Social Psychology Program Research Articles

Introduction to Michael A. Hogg's SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award Address

Introduction to Michael A. Hogg's SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award Address

The Status of Arabic Social Psychology: A Review of 21st-Century Research Articles

This article explores the current state of Arabic social psychology through a selective review of articles written by Arabs, on Arabs, in Arabic (144 articles, published between 2000 and 2015), a basic profiling of first authors, and a regional mapping of graduate social psychology programs. The Levant emerged as the most productive subregion. The most studied topics overall were “the self” and “social adjustment.” Most articles relied primarily on regional references. Furthermore, articles were mostly empirical, correlational, with adult samples, particularly university students. Most first authors were males and very few were specialized in social psychology. Finally, very few graduate social psychology programs were found. We discuss some ways forward for addressing the seemingly marginalized state of social psychology in the Arab region.

John M. Darley (1938–2018).

Presents an obituary for John M. Darley (1938-2018). As a professor of psychology at Princeton, Darley teamed up with colleagues Joel Cooper and Edward E. ("Ned") Jones, to build one of the strongest experimental social psychology programs in the country. These articles consolidated John's reputation as one of the premier social psychologists in the country, a true generalist who made important contributions on a remarkably wide range of topics. Also during this period, John wrote an introductory psychology textbook with Princeton colleagues Sam Glucksberg and Ron Kinchla, coauthored several articles and a book on professional issues in psychology, and chaired the Department of Psychology from 1980 to 1985. John was always a great champion of interdisciplinary exchanges and applied research. He spent about a decade, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, studying behavioral approaches to energy conservation in collaboration with colleagues in engineering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

John T. Cacioppo (1951-2018).

This article memorializes John T. Cacioppo (1951-2018). Cacioppo was the cofounder of the field of social neuroscience and was well known for his transformative work demonstrating how social isolation and loneliness affect well-being. He was also a national leader on matters related to science and health policy. At the University of Chicago, he was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, where he served as director of the Social Psychology program and the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological Analysis of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Guest Editor Karen J. Renner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank Leah L. Kapa and Tara Harney-Mahajan for proofreading the final manuscript. Notes Kristeva's theory of abjection has yielded many different interpretations and has been used in a variety of different ways. We fully acknowledge that ours is only one possible reading of her nuanced writings, which offer alternate interpretations. Our reading has been largely influenced by Sara Beardsworth's Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. For example, Daniel Sullivan, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark J. Landau have recently used the theory to analyze horror and ultraviolent films. In her article “Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris Lessing,” Clare Hanson discusses Ben as a symbol of the link between humans and animals and explores the possibility that this link is disturbing and typically repressed. However, her account differs from a TMT perspective insofar as it suggests that repression of the connection between humans and other species is a phenomenon unique to modern societies, rather than a longstanding aspect of human culture designed to mitigate the psychological threat of death. It should be noted that Kristeva also suggests that the abject is inherently connected to fear of our animality and distancing from the body (12–13, 77–79). It is interesting that Lessing wrote a novel about a couple rejecting the cultural-symbolic to embrace the biological mode of immortality striving, given that one could interpret Lessing's biography as an example of the opposite: a woman who pursued the cultural-symbolic path of the writer in an era (1950s England) when women were highly encouraged to embrace the biological mode. As noted, a more in-depth discussion of Lessing's relationship as an author to issues of maternity and patriarchy is provided by Yelin. Jenks's sociological work also shows that children increasingly have come to serve as symbols of their parents' “futurity” (immortality), particularly in the last century and in industrialized nations. He writes of the modern era: “The dreams and the promise embedded in our children, was to reach for the stars, to control more and more of the wantonness of the cosmos, and to produce human culture as the triumph of finitude over infinity” (102–03). Jenks traces this tendency to, among other factors, the decline of traditional religious beliefs as guarantors of immortality, the diminished importance of community and the rise of ideological individualism, the accompanying elevated belief in historical progress, and the decline in birth rate in modern societies. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel SullivanDaniel Sullivan received bachelor's degrees in psychology and German studies at the University of Arizona in 2008. He is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Social Psychology program at the University of Kansas.Jeff GreenbergJeff Greenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1982. He has co-authored two books, including In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, co-edited two books, and published many research articles. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona.

Cumulative and Career-Stage Citation Impact of Social-Personality Psychology Programs and Their Members

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists' seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.

