaching career and psychological health lay in ruin, and he never reestablished his influence as a psychopolitical expert. This article traces the rise and fall of Hartmann's career and its unique mixture of Gestalt psychology, socialism, and anti‐Communism. Unpublished correspondence, family papers, and files from the FBI and other intelligence agencies are used to recreate Hartmann's political personae—including Socialist electoral candidate, chairman of Peace Now, and leader of the War Resisters League. His life as a public intellectual is used to reflect upon the nature of psychological expertise at midcentury.

“The Approved Bureaucratic Torpor”: Goodwin Watson, Critical Psychology, and the Dilemmas of Expertise, 1930–1945

The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) played an important role in expanding the mandate and influence of American psychology. This article examines the nature of that role through a consideration of the early career of SPSSI's first president, Goodwin Watson. During the Depression, Watson encouraged psychologists to abandon value neutrality and political disinterestedness in favor of politically committed activist science. Government service and political persecution during World War II prompted Watson to conclude that his Depression‐era views had neglected the problematic interface between psychological expertise and policy formation. Responding to these concerns, Watson adopted a professional model that emphasized psychology's neutrality and objectivity. The article also considers the implications of his experience for contemporary debates on psychology's professional orientation.