DIALOGUE                                                                     Page 1

                                                                       DIALOGUE              Volume 18, No. 1

Dialogue — Spring, 2003

 The Official Newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Fifth Annual Meeting Planned for Austin,

January 28-31

By Rick Hoyle                    Check on the status of

construction via live Web

cam, off the hotel’s home

Although fond memories of the 2003 SPSP Meeting in page at www.austin.hilton.com. Hollywood Hills still linger, ^{The hotel is located at the} preparations for the 2004 corner of 5th and Red River, meeting are well underway.  one block from the 6th Street

www.conferencesandmeetings.org/

case, the Hilton Austin will help us relocate to another            spsp.htm.  Graduate student

property in Austin.                          members interested in applying for a travel award

Sixteen New Fellows of the

Society Named

will find relevant information at www.spsp.org/studtrav.htm. General information about travel and lodging in Austin will be at the SPSP site, http://www.spsp.org/student/ travinfo.htm.  And, for help planning your stay in Austin, you might start with the Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau Web site at http://www.austintexas.org.

If you have a suggestion for enhancing our meeting, please pass it on to a member of the Convention Committee, which consists of Lynne Cooper, Rick Hoyle (Chair), Mark Leary (Program Committee Chair) and Tim Strauman. ■

Keith Stanovich, Janet Swim, and Kip Williams.   With the Executive Committee's endorsement, the materials for those individuals who are members of Division 8 of APA have been forwarded to the Membership Committee of APA for its annual consideration of Fellow nominations. Congratulations to these individuals for their (overdue) designation as SPSP Fellows! ■

The State of the Society: 

SPSP Executive Committee Meets,

Confidently Discusses Future

The SPSP Executive Committee

Meeting was held on Sunday, February

9, at the end of the SPSP Conference in

University City, CA. This meeting was

Jim Blascovich's first serving as

President, with Claude Steele becoming Past-President, and Hazel Markus beginning her term as President-Elect.

Budget. For several years, SPSP has run a budget surplus. When the budget was substantially reworked several years ago, the goal was to create a surplus equal to one year's operating expenses; the Society has met this goal. Surplus monies will be used to fund existing programs including student awards, the Summer Institute, and so on.

Membership. Membership in the Society continues to grow; we ended 2002 with 3,738 members. Much of this growth is in student memberships.  Because not all eligible members renew (many students join to obtain lower conference registration rates), the Executive Committee spent some time considering how to retain members. The focus of this discussion was on finding out what members need, and how best to meet these needs. Teaching issues and training opportunities were discussed at some length. If you have suggestions for meeting the needs of the membership, please send a note to the Editors of Dialogue (our e-mail addresses are on the back page). We will pass these comments on the Executive Committee, and if enough responses are generated, we will summarize them in a future Dialogue issue.

Convention. The general consensus is that the SPSP Convention continues to be a success. There were some 1,500 attendees at the 2003 meeting in Los Angeles, our largest group to date. A few glitches in the program were reported, including not enough chairs (to sit in) for one session, and another that was very nearly shut down by the Hilton conference staff. Some people expressed frustration that the Award winners were not given time to speak, and there are continuing concerns about balancing the program between social and personality psychology and accommodating more people who want to speak. Still, the overwhelming feeling is that the SPSP meeting is a conference many people want to attend.

The 2004 meeting is slated for Austin, Texas, in a downtown Hilton that is currently under construction but due to be fully operational about one month prior to the conference. Because this is

a brand new property, the Society was able to negotiate favorable terms for the Convention. Rooms will cost $135 a night, and several exhibition and general purpose rooms will be made available to SPSP at no charge. A welcoming reception is planned, with 2 free drinks per attendee, what are described as "heavy appetizers" (we hope this refers to amount available, rather than the resultant weight in the

stomach), and "theme decoration."

 There is some small chance that construction delays will push us out of this hotel. If that is the case, then Hilton has guaranteed SPSP the same rate at another Hilton property that is mutually agreeable. Developments will be announced on the SPSP web site, the SPSP-Listserv, and in the pages of Dialogue (see story on page 1).

SPSP is planning on setting up a web survey on how the SPSP convention went, with the intention of getting specific feedback to help plan future meetings. The link to the URL with the survey will appear at the SPSP.org web site, and will be announced, when available, on the SPSP-Listserv. 

The Society is now looking at potential 2005 SPSP Conference sites. Some early possibilities are St. Augustine, Sarasota, Jacksonville, Tampa, San Diego, Mobile, New Orleans, and Salt Lake City.

Australasian Fellow. SPSP and the

Australasian Society of Social Psychology jointly sponsor a scholarly exchange between North America and Australasia, where a distinguished scholar is invited to present a colloquium or workshop on a specific topic. The Society funds travel and expenses of the scholar, and the host institution invites scholars and students from the area for her or his workshop. The most recent SPSP-SASP Scholar was Jim Blascovich of UC-Santa Barbara, who was invited to Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia (see p.

17 for an account). The next SPSPSASP Scholar will be a member of SASP who will visit North America.

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The State of the Society, Continued

(Continued from page 2)

Publications Committee. The Executive Committee approved a change in the mission statement of PSPR (see story on p. 20). Discussion of PSPB highlighted the financial savings now that Jerry Suls’ editorial office has closed shop, and concerns

about the slipping impact rating of the

earliest possible moment.

SPSP is planning on                         

setting up a web survey A small number of students qualified for both the Student Travel Award and

on how the SPSP the Diversity Travel Award (which is convention went, with the funded by publishers). Students could

intention of getting    only win one travel award, and were made to choose which award they specific feedback to help preferred. The Executive Committee

plan future meetings.                    voted to add LGBT as a category of

those eligible for Diversity travel

some glitches, was viewed as a success (see stories on p. 8 and 17).

APA Programming. See the article on p. 13 describing the Division 9 convention schedule for APA 2003. The program chair for APA 2003 is Joe Tomaka; the 2004 Convention chair is Batja Mesquita.

Award Nominations. Several Award Committees are seeking nominations. SPSP instituted two service awards last year: One for service to the Society (won this past year by Bibb Latané) and one for service to the field (won by Fred Rhodewalt and Martin Chemers ). Nominations for this year’s service award winners should be sent to pastPresident Claude Steele ([email protected]). Nominations are also being sought for the

Theoretical Innovation Prize. 

Elections. A number of SPSP offices are up for election. Voting members of SPSP should have received a ballot along with this issue of Dialogue.

On the horizon. Harry Reis will be ending his term as Executive Officer of SPSP at the end of 2004. The Executive Committee began contemplating the search to fill this important position. A search committee of current and former Executive Officers will be formed, and a slate of candidates will be presented to the Executive Committee for a vote and formal selection. ■

Theoretical Innovation Prize Winners

Inaugural Round Winners Based on Papers by Blanton & Christie, Fleeson, and Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond & Robins

By Dan Wegner

The Society is pleased to announce three co-winners of the 2002 Theoretical Innovation Prize.  This is the inaugural year for the Theoretical Innovation Prize, and the competition for the prize was strong.  Over 30 papers were nominated from across the full range of personality and social psychology, and the Prize Committee (Dan Wegner, Jeff Greenberg, Joanne Wood, and Robert Zajonc) reviewed these along with all theoretical papers published in the major journals of the field dating from May, 2001 through May, 2002.  The winners represent noteworthy examples of innovation and excellence that are sure to influence the scientific study of personality and social psychology for years to come.

The award winning papers are:

Blanton, H., Christie, C. (in press). Deviance regulation: A theory of action and identity. Review of General Psychology  (Hart Blanton, Department of Psychology, CB# 3270, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3270; [email protected])

The deviance regulation theory proposes that actions translate into meaningful identities to the extent that they cause the individual to deviate from reference group norms.  In particular, the theory holds that people self-regulate more on the basis of the perceived social consequences of deviating from behavioral norms than on the basis of the perceived social consequences of conforming to behavioral norms. The strongest evidence supporting the theory so far concerns persuasion in the context of promotion of health behavior, but the paper uses the theory to generate a wide range of fascinating hypotheses concerning such topics as identity formation and change, conformity and deviance, collective and individual self, and attitude change.  The elegance of the theory and its generative power suggest that it will have an influential role to play in the future of social psychology.

 Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80,

1011-1027. (William Fleeson,

Department of Psychology, Wake

Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109;  [email protected]).

Fleeson argues that because an individual's behavior over time forms a distribution, traits are not best conceptualized as simply means across situations, but as density distributions

of states.  Trait concepts can thereby accommodate both impressive levels of within-person stability and impressive levels of within-person variability.  This orientation helps to integrate personality with social psychological ways of thinking about the causes of human behavior.  In contrast to a traditional trait-as-cause view, Fleeson proposes that the typical individual routinely exhibits nearly all levels of all Big Five traits in his or her everyday behavior.  In contrast to a traditional situation-as-cause view, Fleeson proposes that the degree to which an individual's behavior is variable across situations is a stable, meaningful aspect of personality.  Although previous theorists certainly have wrestled with such issues, Fleeson pioneers an approach that fits the pieces together into a coherent theoretical whole.  Through novel and sophisticated analyses, Fleeson has created a theoretical synthesis that may well encourage integration between social and personality psychology.

Kwan, V.S.Y., John, O.P., Kenny, D. A., Bond, M. H., & Robins, R. W. (unpublished) Reconceptualizing individual differences in selfenhancement bias: An interpersonal approach. (Virginia S. Y. Kwan, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544-1010; [email protected]).