Trends in Graduate Training in Social Psychology: Training Social Psychology's Trainers

We examine social psychology graduate training in the United States by analyzing the faculty members in doctoral degree-granting programs, using archival sources. About 500 full-time faculty work in the 105 social psychology doctoral programs in the United States. These faculty hold Ph.D.'s from 74 different U.S. (and 11 non-U.S.) social psychology programs, with a median degree receipt date of 1983. Increasing numbers of women faculty attain positions in doctoral programs in social psychology; in our sample, 48% of women received Ph.D.'s after 1990, compared to 30% for men. We examine 29 programs that provided 2 or more training faculty, from 1950–1990 and 1991–2004. The data demonstrate both stability and change in graduate training—programs that produced the majority of graduate trainers during the post-WWII period continue to produce new graduate trainers (ρ = .40, p < .05), though the creation of graduate trainers currently spreads across a larger array of programs. Average GRE scores of a training program's students does not predict a given program's likelihood of placing students in training positions.

Review of Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems.

FRANK W. SCHNEIDER, JAMIE A. GRUMAN, and LARRY M. COUTTS (Eds.) Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005, 464 pages (ISBN 1-4129-1539-2, US$64.95 Paperback) I approached the task of reviewing Schneider, Gruman, and Coutts' edited book, Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems, as someone trained in so-called basic social psychology whose exposure to applied social psychology has been derived more or less exclusively from reading the extra chapters tacked on to the end of my intro social psychology text, chapters on applications of social psychology to law, business, and health. In other words, I began the book with little sense of how diverse and rich the applied contributions of my counterparts in applied social psychology have been. Now, having read Applied Social Psychology, I have a renewed enthusiasm for my field and a much deeper appreciation of the range of situations in which social psychological theory and may be, and indeed have been, applied, and a fuller understanding of the opportunities, perhaps even the obligation, that I have, as a social psychologist, to do that positively impacts the world. Though I think the appeal of Applied Social Psychology ought to extend well beyond the intended audience, Schneider et al. are marketing their book as an undergraduate level introductory text. It thus contains much of the pedagogy that instructors have come to expect in textbooks. For example, each chapter begins with an outline and ends with a summary, and important concepts are highlighted in bold within the body of the text. Most chapters also include brief capsules that highlight the role of culture in the topic area under discussion, as well as boxes entitled focus on research and focus on which provide brief but detailed discussion of particular studies and interventions, respectively. These boxes are a definite strength of the text and, in my opinion, are more effectively integrated with the other material discussed in the chapters than is often the case in undergraduate texts (where they often seem to function primarily as add-ons). I also especially liked the opening vignettes that most of the contentbased chapters employ to set the stage for the discussions that follow. On the other hand, margin definitions, glossaries, and suggestions for further reading are all missing here. Instructors and students who find this kind of material beneficial may find that the lack of these resources detracts from the text's effectiveness. The typical undergraduate text is written by a single author or group of authors. Schneider et al. opted for a different approach: Theirs is an edited volume, a collection of chapters written by specialists in a wide range of topic areas (although the majority of the authors are from the Applied Social Psychology program at the University of Windsor or have academic ties to this program). Whereas it might have been natural in this case to expect problems with lack of consistency in style, organization, and content across the chapters, I was impressed by the effectiveness with which the editors maintained consistency throughout. One of the main strategies by which they achieved this level of success seems to have been by encouraging authors to use several classic theories and studies, where appropriate, in discussing the content relevant to their own areas of expertise. For example, discussions of theory and on cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, groupthink, conflict, and prejudice appear in several chapters. The result is a sense that there are major theories or themes that tie together much of the work discussed in the individual chapters, despite the diversity of topics to which these theories are applied. Of course, the repeated references to the same set of theories also function to demonstrate the practical utility of a good theory. …

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.