 Kwan and colleagues have developed a theoretical analysis based on an idea that is simple and compelling:  a person’s self-views can be compared to self's views of others, and to others' views of self.  So, we can be selfenhancing in one way, or in the other, and the two have different causes and effects.  The analysis of these different forms of self-enhancement through the Social Relations Model treats selfperception as a special case of social perception, and indicates that selfenhancement effects are logically divisible into these two distinct kinds. This analysis separates components of self-enhancement that were previously confounded in research and theory.  A distinction now can be made between self-enhancement as a bias in social comparison and self-enhancement as a bias in self-insight.  Kwan and colleagues use evidence from an illustrative study, and from a review of relevant literature, to substantiate their theoretical advance and show its potential for the study of adjustment.  This integrative model goes beyond theory to provide important conceptual and methodological tools for future research in the psychology of self.

For information about submitting manuscripts for the next TIP Award, please watch the SPSP website. ■

By Jack Dovidio

The Winter SPSP Publications Committee Meeting produced several notes of good news for the Society. The three main publications, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), Personality and Social

Psychology Review (PSPR), and Dialogue are all prospering. 

The Publication Committee expressed its gratitude to Jerry Suls, who has completed his editorial service for the Society. Under Jerry’s leadership, PSPB has continued to be published on time, increased the number of articles per issue, broken the record for submissions in a year, and has reduced its publication lag significantly (to about nine months). 

Fred Rhodewalt has also completed his first year as Editor of PSPB with great success. He has assembled an outstanding editorial team, consisting of Vicki Helgeson, Margo Monteith, Paula Niedenthal, William Rholes, William von Hippel, and Stephen Wright. 

The journal received 451 new submissions in 2002. The current acceptance rate is 17%, with a mean editorial lag for action letters under nine weeks. Fred reported that the reorganization of PSPB’s editorial operations around a central office has improved the efficiency of the operation and has permitted more detailed tracking of manuscript progress. 

The Society is also optimistic about the publication of a thirteenth annual issue of PSPB that represents the SPSP

Convention Program and abstracts. 

Over the past year, however, there have been slight decreases in subscriptions for PSPB, probably due to the combination of the economic climate and the availability of electronic subscriptions to libraries, and in citation rankings of the journal. Nevertheless, the Publications Committee was pleased with the journal and the journal operations and was confident about PSPB’s continued leadership position in the field.  

The news about PSPR was also very good. Eliot Smith, who previously agreed to extend his term as Editor, reported a record number of submissions (73) for 2002, the third straight year of an increase. Acceptance rate was 19% (close to the historical 20% rate for PSPR), and editorial lag is consistently under 12 weeks. 

Although official citation impact ratings for PSPR will not be available until later this year, it is estimated that the journal may rank as high as number 2 in social psychology (behind Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).  

Eliot announced that Diane Mackie was stepping down from her duties as Associate Editor of PSPR at the end of 2002; Garth Fletcher was approved to replace her. The Publications Committee expresses its gratitude to Diane for her outstanding service to the journal and to the Society. 

The Publications Committee also endorsed a modification of the journal’s mission statement, which clarifies that PSPR’s primary goal is the advancement of theory in social and personality psychology. Thus, although methodological pieces that make substantial contributions to theory are still appropriate for PSPR, purely methodological papers (e.g., critiques of some specific measure or method in the empirical literature) are no longer accepted for review (see p. 20 for the full text of the old and new statements).  In terms of finances, Harry Reis reported that PSPR is now making money for the Society —slightly ahead of the originally projected timetable. The Publications Committee, however, felt that the number of library subscriptions should be higher and is planning a new advertising campaign for later this year. We encourage you to search your university’s library holdings for PSPR and make the appropriate acquisition request if it is not available. 

In addition, the Publications Committee applauded the work of Chris Crandall and Monica Biernat on Dialogue. The Committee recognized the importance of Dialogue as a newsletter for the organization and praised its quality. 

Finally, Joanne Wood was appointed the Chair of the Student Publication Award Committee for 2003. 

Overall, the Publications Committee felt that the Society’s publications were in excellent shape in the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, in their professional quality, and in their financial health. The Society is fortunate to have such responsible and dedicated members in these key editorial leadership positions. ■ 

The Counterfactual Conference 

(That Might Have Been)

success.¹⁰ On the airport bus, Keith

Markman was also anxious to plan next year’s event. We need to acknowledge that this conference was a loss he said. That’s the only way we’re going to figure out how to make things better for next year.¹¹ Some of the other organizers were less keen to

dwell on what might have been. We are

all sitting her thinking ‘if only…’ but that’s not

going to explain why things went wrong said David Mandel.¹² Ahogni N’gbala

agreed, just because some of us need to do things differently next year, that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily to blame for this disaster.¹³

 Notes

1

 Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic & A. Tversky (Eds.) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201208). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

² Kahneman, D. & Varey, C.A. (1990). Propensities and counterfactuals: The loser that almost won. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1101-1110.

³ Wells, G.L., & Gavanski, A. (1989). Mental simulation of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 161-169. ⁴ Davis, C.G., Lehman, D.R., Wortman, C.B., Silver, R.C., & Thompson, S.C. (1995). The undoing of traumatic life events.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 557-567.

⁵ McCloy, R., & Byrne, R.M.J. (2000). Counterfactual thinking about controllable events. Memory & Cognition, 28, 1071-1078.

⁶ McGill, A.L. (1993). Selection of a causal background: Role of expectation versus feature mutability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 701-707.

⁷ Miller, D., Taylor, B., & Buck, M. (1990).

Gender gaps: Who needs to be explained? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 5-12.

Training Committee Considers New Initiatives

major survey of graduate student

Graduate Student Committee Expands Services to SPSP Student Members

• Policymaking and advocacy workshops, invited speakers • Media training

• A network of graduate program chairs in personality and social psychology • A teaching exchange in which people share syllabi and other materials • Other resources for first-time teachers

• Professional issues and ethics

• Resources for assistant professors • Model training programs that take a proactive approach to ethics education • Conference programming (e.g, a roundtable on "negotiating academia") • Fostering a collaborative climate for research • Facilitating informal programming

(e.g., research breakfasts) at SPSP

Please send feedback or suggestions regarding any of these initiatives (or new ones not listed here) to me at [email protected] or to Allen Omoto ([email protected]) or Yuichi Shoda ([email protected]). ■

elections and will soon be welcoming new members Jonca Jacek-Jacinski, Chandra Osborn, Michele SchlehoferSutton, and Arlen Moller, while saying goodbye to Amanda Scott, Megan Kozak, and Josephine Korchmaros.

Based on suggestions from new committee members and graduate students, we have a large number of projects on the drawing board this year. Along with the Graduate Student Poster Award, the graduate student committee would like to sponsor a formal mentoring lunch at SPSP 2004.  Because APA sponsors a half-day academic career pre-conference, we are also exploring options to collaborate with them by adding another half-day for non-academic career opportunities.  Aside from conference activities, we will be conducting a web-based survey of graduate students and their academic training programs, increasing the publication frequency of the Forum to

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PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Using SPSP’s Strengths To Study Modern Problems

By Jim Blascovich

Greetings and best wishes to the membership of SPSP. By all accounts, the Society continues to thrive, building on past efforts and reaching out in even stronger ways to our membership including, especially, our student members and members of under-represented groups. 

We owe a debt of gratitude to our convention committee (Dan Cervone, Rick Hoyle, and Lynne Cooper) including, especially, our program chair (Tim Strauman) for our recent stellar meeting in Los Angeles. Anyone who attended the meeting should have no doubt about the health and vigor of personality and social psychology and the effectiveness of our Society.

In contrast, with the country involved in turmoil vis-à-vis the war in Iraq these days, many have doubts about the health, vigor, and effectiveness of U.S. society. I do not presume, of course, to speak on behalf of the membership regarding politics, national or international. 

However, upon reflecting how the world situation has played out, it seems to me that personality and social psychologists should have something to say about the antecedents and consequences of the war in Iraq and ought to say something as well. Historically, societal issues and upheavals have stimulated our fields.

Personality and social psychology really began to thrive during and after World War II. Indeed, many of the founders of our fields, while serving in the military or the U.S. government, began important areas of research during the war, areas that became

cornerstones of personality and social psychology. Persuasion and attitude change, leadership and group dynamics, and personality testing perhaps topped the list. Later, the civil rights movement gave impetus to the study of stereotypes, prejudice, and stigma. The women’s movement prodded us to extend our work into the area of gender roles.

Although the Vietnam War stimulated the study of peace and conflict resolution, even with the notable work of individuals such as Dean Pruitt and Morton Deutsch, research efforts in these areas have not topped the research agendas of many of us. Multinational interests and conflicts have more recently led to a rise or a rebirth of interest in culture, personality, and social psychology. Though many worry about a war of civilizations driven by conflicting values and beliefs, research on values and religion even within western culture remains relatively sparse in our fields.

Perhaps it is too early to tell how current events will influence personality and social psychology. Nevertheless, I am surprised that despite the tragedy of 9/11, few of us seem to be concerned as scientists about the personality and social psychology of terrorism, fundamentalism, and the abrogation of basic freedoms, though Tom

Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and

Jeff Greenberg’s In the Wake of 9/11 is an important exception.

In my opinion, the inter- and intrasocietal disturbances the world faces should motivate us to test and define our theories as well as to develop new ones. If a prosocial world is a goal to which we can subscribe, to borrow a phrase, there is “nothing so practical as a good theory.” ■

By R. B. Zajonc

 Les mots justes

The fabulous nineteenth-century French writer, Gustave Flaubert is known for his exquisite diction. He labored meticulously over his choice of words, agonizing often for hours over a single word. In his view, there always was the perfect, the right word—le mot juste. If a thought, an image, a suggestion is to be faithfully conveyed, if the writer and the reader are to fuse their minds in a joint understanding, the proper words must be found. In fact, Flaubert wrote that for each thought, for every image, there is one-and-onlyone right word—le seul mot juste. Thus, he argued, there are no synonyms since semantic approximations are invalid. 

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have convincingly demonstrated the power of the metaphor, especially in political discourse. The metaphor of the “parasite” is invoked to justify another metaphor, “ethnic cleansing.” A growing domain of political expertise became known by yet another metaphor—the ”spin-doctors.” But spin-doctors supply politicians not only with metaphors. They offer them also words of power, which are not metaphors but plain nominal terms. 

Metaphors have a powerful influence on political and literary discourse, but they do not create realities quite as readily as nominal terms. During the cold war there was a fear of a “ladder of escalation” and of a “slippery slope”, but there was no real slipping or climbing of ladders. However, plain and propitiously chosen nominal terms can and do create an ugly and dangerous reality.

I limit my discussion here to what are preemptive words. In political polemic, preemptive words constrain our perception, generate favorable or hostile attitudes, and seek commitment to action. The media, the politicians, the commentators, the  country’s leadership are all very careful about what words to impose on a given reality. I say impose, because the words not only represent a reality but often create one. Preemptive words create new realities in science, literature, politics, and in our daily lives. The advertising industry excels in crafting words that promise multi-billion dollar profits.

In the context of the recent political events, the preemptive word evil has suddenly become highly conspicuous. As of this writing, it has found its way into 189 New York Times articles in the last 30 days. A September 24, 2001 Wall Street Journal editorial rejoiced because now we may “call evil by its real name.” The terrorists are evil, say the media. Their acts are evil pure and simple, says the government. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are both evil. The November 12, 2002 letter from the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naji Sabri Ahmed, accepting the United Nations resolution 1441 contains numerous instances of the evil United States. It refers to the United States government as the “gang of evil.” It calls the pressure put on the United States for a firm resolution “extremely evil and shameful.” It sees the United States brandishing “the dagger of evil.” It asserts that the United States “threatens the world with their evil schemes.” It denies that Iraq has the possession of weapons of mass destruction “whether nuclear, chemical or biological as claimed by evil

people.” 

Evil is not a metaphor. Evil is a preemptive word. It is preemptive because it imposes on us only one form of understanding, only one meaning— for evil is he whose actions are dictated by Satan. Hence those who are evil are a mortal threat. There is just one course of action—extermination.

What does it mean for evil to be a preemptive word?

The word evil pretends to explain adversaries’ actions, it imputes to them a satanic origin, and it conjures apocalyptic threat, but offers only one response–extermination. The rhetoric represents the enemy as a source of formidable threat that will not disappear without the total destruction of the target. Hence, a reality is created whereby a preemptive word may promote a preemptive war. There is just one course of action against evil. If it’s evil, kill it. Here is what Senator John McCain suggests: “Shed a tear and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can and as ruthlessly as we must” (Wall Street Journal).

Preemptive terms in psychology

Psychology, in fact all science, is not free of preemptive words. The words of psychologists doing research, building theories, formulating explanations of perplexing phenomena, have profound consequences. It makes a serious difference whether we call a phenomenon non-contingent negative reinforcement or learned helplessness. There is an enormous difference between a program we want to call affirmative action and a program we insist on calling racial preference. And pro-choice is quite different from prolife. I cite two examples of word power

(Continued on page 11)

Power of Words, Cont.

(Continued from page 10) from our own field that in my opinion did more harm than good. I also cite an example that had seminal properties suggesting novel and even revolutionary theories. 

Emotional expression

Few would disagree that Darwin’s book on The expression of the emotions in man and animals constitutes the very center of all emotion theories that followed him. Yet few realize that Darwin had no vital interest in the emotions. His aim was not so much to offer an explanatory theory of the emotions but to demonstrate that emotional expressions and, therefore, the emotions themselves, manifest a remarkable universality–a proxy for the theory of natural selection. His book is essentially a long list of examples of universality of emotional expression, not only across human cultures but across a large number of species as well. His examples of universality were not there to explain emotions, but to furnish yet another proof for the theory of natural selection. He concludes his book by affirming that the universality of emotional expressions is indeed a further demonstration of how “man is

derived from some lower animal form.”

Since Darwin’s volume was first published, the term emotional expression has played a central role in theories of emotions that were spawned by it. It has played a central role because it is a very engaging concept. And it is an engaging concept because it is a preemptive concept. Emotional expression is a preemptive term because it imposes on us a particular theory of emotions; it implies relationships, processes, and phenomena for which we had no evidence at the time of Darwin and we do not have much more evidence for them today because we never had to prove them.

To be specific. If we accept Darwin’s preemptive concept of emotional expression we must also accept all the implicit meanings and associations that go with it. For instance, emotional expression implies that for each emotion there exists a distinct internal state. That there are these distinct and identifiable states is clearly implied by the fact that Darwin’s title reads THE expression of THE emotions in man and animals. For example, it is asserted that the internal state of anger has a distinct manifestation in facial expression and bodily posture, different from the expression of fear or disgust.

The concept of emotional expression also implies that this distinctive state, the emotion, seeks externalization. It follows therefore, that if external manifestation does not occur for some emotional instigations, then there must exist a process capable of suppressing it. 

If there is a one-to-one correspondence between the internal state and its external manifestation, then it follows that once we have a thorough classification of the expressions, we will simultaneously have an equivalent classification of the emotions. But consider the consequences. If the classification of the emotions derives preemptively from their external behavioral manifestations, no other basis of classification need be (or, in fact, was) considered. And thus we have today, by acclamation, six categories of the so-called basic emotions–sadness, joy, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise, based entirely on their facial myogenic displays. There are, of course, some other classifications (e.g., Plutchick, 1980; Ellsworth, 1995; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), but the vast majority of empirical research accepts the six –fold category system. 

Now, why are the six “basic”? The six emotions were declared basic because their facial expressions–i.e., muscular configurations—happened to be distinguishable more reliably from each other than some other expressions such as, for example, greed, envy, or boredom. Is this, however, the very best way of classifying emotions? There are no solid theoretical grounds for the claim that they are in fact basic in the sense, for instance, that other more complex emotions, such as greed, envy, or boredom can be distinguished by a systematic combinations of some of the basic six.

Nor are there solid empirical grounds for the assumption of a full correspondence between the specific internal emotional states, their expressions and other emotion correlates. The empirical correspondence between the specific expressions and the specific autonomic reactions, for example, or the subjective states, was found in fact to be negligible (Zajonc & McIntosh, 1992). 

What follows if some of these untested assumptions are false? Because the concept of emotional expression implies a one-to-one correspondence between expressions and their internal states, if such a correspondence does not fully exist, then if there are some emotions that have no corresponding external manifestations, these emotions will never be known. 

The power of the preemptive concept of emotional expression was so remarkable that any theory daring to challenge the implications of the concept was summarily dismissed. For example, the radical idea of William James that the feeling follows the emotion—that we don’t run because we

are afraid but are afraid because we 

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The Preemptive Power of Words,

Continued

against the bony structure of the face, facial expression is also capable of regulating blood flow to the brain, and thus of changing the subjective experiences of emotions. There actually is some good evidence for Waynbaum’s theory (Zajonc, Murphy & Inglehart, 1989) although it relies more on blood temperature than on blood flow. I cite this theory to illustrate the power of Darwin’s ideas, because like James, Waynbaum was memory, mainly because much of cognitive theory was developed on the computational model that doesn’t feature recollection as a significant process. The concept of retrieval, unlike the concept of evil or expression, is a metaphor, a preemptive metaphor nevertheless. 

Benefits of preemption

In all cases, words have constraining effects for they guide a theory and analysis in a particular direction that excludes alternatives. However, such a

constraint may be damaging or beneficial. A propitious choice of words may constrain a theoretical development suggesting seminal implications. A good example is a set of well-known phenomena investigated by Tversky and Kahneman. One wellknown phenomenon involved the overestimation of frequency by virtue of its availability to memory. Another was the discounting of probabilities by virtue of individuating representative information. These and similar phenomena could have been labeled biases, algorithms, models, schemas, fallacies, etc. Tversky and Kahneman, however, chose the term heuristics, a more productive term than any of the others. Bias suggests nothing more than a departure from randomness. It does not give us any insight into the psychological nature of this departure from randomness, of the cognitive domain that should be inspected for its nature, or the class of concepts that should be invoked to take us to possible explanations. The remaining alternatives are no better. But heuristics constrains us in a felicitous direction. It guides us to view the phenomenon as a particular and a habitual way of formulating a problem that can be specified, analyzed and decomposed

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Preemptive Power of 

Words, Continued

(Continued from page 12) into its elementary processes.

So what?

Nothing in the above should lead us to establish a word police, to enter a caveat in the APA Publication Manual, or rewrite our textbooks. For when a new concept or term is introduced, we are not immediately aware of its theoretical and empirical influence. Only years of usage and discourse make us aware of its heuristic value and its preemptive qualities. But then it is too late to change. So at best, we can be aware of the preemptive power of words in our research, in our publication, and in our instruction. 

 References

Ellsworth, P. C. (1995). The right way to study emotions. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 213-216. 

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980).

Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 

Mesquita, B, & Frijda, N, H, (1992). Cultural variations in emotions: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 179-204.

Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotions: A psychoevolutionary synthesis. New York: Harper & Row.

Waynbaum, I. (1907). La physionomie humaine: Son mécanisme et son role social. Paris: Alcan. 

Zajonc, R. B., & McIntosh, D. N. (1992). Emotion research: Some promising questions and questionable promises. Psychological Science, 3, 70-74. 

Zajonc, R. B., Murphy, S. T., & Inglehart, M. (1989). Feeling and facial efference: Implications of the vascular theory of emotion.

Psychological Review, 96, 395-416.

■

APA In Toronto:

2003 Convention

By Joe Tomaka

 Cluster programming involves clusters of divisions with like interests.  This year, Division 8 was clustered with

Update on GASP, the GLBT Alliance in Social and Personality Psychology

By Lisa Aspinwall

The last several months have been busy ones for GASP.  We received an interdivisional grant from APA to support the GASP Measures Project and other improvements to our web site (see details below), we hosted a graduate student coffee hour, organizational meeting, and after-party at SPSP, and drum roll, please, saw the SPSP Executive Committee vote to add

LGBT students to the Diversity Travel

Awards program.  With this vote, LGBT students are now fully, publicly, and explicitly included in all SPSP diversity programs, which was one of GASP's major goals.