Reflections on the Self-Fulfilling Effects of Positive Illusions

It is often joked that psychologists choose to study what they lack personally; we're relieved to say that this did not hold true for us. We are an optimistic group and started with the hunch that cold-eyed reality may not be the best thing for romantic relationships. Anecdotally, we had all been struck by people's capacity to see a dating partner's jealousy as caring, or a spouse's stubbornness as strength. On the more personal side, we were all relieved by our respective spouse's ability to tolerate our faults. On a more academic front, we had also been captivated by Brickman's (1987) writings on the sources of meaning in life and by Taylor and Brown's (1988) thoughts about the adaptive nature of hopeful distortions. Basically, Brickman (1987) argued that the experience of commitment, meaning, and value comes from people's basic motivation to reconcile the more negative with the more positive side of their experiences. In fact, he went so far as to argue that people would find little sense of meaning or value in the pursuit of unconflicted goals. Instead, from Brickman's perspective, it is precisely because of the negative aspects of our choices and endeavors that we come to see the positive value and meaning in our lives. From his perspective, we love our partners not in spite of their negative qualities-but because of these very attributes. Captivated as we were by this general theme, we were also left unconvinced by some aspects of this reasoning. For instance, Brickman (1987) believed that people rationalize their partner's faults by embellishing or exaggerating their virtues. According to this bank account model (e.g., Gottman, 1998), faults are simply overshadowed or masked by the positive rather than being somehow transformed. As a result, Brickman pointed to the perils of such idealization processes, arguing that such constructions are inherently fragile, turning love into hate when they are undone. Moreover, such pessimism about the disappointments likely to befall intimates who idealized one another echoed most popular and even psychological conceptions of love. People are invariably cautioned not to idealize one another-and instead, to strive for a realistic understanding of one another's actual qualities (see Brehm, 1988, for a review). In fact, Swann, Hixon, and De La Ronde (1992) had recently reported that people experienced less emotional intimacy in their marriage when their spouse saw them more positively than they saw themselves. In debating these ideas, we could not escape our sense that people could develop generous, idealized images of their partner without necessarily denying or masking their partner's faults. For instance, seeing a partner's stubbornness as integrity involves shifting one's construal of the behavior, not denying it. Holmes' prior work on trust also had suggested that trusting spouses organize their beliefs and expectations about their relationships in ways that link negative thoughts and memories to more positive ones (Holmes & Rempel, 1989). More generally, the zeitgeist of the University of Waterloo social psychology program emphasized the construction of social reality, and how this construction was often in the service of goals and motives. Hallways were full of discussions of social construal processes, and the flexible and creative nature of social perception (Griffin & Ross, 1991; Kunda, 1990). After all, Kunda's theory of motivated reasoning, Zanna's historical roots in dissonance (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), recent writings on commitment and adversity (Lydon & Zanna, 1990), and Ross's (1989) research on the construction of personal histories all share the common sentiment that people's goals and expectations shape how they construct and perceive their worlds. Consistent with such social constructionist leanings, Taylor (1983) argued that female patients with cancer satisfy overarching motives for self-esteem, meaning, and mastery by selectively engaging in social comparisons and by flexibly accommodating their theories about the causes of their cancer to present circumstances. In much the same way, we believed that

Some Reflections on the Golden Age of Interdisciplinary Social Psychology

In the 25 years or so that began with World War II, there was a great wave of enthusiasm for interdisciplinary social psychology which resulted in the establishment of interdisciplinary social psychology training and research programs in some of the major universities in the United States. By the mid-1960s however, this seeming Golden Age had largely vanished. This article, by one of the participants in this movement, is devoted to an elaboration of how this Golden Age came about and the forces that led to its demise. Its origins are traced to the World War II experiences of social psychologists in interdisciplinary research on the adjustments of the American soldier under the leadership of Samuel Stoffer and with Rensis Likert on the US strategic bombing surveys in Germany and Japan. Many of the participants in this research were greatly impressed by the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary collaboration and were determined to establish interdisciplinary social psychology programs on their return to their universities. Several of these programs were very successful for a number of years, especially those at Harvard and Michigan, but failed to survive and become integrated into the institutional structure of the American university. The reasons for their failures are complex but at least four factors seem to have been important. First, the threat of these programs to the traditional departmental structure of the university—particularly in light of the relatively weak position of the social sciences in that structure. Second, the lack of adequate and appropriate funding from either university or federal sources. Third, the lack of a major breakthrough in social psychological theory. Fourth, advancements in research methods did not produce greatly increased understanding of social psychological phenomena. These factors are examined and contrasted with the situation in the natural sciences, particularly with molecular biology.

Internships and Practica in Social Psychology Graduate Training Programs

Many training issues face social psychology programs whose students desire internship and practicum experiences in nonacademic settings. Two programs are described whose faculties have devised very different solutions to such common problems as locating internships and supervising interns. Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Utah may represent opposite ends of a philosophical continuum running from "problem solving for the agency/employer" to "faculty-controlled research in applied settings." Each program's training strategies capitalize on available resources while meeting each faculty's goals for graduate training. The discussion of issues and strategies is directed at assisting others in developing program innovations for training applied social psychologists.

The 1976 APA Society for Personality and Social Psychology Program

The 1976 APA Society for Personality and Social Psychology Program