Celebrate Inclusion!  Please send

contributions to Diversity Travel

Awards

Help us provide an illustration that inclusion pays— please join us in celebrating the full inclusion of LGBT students in all SPSP diversity programs by sending a check to SPSP at the address below.

Make the check out to SPSP and be sure to include a note that it is a contribution to the diversity fund.  (Yes, it's tax-deductible, and even a penny will help.)  These funds are used exclusively for the travel award program.

Attn:  Diversity Travel Fund

Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology      

University of Rochester

Rochester, NY  14627

Let's show SPSP that fair-minded folks support diversity in all its forms— wouldn't it be great if the vote to include LGBT students was followed by an avalanche of checks, large and small, from all over the world?

GASP Measures Project Funded, Seeks

Submissions from Researchers

Lisa Diamond, Allen Omoto, and I have received an interdivisional grant from APA (sponsored by Divisions 8, 9, and 44) to put together a web-based annotated database of measures useful for research on lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender issues and populations, and we would like your input.

We'd like for this free public resource to provide "one-stop shopping" for researchers working on these issues, so that if researchers want to have a look at all the different measures of (for example) internalized homophobia, or identity development, or gender atypicality, or heterosexism, they can find .pdf versions of these measures, along with detailed psychometric information on their reliability and validity in different samples, full citation info, metaanalyses and other examples of the use of this measure, etc., all in one place. The project is being conducted under the auspices of GASP and when completeled, will be accessible through the GASP web site at www.psych.utah.edu/gasp.  Here's where we'd really like input.  Are there particular measures that you know of that you would like us to include, including measures you might have designed and/or tested yourself?  Do you have any interesting or important technical information about existing measures (i.e., test-retest reliability, information about its appropriateness for certain subpopulations, etc.)?  In order to make this resource as comprehensive, highquality, and useful as possible, we really need input from people who have used these measures or plan to do so.

Please e-mail suggestions, measures, validating information, and other materials directly to Lisa Diamond at [email protected].

You may also write to GASP at [email protected]. 

GASP Discussion Forum Launched

The APA interdivisional grant has also funded improvements to the GASP web site.  Chief among these is the new GASP Discussion Forum, accessible through the GASP home page.  The forum allows visitors to post topics and questions for discussion and for replies to be threaded (kept organized) with the original question for people at read at their leisure.  We are hoping GASP's 82-members-and-counting and other interested members of our field will use this forum to discuss research, professional issues, future conference symposia, job-search and interviewing strategies, ethical issues, teaching tips, and other topics. As with all GASP programs, participation will not be tracked in any way— no record is kept of who logged in or where people logged in, and each user will be asked to create a personal ID and password.  Please read the GASP Privacy Policy on the web site if you have any other concerns.

Suggestions Sought for New GASP

Initiatives 

As always, suggestions for new GASP initiatives are welcome.  Please write to [email protected] or to me

directly at [email protected]. ■

APA Council Report:

The February 2003 Meeting

than before), the Association’s net worth has eroded by about 33% owing to losses from stock investments. In addition, on a yearly basis, operating expenses have risen modestly, while revenues have dropped. 

Another agenda item of interest to SPSP members concerned the evaluation(s) of the new “cluster” format for the APA convention. Two independent evaluations were presented to Council—one conducted by the APA Board of Convention Affairs and the other by the Council-appointed APA Convention Evaluation Committee. 

The evaluations came to quite different conclusions. The Board of Convention Affairs report concluded that the restructured cluster format was a success, largely appreciated by conference goers; the Councilappointed Committee concluded that the new format was unsuccessful, citing various problems from the Divisions’ perspective. 

Representing Division 8, we conveyed our group’s frustration with the reduced number of program hours and with the make-up of our cluster (e.g., Division 38, Health Psychology and Division 8 were placed in different clusters). 

At the meeting of CASAP (the science caucus), science-based divisions expressed similar concerns. So clearly the convention format will continue to be re-examined. We favor a format that would allow divisions to voluntarily participate in cluster programming if they wish.

All in all, it was an interesting meeting —one cut short by one of the largest winter storms ever experienced by the DC area. (We narrowly escaped being snowed in for several more days with the other 198 Council members—now

there’s a scene to contemplate!) 

 We encourage members of Division 8 to become actively involved in APA affairs—especially the very influential Boards and Committees, many of which bear directly on matters of concern to Personality and Social

Psychology. ■

Membership Trends in SPSP, from 1988 to 2002:

In Figure 1, above, one can see that the overall growth in the income and spending of SPSP has increased dramatically over the past 15 years.  In Figure 2, below, one can see that this is  consistent with the overall growth of the organization.

Graduate Student Poster Awards and Honorable Mentions

Virtual Reality Workshop Summary: SASP-SPSP Teaching Fellowship

By Kipling D. Williams                   Lectures included an introduction to

virtual reality (or immersive virtual

environments), its uses in social

The first exchange of the SASP-SPSP

psychology and other related areas,

International Teaching Fellowship

programming issues, Jim’s theory of occurred May 20-24, 2002, at

social influence as it related to

Macquarie University in Sydney

immersive virtual environments, issues

Australia. Professor Jim Blascovich

related to copyright and ownership of and Dr. Andy Beall, of the University

VR worlds, and ethics. of California – Santa Barbara, gave a 5-

 day workshop on the use of virtual

Two teams were created to develop reality technology in social psychology. their own virtual worlds to be used in

research. Team 1 created a “chicken

Invitations were sent on to post-

paradigm” virtual world in which the graduate students and academic staff,

participant walks down a narrow and 12 participants showed up from

hallway as an on-comer approaches.

Australia, New Zealand, and even the

The program measures if and when the US.  participants steps aside. Waiting till the

last second to move aside is a measure

The workshop was intensive—it started

of aggression. Team 2 created a virtual each morning at 8:30am and ended

ball-toss world (that takes place on a around 10:00pm. Mini-lectures were

sunny beach in Sydney), for purposes interspersed with hands-on

of conducting ostracism research. programming, using VRUT, a language

 developed by Andy Beall. 

Mid-week, Jim gave a Macquarie University Colloquium that attracted wide attention and interest. On the last day, Australia’s leading Science Show sent a reporter to cover the workshop, which aired on national radio.

For a first hand report of the specific activities each day, check out PhD student Cassie Govan’s account at  http://www.psy.mq.edu.au/staff/kip/ virtual.htm

All in all, it was a very successful inauguration of the SASP-SPSP International Teaching Fellowship, and we look forward to having a fruitful collaboration with SPSP in the future. 

The next exchange will be an Australasian social psychologist giving a workshop in the US. Information about submissions can be found at http://www.spsp.org/sasp.htm. ■

Which Scientific Problems to Pursue II?

Eminent Social/Personality Psychologists Reveal Their Secrets of When to Give Up to the Editors of Dialogue

One of the most difficult and important problems for a scientist is deciding when  you have reached a personal dead end. This question is rarely answered during graduate education.; peers are frequently too kind, and faculty may have difficulty articulating ways to value some ideas and eschew others. To speak to these issues, Dialogue asked a handful of social and personality psychologists to answer two questions. The first was: How do you know which idea to pursue? This question was covered in the most recent issue of Dialogue (see Vol. 17, 2, pp.12-15). The second question is the focus of this issue: How do you know when to give up on a problem? 

One of the previous Editors of Dialogue, Roy Baumeister, wrote that "I had started writing an Editorial for Dialogue on revising one's views—we tend to criticize people who change their opinions and admire those who are consistent, but the field would be better served by the reverse." It is clear that persistence is sometimes called for, and in other cases, a strategic retreat is the better part of valor. How does one balance determination with discretion?

We chose a handful of prominent researchers, not only for their excellence in research, but also because they have chosen interesting problems and have at some time in their careers shifted to new and different projects. The responses below are edited and organized by the Dialogue editors. 

The most common response was a combination of two ideas—a loss of interest in the problem, and the well running dry on new ideas.

Bob Cialdini: Bail out when you hear yourself begin to plan the next study with the words “Well, I guess we could manipulate X and just see what

happens.”

Dan Wegner: I give up when I'm bored. Maybe I can write two papers that sort of say the same thing, but if I launch into a third, I rapidly lose interest and begin playing with my buttons. Losing interest is the first step toward burnout, which of course results in alcoholism and widespread social unrest...but perhaps you get the point. One of the great benefits of academic life is that we can do things that interest us (rather than boring things that pay well), and I'm keen to retain that benefit every day of the week. 

Boredom is also a social disease. How often have you paged through a journal, seen some author's name, and thought quickly to yourself: "No reason to read this. Same old same old." My dread at garnering that reaction is so profound that I always opt to be a moving target. This means that instead of following the time-honored "win-stay, lose-shift" rule (continue with a research program that is getting published and getting attention, leave one that is not doing so well), I often leave things even as they are winning. This doesn't mean quitting before doing something right—you do need to wrap the gifts in pretty packages or no one will want to open them. But nobody ever walked out of a talk complaining that it was too short. There is something delightfully satisfying about saying just enough on a topic and then leaving the building.

Jack Brehm: As soon as doing that research has become boring, which means that one is learning nothing new even though continued research may be publishable. A much more difficult problem arises when a particular empirical relationship must be established in order to proceed to more interesting theory-building. If it then turns out to be difficult or impossible to obtain reliable support for the needed empirical relationship, a question can easily arise about how persistently one should try. It goes without saying that if one cannot make an empirical demonstration of an obvious idea, then one is missing something important, and that is, unfortunately, the very condition, a puzzle, that should give rise to an idea. So the problem may be in the very obviousness of the idea, and that can be a tough nut to crack. 

The cost of pursuing such an endeavor can be discouraging to everyone involved. While the tenured professor can pursue a difficult problem, graduate students (or untenured faculty) should not be asked to spend a lot of their time on it. However, to look at the other side of the coin, we can ask how long a person might have taken to think about a puzzle before finding an intuitively compelling explanation. For myself I can say that periods from months to years have elapsed while I mulled over certain puzzles.

The second most common reason that scientists said they dropped ideas was based on the data themselves. Certainly scientists should pay attention when the data are generally uncooperative.

Roy Baumeister: I abandon my ideas pretty fast when the studies don't work!

Dick Nisbett: If I hit a dry hole twice in a row, or if the magnitude of the effect is so weak as to be uninteresting. Knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em is also a learnable skill. A couple of times I saw Stanley Schachter work very hard on a project that wasn't working out and then just drop it. That can be very hard to do, especially when you're young and need to show you can accomplish something, but it's no less important then. You have to keep in mind that you don't want to be a sunk cost sucker—working on something simply because you've already worked so hard

(Continued on page 19)

Which Scientific

Problem to Pursue?  

(Continued from page 18) on it. 

Marilynn Brewer: I guess the scientifically correct answer here would be “when the data prove it to be wrong.” But, of course, ideas are almost never abandoned just because of recalcitrant data. Ideas are modified, qualified, and complexified in response to new data, but rarely abandoned. So what does it mean to “give up” on an idea? I guess in my case it would happen when the idea has had to be modified and qualified to the point where it is in danger of collapsing of its own weight. I don’t think parsimony is a necessary criterion of good theory, but I do like elegance. In fact, I hate inelegant theories. If models become too complex, it’s probably a signal to move up to a higher level of abstraction. A more positive spin on when to stop pursuing an idea is when other people have picked it up and are taking it into new areas and applications. To me that is the best outcome; to be able to stop doing research on my own theories because what was a new idea is now an “old” one.

Elliot Aronson: No matter how pretty or compelling an idea might be, there comes a time when one is forced to give it up. If I make three or four unsuccessful passes at demonstrating an idea in the laboratory, I am ready to conclude that either the idea is wrong or I'm simply not smart enough to find a sensible way to test it. Either way, after three or four unsuccessful attempts, I'm usually ready to conclude that it's time for me to move on so that I can use my energy in more productive ways.

Some of the scientists acknowledged both a loss of new ideas and uncooperative data: 

Galen Bodenhausen: I guess there is a negative subjective state that serves as a stop signal. Actually, I think there are two—one is a negative aesthetic experience that arises when ideas prove to be more complex and incoherent than expected (as when data are inconsistent or uncooperative), and one that is a state of boredom, when an idea loses its ability to capture the imagination because it has been mined out or has been incorporated fully into one's background assumptions.

Brenda Major: Have I answered the question to my satisfaction?  Am I totally frustrated by a spate of nonfindings? Am I bored?

Bob Sternberg: 1. When you are totally bored with the idea. 2. When everyone else has become bored with the idea. 3. When, try as you might, you can't get the idea to work—you need to put it away and incubate on it for a while. 4. When journal after journal or granting agency after granting agency has rejected work based on it. The idea may still be good, but you are not presenting it effectively. You need to think about how to present it better, or else incubate on it. 5. When, deep in your heart, you know the idea stinks but you are so concerned about coming up with something, somehow, that you have lowered your standards below where they should be.

One social-personality psychologist wrote explicitly about timing, when the work is needed, or when people will pay attention to it.

Russell Spears: Generally perseverance pays off and you are more likely to have regret from not following up something than doing so. There is no point pursuing things past their sell-by date though (e.g., if a paradigm has moved on). It is nice to be working on a topic that enjoys some cult status but is about to take off (easy to say, difficult to judge or make happen), but when a lot of people jump on the bandwagon it may be time to move on (distinctiveness counts!).

Some of the scientists suggested that one need never actually give up on an idea.

Daniel Gilbert: I never give up on ideas, though they often give up on me.

After enough experimental failures, I am usually willing to admit that I'm just not clever enough to find the context in which the idea is true, and trust that the idea itself would be much happier being tested by someone else. Of course, I usually part company with ideas before I test them. There are more interesting ideas than there is time to develop them, and as my advisor told me in graduate school, a successful scientist is someone who knows what not to do.

Dan Batson: How do you know when to give up on an idea? Clearly, I don't!

Yoshi Kashima: A first point could be when experiments/studies don't work out at all. If nothing worked out in a couple of experiments, that'd be a good time to reassess the situation. Would I give up then? I'd say it depends.

Sometimes, it is worth persisting.

Another point could be when a first paper on the topic gets rejected by journals. If a first journal doesn't like it, I certainly wouldn't give up then. But, if half a dozen journals don't like it, I'd think carefully. Of course, journal editors could make mistakes (as we all know!). The idea could be so revolutionary that no one understands this . . . maybe.  Another point could be when a paper reviewing your own research program gets accepted by a review journal. I guess this could be a happy ending to your research program. But, one may still think there are many more things that one would want to and should do. Then, press on.

You could run out of steam, I suspect. Even if you could think of things to do, you might feel you just could not push yourself to do another study, write another paper, or supervise another student on the topic. Then, it's a high time to give up, I guess. But, I haven't been there yet. So I can't tell . . . social psychology is just too interesting. Any topic seems to have too many interesting angles to work on, and invite so many deep questions... Ask me the same questions in ten years, and

I might have different answers then, but

I doubt if I will. ■

PSPR Revises Mission Statement                  

Competition Stiff for Student Travel Awards By M. Lynne Cooper

Over 160 students applied for Student Travel Awards to attend the SPSP annual meeting held in Universal City in February of this year. Of the submitted applications, 158 were from students who were first or sole authors on posters; five were from students who were first or sole authors on symposium papers. Applications were independently rated by two members of the committee on : (1) quality of the abstract and (2) strength of the scholarly record (taking into account year in school). Forty awards of $300 were made. Recipients ranged from first-year to 5th year and beyond, and represented schools throughout the US and Canada. The quality of the applications was uniformly high , making selection difficult. Members of this year’s Student Travel Award Committee were: Lynne Cooper,

University of Missouri–Columbia;

Chris Fraley, University of Illinois at

Chicago Circle; Ron Friedman, University of Missouri–Columbia; and Catherine Sanderson, Amherst College. 

 2003 SPSP Travel Award Recipients

 Beilock, Sian; Birgegard, Andreas;

Bliss-Moreau, Eliza; Brackett, Marc

Burton, Chad; *Cheng, Clara

Cuddy, Amy; Ehrlinger, Joyce

Eyre, Heidi; Ford, Maire

Foster, Joshua; Gerend, Mary

Graham, Steven; Jones, John

Kang, So-Jin; Kay, Aaron

Kiene, Susan; Kopetz, Catalina

Kumkale, Tarcan; Lakin, Jessica

Maner, Jon; Marsh, Abigail

Mauss, Iris; Newman, Matthew

Niiya, Yu; Paluck, Elizabeth *Park, Lora; Petrocelli, John

Schmeichel, Brandon; Shrira, Ilan

Slone, Laurie; Stocker, Shevaun

Storbeck, Justin; Tracy, Jessica

Trzesniewski, Kali; Uskul, Ayse

Vaidya, Jatin; Vartanian, Lenny

Wang, Shirley; Webster, Gregory

Wohl, Michael; Yopyk, Darren

 *Declined award. ■

Passings

Donald W. Fiske, April 2003

Donald Fiske received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1948, and joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career. Fiske was one of the premier methodologists in psychology. His paper with D.T. Campbell, (1959) Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix,

Psychological Bulletin, 56, 81-105, is one of the most cited papers in psychology. He made substantial contributions to personality measurement and prediction, research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy, and the review process, among many others. His books include (with S. Maddi) (1961) Functions of varied experience, and (1971) Measuring the concepts of personality. Fiske had two children with his with Barbara— Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton, and Alan Page Fiske, a cognitive anthropologist at UCLA.

Paul Meehl, February 2003

Paul Meehl received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1945, was and spent his entire academic career there. In the 1960's, Meehl promoted the then-controversial notion that schizophrenia had a strong genetic component, now the accepted view. In his bombshell 1954 book, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction, he demonstrated that clinical judgment was a very poor predictor of behavior, especially as compared to personality tests and structured interviews. This book also was seminal in the attack on subjective confidence as evidence of accuracy. Meehl helped devise the MMPI, the most widely used psychological test outside of intelligence testing. Meehl was President of APA, and a recipienvt of APF Gold Medal Award, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Included among his many influential papers are (1948) On a distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables. Psychological Review, 55, 95-107 (with K. Maccorquodale), (1955) Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52, 281-302 (with L. Cronbach) and (1978) Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 806-834.

Harold H. Kelley, January 2003

Hal Kelley, Professor Emeritus at UCLA died of complications from colon cancer at age 81. Kelley's major contributions to the field include the study of the role of reference groups in communication and attitude change, the establishment (with John Thibaut) of interdependence theory, the integration of research on attribution theory, and the application of interdependence concepts to close relationships. Kelley completed his Ph.D. at the Research Center for Group

Dynamics in 1948 (under Doc Cartwright at MIT), and moved with the center to the University of Michigan. He also served on the faculties at Yale and Minnesota before his move to UCLA in

1961. Kelley was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Harold B. Gerard, January 2003

Hal Gerard, earned his Ph.D. in 1952 at the University of Michigan under the direction of Leon Festinger, and was Professor Emeritus at UCLA. Gerard was best known for his influential social psychology text, Foundations of Social Psychology, co-authored with Ned Jones, for his work on group influences on attitudes and behavior and cognitive dissonance theory, and for his early studies of school desegregation. Gerard . At age 59, he entered psychoanalytic training and then established a clinical practice while maintaining his faculty appointment at UCLA.

Magda Arnold, August 2002

Magda Arnold was born in Austria in

1903 and taught at the University of

Toronto, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and

Loyola University. She worked at

Toronto during World War II along with Mary Ainsworth and a number of other distinguished women who replenished faculties drawn down by the war. Her 1960 book Emotion and Personality was one of the first clear statements of the role of appraisal in human emotions, and focused on how emotions must be understood in terms of relations of the self to events, things, and other people. This work forms the foundation for later cognitively based emotion theorists, notably Richard Lazarus.

Richard S. Lazarus, November 2002

Richard Lazarus, Lazarus earned his

Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in

1947 and later served on the faculties of Johns Hopkins University and Clark

University before moving to Berkeley in 1957 to head the clinical psychology program. Lazarus received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution

Award in 1989 and named by the American Psychologist as one of the most influential psychologists in the history of the field, is best known for his work on cognition and emotion and stress and coping. Retired since 1991, Lazarus continued to write, producing 5 books and a recent critique of the "positive psychology" movement.

 James Tedeschi, December 2000

James Tedeschi received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and taught at Utah State University, the University of

Miami, the International University in

San Diego, and for over 30 years at University of Albany. Tedeschi published widely in the areas of selfpresentation, social power, selfpreservation, and violence and aggression. His books include Conflict, Power, and Games (1973), Social Psychology:

Interdependence, Interaction, and Influence

(1976), and (with R. Felson) Violence, Aggression, and Coercive Actions (1994). He received the Outstanding Educator Award from the American Education

Association.  ■

By S. Alexander Haslam  and Stephen Reicher

In Spring 2002, The BBC broadcast

The Experiment (Koppel & Mirsky, 2000), a four-part series that presented some of the findings from a large-scale study designed to explore the social psychology of groups and power.  The study received a fair amount of publicity — not all of it well-informed or accurate.  This was due in large part to the parallels between the research and the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues in the early 1970s.   As almost every psychology student knows, that earlier study had been conducted in a simulated prison environment, but had to be halted after six days when the brutality of participants who had been randomly assigned to be Guards got out of hand and was seriously compromising the welfare of those participants who had been designated to be Prisoners.

The role account

For Zimbardo’s research team, the conclusions to be drawn from this study were disturbingly clear.  Because the participants were decent, welladjusted college students, the findings suggested that anyone would veer towards tyranny if they were given a role as a member of one group that had power over another.  As the researchers put it “We did not have to teach the actors how to play their roles”

(Zimbardo, Maslach & Haney, 1999, p.206), “Guard aggression … was emitted simply as a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role” (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973, p. 62). 

For the last 30 years, the findings and conclusions of the Stanford study have gone largely unchallenged.  Moreover, they have had more impact on the public consciousness than almost any other piece of psychological research.  Amongst other things, they have inspired television documentaries (e.g., BBC’s Five Steps to Tyranny), a film (Das Experiment), and even a punk rock band (“Stanford Prison Experiment”, whose first self-titled album was released by World Domination Records in 1993).  But are those conclusions correct?

Questioning the role account

One of the main problems in answering this question is that there is limited information concerning the details of what happened in the Stanford Study.  Amongst other things, this is because the study was never reported in a mainstream social psychology journal.  As a result, the most detailed account is that which Zimbardo provides on his own website.  However, close scrutiny of the information that is available raises questions about the received analysis. 

First, there is plenty of evidence that people did not simply slip into role but actively resisted the situation that had been thrust upon them.  Many Guards appear to have resisted the pressure to be brutal.   Many Prisoners resisted the authority of the Guards.  Indeed, in the first stages of the study, it appears that the Prisoners were ascendant and the Guards felt weak and humiliated. Second, to the extent that the Guards did become brutal, it could be argued that this arose not from a generic drive to abuse power but from the intervention of Zimbardo who had taken on the position of Prison Superintendent.  So, on the one hand, the quashing of the Prisoners’ resistance and their subsequent passivity can be seen to have arisen from the fact that Zimbardo led the Prisoners to believe that they could not leave the prison.  On the other had, any brutality displayed by the Guards can be seen to have followed directly from the instructions that Zimbardo provided — beginning with the following briefing that he gave them at the start of the study:

You can create in the Prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me and they’ll have no privacy... They have no freedom of action they can do nothing, say nothing that we don’t permit.   We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways.  In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness.  That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none (Zimbardo, 1989).

At the very least, the provision of these instructions in which Zimbardo clearly sanctions oppressive treatment of the Prisoners questions the claim that the Guards’ roles were not taught.  On top of this, note too that he entreats the Guards to act in terms of the group of which he is the leader (“we’re going to take away their individuality”, “we’ll have all the power”; cf. Haslam & Platow, 2003; Reicher & Hopkins, 1996).  At the very least, Zimbardo’s leadership represents a major confound in the study, that calls into question the

internal validity of his analysis

A social identity account

On the basis of the above objections we would argue that the received analysis of the relationship between power, group membership and tyranny is very one-sided.  It stresses tyranny but ignores resistance. It stresses the negative side of group behaviour — how groups create social inequality — and overlooks the positive side — how collective action can overcome

(Continued on page 23)

Beyond Stanford

(Continued from page 22) inequality (Reicher, 1996; Tajfel, 1978).  It is also at odds with developments in social psychology that have occurred over the last 30 years and which challenge the idea that people necessarily become mindless and anti-social in groups (e.g., Postmes & Spears, 2001; Spears, Oakes,

Ellemers, & Haslam, 1997; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987).  

One of the most significant of these developments is social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).  This theory argues that people do not take on group roles uncritically, but do so only after they have internalised them as part of a social identity that is shared with other people.  Whether or not this occurs is hypothesised to be a consequence of psychological and social structural factors (e.g., see Turner, 1999).  The theory proposes that a shared social identity is the psychological precondition for coordinated collective action. As well as being a basis for dominant groups to assert their power, the theory also argues that social identity can serve as a basis for people to challenge subordination and tyranny (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979).   

 Investigating social identity theory

The BBC Prison Experiment was formulated as an extended field study of the psychology of intergroup inequality from a social identity perspective.  It focussed on the conditions under which people oppose inequality as well as the conditions under which they impose inequality.   The primary way that it did this was by manipulating two features of social structure that are hypothesized to encourage members of subordinate groups to relinquish a social mobility belief system (which would lead them to work individually to try to improve their situation), and instead adopt a social change belief system (that would lead them to act in terms of social identity in order to improve their lot collectively).  These two features were (a) the permeability of group boundaries (the extent to which Prisoners believed it was possible to be admitted into the high status group), and (b) the security of group relations (the extent to which Prisoners believed status differences in the prison were legitimate and stable).

In the BBC experiment, participants were randomly assigned to Prisoner and Guard groups, as in the Stanford study.  However, unlike Zimbardo, we did not take sides in our dealings with the two groups.

Permeability was manipulated by first allowing, and then precluding, opportunities for promotion from Prisoner to Guard.  Prior to the promotion taking place, the possibility of individual advancement was expected to encourage a social mobility belief system on the part of Prisoners and acceptance of the status quo.  When this was ruled out, we expected Prisoners to adopt a social change belief system and to work collectively to challenge the status of the Guards (see also Ellemers, 1993; Wright, Taylor, & Moghaddam, 1990).   

Following this experimental intervention, the security of group relations was manipulated by introducing a Prisoner with a professional background in the field of industrial relations.  His arrival was expected to provide participants with a sense of cognitive alternatives (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) that would encourage them to rethink the nature of PrisonerGuard relations.  In particular, it was expected that his background as an advocate for employees would provide the Prisoners with a rights-based framework for reinterpreting their relationship with the Guards, and for all participants to rethink the nature of their relationship with the experimenters.  

Support for the social identity account; Problems for the role account

The effects of these two interventions were observed in the early phases of the experiment.  In the first phase, although their conditions were inferior to those of the Guards, the Prisoners worked individually to try to improve their situation (e.g., by vying for promotion), because a strategy of social mobility made sense in light of the permeable group boundaries.  However, the Prisoners’ sense of collective identity increased after promotion was ruled out and, as predicted, this allowed them to work together to resist and challenge the Guards’ authority.  After this, the arrival of the new Prisoner and the new framework he provided led the relations between Prisoners and Guards to be renegotiated (to the extent that conflict was replaced with order), and also encouraged the participants as a whole to question the legitimacy of features of the experimental set-up as a whole (in particular, the heat).  Importantly too, these (and other)  observational findings were consistent with a wealth of psychometric data (e.g., using standard social, clinical and organizational measures) that we collected throughout the study (for details see Haslam & Reicher, 2002; Reicher & Haslam, 2002, in press).

But as well as providing support for these core predictions, the study also generated unexpected findings.  These are compatible with the general theoretical thrust of social identity work, but inconsistent with Zimbardo’s analysis.  The two most significant of these were (a) the discomfort that several of the Guards experienced with their position in the prison and (b) the move to establish a more autocratic regime at the experiment’s end (reflected in a general increase in participants’ authoritarianism; Altmeyer, 1981).  

In regard to the former, there is a fundamental point to be made about the extreme situationism of role accounts.  Our Guards were wary about their role because they imagined how others – friends, family, workmates – might

(Continued on page 24)

Beyond Stanford

(Cotinued from page 23) regard them if they acted tyranically.  This human capacity for imagination meant that their behaviour was not simply dominated by the immediate context but took other times and places into account.  However, of greater interest to us here were the consequences of this in terms of the failure of the Guards to develop a shared sense of social identity.  One of the most important findings of the whole study was the way in which it showed that, without a coherent social identity, coherent collective action is impossible.  Moreover it further demonstrated that this does not only have consequences on a social level but on an organizational and clinical level (cf., Ellemers, De Gilder & Haslam, in press; Haslam, 2001; Turner & Haslam, 2000).  For example, because they couldn’t agree on priorities or communication strategies, they found it impossible to plan or even organise themselves, and they therefore became increasingly stressed and burnt-out.  So, far from behaving tyrannically, the Guards found any form of order increasingly difficult to impose.  Indeed, eventually the Guards’ regime was destroyed by a revolt on the part of some Prisoners and the participants collectively agreed to create a

Commune.  This outcome (the reasons for which we discuss extensively elsewhere; Reicher & Haslam, 2002), obviously challenges Zimbardo’s conclusion that powerful roles lead inevitably to tyranny.     

However, as indicated above, we did glimpse tyranny in our study.  Importantly, this appears not have been an inevitable or automatic expression of role — not least because it actively subverted both the original roles into which people had been cast and the roles they had adopted in the course of the study.  Nonetheless, at the end, participants were close to creating a new and more draconian form of the original structure, albeit with different people as Guards and as Prisoners. 

Significantly too, this authoritarian system came to seem more attractive as other systems failed to create order and the participants as a whole came increasingly to desire structure and order.  Such findings point to a relationship between groups and tyranny that is very different to the received wisdom in psychology over recent years.

The need for social psychological theory to incorporate social structure and history 

One of the problems with the Stanford study is that because Zimbardo himself took on responsibility for creating norms which encouraged tyranny, it provides limited insight into the way in which tyranny might emerge as part of a social process that develops over time.  In contrast, the BBC study did allow for such insights and this, we believe, was one of its key strengths.  Indeed, in this respect it stands apart from most social psychology experiments in which the impact of group history is denied or overlooked — for the simple reason that such studies are increasingly unlikely to involve social interaction and seldom last longer than half an hour (Haslam & McGarty, 2001).  

The BBC study thus encourages researchers to understand the psychology of tyranny in relation to its social, structural and historical underpinnings rather than simply seeing it as the product of fixed psychological or situational determinants – something over which people have no control and therefore for which they have no responsibility.  In this regard, the simple role account (‘It was the uniform that made me do it’) is dangerous not only because it fails to explain tyranny but also because it serves to excuse it.

More specifically, our analysis suggests that tyranny is not the inherent consequence of groups and power but rather of the failure of groups and powerlessness.  It is when people fail to achieve a common social identity that they feel weak, helpless, humiliated, and resentful of others. It is when people cannot work together to create their own social order that they begin to find something attractive in extreme forms of order imposed by others.  We therefore suggest that rather than striving to make people fearful of groups and power (fears that led to the dysfunctionality of the Guards in our study), we should encourage them to work together to develop collective systems that allow them to use power responsibly (see Kanter, 1979; Pfeffer, 1992; Reynolds & Platow, 2003). 

An additional point to make about this conclusion is that as well as being in tune with developments in social psychology, it also chimes with the insights of other disciplines.  It is, for example, compatible with influential accounts of the rise of Nazism provided by Hobsbawm (1995, e.g., p. 127), Gellately, (2001) and Rees (2002).  There are multiple points of contact between these account and the unfolding dynamics of our study.  Significantly too, like most historical analyses, these dynamics demand a far more sophisticated appreciation of social psychology  and its relation to social reality than is provided by the role account. 

Opening up debate and moving

beyond the Stanford study 

We are not the first to suspect that the insights provided by the Stanford study are limited.  However, previously, ethical and practical factors made it almost impossible to do the empirical work that might directly interrogate Zimbardo’s conclusions.  In this respect, the study has stood like a magic box that no-one is allowed to open — and this untouchable quality has only added to the mystique and authority of its contents (for the public and psychology undergraduates, if not for social psychologists).   

At the very least, then, by daring to revisit Zimbardo’s paradigm (albeit within a much more stringent ethical framework), the BBC Prison

Beyond Stanford

(Continued from page 24)

Experiment allows us to reopen debates about the psychological bases of inequality, about how tyranny emerges, and about the conditions under which it is challenged.  It raises important points about the methods of psychology and their capacity to help or hinder our understanding of such issues.  It also has important theoretical implications concerning the psychology of groups and power. 

However, most importantly, it demonstrates the centrality of  psychology to essential social debates like those that surround the issue of how to avoid and fight tyranny.  Here our most basic message is that oppressors and oppressed are not helpless victims of human nature.  Instead, as political and politicized agents, they have abilities, responsibilities, and choices, and these have an important role to play in determining the societies we create and the societies we seek to create.  In light of current world events, we think that this message — and the debate that it provokes — has never been more important.

References

Altmeyer, B. (1981). Right wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manatoba Press. 

Ellemers, N. (1993). The influence of socio-structural variables on identity enhancement strategies. European

Review of Social Psychology, 4, 27-57.

Ellemers, N., de Gilder, D. & Haslam, S. A. (in press). Motivating individuals and groups at work: A social identity perspective on leadership and group performance. Academy of Management Review.

Gellately, R. (2001). Backing Hitler.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.

Haslam, S. A. (2001). Psychology in organizations: The social identity approach. London: Sage.

Haslam, S. A. & McGarty, C. (2001). A hundred years of certitude? Social psychology, the experimental method and the management of scientific uncertainty. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 1-21.

Haslam, S. A. & Platow, M. J. (2001). The link between leadership and followership: How affirming a social identity translates vision into action. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1469-1479. 

Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2002). A study guide to The Experiment — Exploring the psychology of groups and power: Manual to accompany the BBC Video.  London: BBC Worldwide.

Hobsbawm, E. (1995). Age of extremes:

The short twentieth century 1914-1991.

London: Abacus.

Kanter, R. (1979). Power failure in management circuits. Harvard Business Review, July-August, 65-75.

Koppel, G. (Series producer) & Mirsky, N. (Executive producer) (2002, May 14, 15, 20, 21),  The Experiment. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.

Pfeffer, J. (1992). Managing with power. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Postmes, T. & Spears, R. (1998). Deindividuation and anti-normative behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 238-259.

Rees, L. (2002). The Nazis: A warning from history. London: BBC Worldwide.

Reicher, S. D. (1996).  Social identity and social change: Rethinking the context of social psychology.  In P. Robinson (Ed.), Social groups and identities:

Developing the legacy of Henri Tajfel.

Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Reicher, S. D. & Haslam, S. A. (2002). Powerless groups and the emergence of tyranny: The BBC Prison Experiment. 

Manuscript submitted for publication. Reicher, S. D. & Haslam, S. A. (2003). Social psychology, science, and surveillance: Understanding The Experiment. Social Psychological Review, 5, 7-17.

Reicher, S. D. & Hopkins, N. (1996). Seeking influence through characterising self-categories: An analysis of anti-abortionist rhetoric. British Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 297-311. 

Reynolds, K. J., & Platow, M. J. (2003). Why power in organizations really should be shared:  Understanding power through the perils of powerlessness. In S. A. Haslam, D. van Knippenberg, M. J. Platow, & N.

Ellemers (Eds.), Social identity at work:

Developing theory for organizational practice (pp. 173-188). New York: Psychology Press.

Spears, R., Oakes, P. J., Ellemers, N. & Haslam S. A. (Eds.) (1997). The social psychology of stereotyping and group life.

Oxford: Blackwell.

Tajfel. H. (1978) The achievement of group differentiation. In H. Tajfel (Ed.), Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations. London: Academic Press. 

Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup

conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel

(Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA:

Brooks/Cole.

Turner, J. C. (1999). Some current issues in research on social identity and selfcategorization theories. In N. Ellemers, R. Spears, & B. Doosje (Eds.), Social identity: Context, commitment, content (pp.

6-34). Oxford: Blackwell.                                 Turner, J. C. & Haslam, S. A. (2001). Social identity, organizations and leadership. In M. E. Turner (Ed.), Groups at work: Advances in theory and research (pp. 25-65). Hills­dale, NJ:

Erlbaum.

Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S.

(1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Wright, S. C., Taylor, D. M., & Moghaddam, F. M. (1990). Responding to membership in a disadvantaged group: From acceptance to collective protest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 994-1003.

Zimbardo, P. (1989). Quiet rage: The Stanford Prison Study video. Stanford CA: Stanford University.

Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney,

C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm (pp.

193-237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. ■

By David Myers

Having recently completed three and a half decades professing psychology and having just turned 60 years of age, this seems a fitting time to reflect again on some lessons I have learned. Perhaps this self-disclosure can stimulate some of you to reflect on the lessons you have learned while professing psychology. Can you articulate what Bob Sternberg calls your “tacit knowledge”—the implicit, experienced-based principles that facilitate your work life? Here are a dozen lessons I have learned.

Lesson #1: One can’t predict the future. As an undergraduate chemistry major who had taken only introductory psychology during my first three years, I would never have guessed that I’d become a social psychologist. When entering graduate school, aiming to become a college teacher, I would never have guessed that I’d become engaged by research. And when doing research during my assistant professor years, I would never have guessed that I would become a writer.

The awakening of my interest in social psychological research illustrates why I have come to expect the unexpected. When I arrived to begin Iowa’s graduate program in 1964, having declared my interest in personality, my advisor explained that their one faculty member in personality had just left. “So we’ve put you in social psychology.” And that is how I became a social psychologist.

During my second year, I assisted social psychologist Sidney Aronson by engaging 40 small groups in discussing story problems that assessed risktaking. We replicated the phenomenon of increased risk taking by groups, dubbed the “risky shift,” and before long the college teacher wanna-be had, to his surprise, also become a research psychologist. Moreover, the research mutated unpredictably—from risky shift to a broader group polarization phenomenon to studies of the subtle influence of mere exposure to others’ opinions.

Such is the adventure of life. You can’t know your future. Your interests on entering college will likely change during college, and will change again during your working life. And that is why a broad education for an unpredictable future—a liberal education—serves most students better than a focused vocational education.

Lesson #2: Contrarian professional investment can pay big dividends. Major contributions often occur when people invest in a research problem at an early stage—when, as Bob

Sternberg says, the intellectual stock is still undervalued. Unless one is uncommonly brilliant, which most of us aren’t, a good way to contribute to psychology is to pick a research problem that has hardly been studied. This offers the chance to master the available literature before it proceeds to third-order interaction effects. Then stay with the stock. Become a worldclass expert. The risky shift/group polarization literature was visited by dozens of people who dabbled with a study or two and then moved on to do a study or two in other areas. The people who really enlarged our understanding were not these, but those who stayed around long enough to dive deep, often by offering a single idea which they pushed to its limits.

Lesson #3: Scholarship can be a lonely enterprise. When you have freshly mastered a literature and know it about as well as anyone in the world, few other people may know or care. Once you have done your research, written it up, survived the publication lag, had your work cited in secondary sources, and gone on to other things, then people will take you to be an expert and will invite you to give talks and write reflective chapters. Meanwhile, the fresh minds working at the cutting edge will be languishing for such opportunities.

Lesson #4: Success, even if serendipitous, builds on itself. Life isn’t fair. Success biases new opportunities toward those who’ve already been given other opportunities. Although the skills required for research and for writing overlap only modestly, it was my good fortune to happen onto what turned out to be a fruitful research problem (rather than a dead end) that led to an invitation to write my social psychology text . . . which led to an invitation to write an introductory psychology text . . . which lent credibility to my approach to a literary agent about writing The Pursuit of Happiness . . . which opened doors for other opportunities to communicate psychological science to the lay public. Although the process begins with solitary hard work, fortunate outcomes can lead to more opportunities, whether one is the most deserving person or not. Success feeds on itself. So it pays to start well.

Lesson #5: To be an effective, contributing professional one needn’t be uncommonly brilliant or creative. With dogged work, I was able to master a literature and connect some dots, despite not having the genius to invent the theories. One needn’t be as theoretically creative as Daniel Kahneman to work at winnowing truth from falsehood, at consolidating what we’ve learned, or at communicating it

(Continued on page 27)

Lessons I have learned

(Continued from page 26) to college students and the lay public. That’s what Dean Simonton has discerned from the curvilinear relationship between intelligence and leadership ability. Up to a point, intelligence facilitates leadership. But an excessive intellectual gap between leader and follower can hamper their communication. Good teaching and science writing likewise require enough intelligence to comprehend what the pioneering theorists are saying and discovering, but not so much that one is out of touch with how ordinary people think and talk.

If one isn’t brilliant or expert on every aspect of a problem, it also helps to gain the support of people whose competencies complement your own. I suspect every text author has at times felt mildly embarrassed by people who are too impressed—people who think we just sat down and wrote what they’re reading, assuming they never could. But such folks should not be so intimidated. It actually took a whole team of reviewers and editors to shape, over several drafts, a work that surpasses what the author, working alone, was capable of writing.

Lesson #6: You don't get pellets unless you bar press. Life has us on partial reinforcement schedules. What one reviewer thinks is pointless research, another will think is pioneering. What one reader finds “too cute,” another will find refreshingly witty. The poet Pennington was once rejected by a magazine which explained, “This is the worst poem in the English language. You are the worst poet in the English language.” So he sent the poem to another magazine, which accepted it “with glowing praise,” and chose it as its year's best poem.

Given the unreliability of others' judgments of our work, it pays to try and try again. Our colleagues who are athletic coaches live with the publicity given both their victories and their defeats. Those of us who are scholars only announce our victories. But let me admit to one of my strings of unpublicized defeats. Several years ago, Today's Education rejected my critique of the labeling and segregation of “gifted” children from the 95 percent of children deemed, by implication, “ungifted.” I then submitted it to six other periodicals, all of which rejected it. Noticing that Today's Education by now had a new editor, and thinking the piece slightly improved, I resubmitted it to Today's Education without reminding them that they already had rejected a previous draft. They accepted it immediately, published it, later gave permission for its reprinting in newspapers and magazines, and invited me to write more.

Lesson #7: If you feel excited by an idea or a possibility, don't be easily deterred by criticism. We've all heard stories of great books that were rejected countless times before publication, or works of art or music that went unappreciated during the creator's lifetime. People derided Robert Fulton's steamboat as “Fulton's Folly.” As Fulton later said, “Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish, cross my path.” Much the same reaction greeted the printing press, the telegraph, the incandescent lamp, and the typewriter. John White's book, Rejection, is one story after another of all the scorn and derision that greeted the work of people from Michelangelo and Beethoven to the American poet A. Wilber Stevens, who received from his hoped-for publisher an envelope of ashes. Dr. Seuss initially was rejected by some two dozen publishers. “There is no way to sell a book about an unknown Dutch painter,” Doubleday explained before Irving Stone's book about Van Gogh survived 15 rejections and sold 25 million copies. In a possibly apocryphal story, one of the seven publishers that rejected The Tale of Peter Rabbit said that the tale “smelled

like rotting carrots.” 

If you pick up brochures for anyone's textbook and read all the nice quotes, you may feel a twinge of envy, thinking it must be nice to get all those glowing reviews. But those aren't all the reviews. Let me tell you about some reviews that you will never see quoted. A reviewer of my introductory psychology text offered the following in his chapter reviews: The use of the English language in this book is atrocious. Faulty grammar and syntax, imprecise meaning and incorrect terminology etc. etc. are abundant. When I'm reading the book I have the feeling that it is written by one of my undergraduate students; when reviewing this edition it is at times like correcting an undergraduate term paper. 

 In response to another chapter he wrote that: I find the tone and even content paternalistic, value laden and maybe even demeaning. Especially the section on “work” is very poor; it left me angry that one would want to present such “crap” to learning young adults. Did Dr. Myers really write this vague, stereotypical, poorly worded, unclear and confusing section on work?

And to yet another chapter: At times this text reads as if it has been a translation from the German language.” (Incredibly, this reviewer shortly thereafter adopted the book!)

Then there was the reviewer who noted that the book “is very biased and opinionated. I don't think the author is very competent. I have thought of writing a text and perhaps now moreso,” whereupon he proceeded to offer his services.

While preparing that book’s first edition, there were days when, after being hammered on by editors—one of whom scribbled criticism all over several chapters with but one stillremembered compliment: “nice simile”—I longed for a single encouraging word.  One of my most difficult professional tasks—perhaps yours, too, as you cope with mentors’ criticisms, professional reviews, or student evaluations—is being open to feedback without feeling defeated by it. The lesson I have learned from this is: Listen to criticism, but if you have a

(Continued on page 28)

Lessons I have learned

(Continued from page 27) vision, hold to it. Keep your eye on the goal. In retrospect, I'm glad I submitted to the process, but I'm also glad I didn't let it intimidate me into submission. 

Lesson #8: As praise and criticism accumulates, its power to elate or depress lessens. Compliments provoke less elation and criticisms less despair as both become mere iotas of additional feedback atop a pile of accumulated praise and reproach. That helps explain why emotions mellow as we age. I have spent hours in sleepless anguish over my children's ups and downs, but rarely, of late, over professional criticism. As Albert Ellis keeps reminding people, not everyone is going to love what we do. The more feedback I receive, the more I can accept that.

Lesson #9: Achievement comes with keeping focused. Our basketball coaches say their teams play well when they keep their focus, without being distracted from their game plan by the referees' calls, the opposing fans, or the other team's spurts. A successful entrepreneur friend speaks of achieving success by keeping his focus— knowing his niche, where he's needed, what he's good at. We all get asked to do all sorts of things that other people can do as well or better. My experience is that the world is a better place when each of us identifies and then focuses on our best gifts. When a service club wants a talk on a topic where I have no expertise, or when a caller needs a counselor, I decline, with thanks, or offer a referral, remembering that every time I say “yes” to something I am implicitly saying “no” to some other use of that time. Sometimes I want to say yes to that use of time, which is what led me to spend time preparing these reflections. Other times, the alternative uses of the time feel like higher priorities.  

And when my house needed repair work, I tried, even when supporting a family solely on an assistant professor patiently teaching me what it means to

income, to emulate my father, who develop a voice, to order words to

would pay craftspeople to do what they maximize punch, to write with rhythm.

could do better and more efficiently,

It pays to have enough self-confidence

which gave them work and freed his to risk undertaking a project, and

time for his profession. In the long run, enough self-doubt to think you'll fail if

it has paid off. I'm not advocating a you don't focus enormous effort on it.

workaholism that competes with

investing in family relationships,

Lesson #11: To minimize stress and

relaxing hobbies, and an equitable maximize productivity, it pays to

sharing of daily domestic work. But if I manage time.  Several years ago I

can focus all those other hours on the noticed one of my colleagues writing

professional work that I most enjoy, I'll down something in his desk calendar as

have more to give. It's a point I make to someone left his office. What was he

younger colleagues when I see them doing? He was logging his time, he

doing clerical work, which both explained, to see how closely his use of

deprives someone else of a job and time mirrored his espoused priorities.

steals time from their own profession.

So I decided to do the same. What a

revelation! Not only did I learn how

Also, though some people seem to long it took me to write a textbook—

manage several professional tasks at

3550 hours for the first edition of

once, I must be slower-witted. I am

Social Psychology—I learned how

most effective when focused on one poorly my actual priorities matched my

project. A little song from Brother Sun, proclaimed priorities. More minutes

Sister Moon, a film about St. Francis of adding up to more hours than I would

Assisi, says it well: have believed were frittered away

uselessly—not counseling students, not

If you want your dream to be, teaching, not doing research or writing,

   build it slow and surely. not in meetings, just doing nothing

Do few things, but do them well, useful.

   heartfelt work goes purely.

                                                                                 While still allowing time for

Lesson #10: Success requires enough spontaneous connections with people,

optimism to provide hope and enough that very realization made me more

pessimism to prevent complacency. conscious of wasted time. I took to

Feeling capable of but one task at a always having a pen and note card in

time partly reflects a nagging lack of my pocket, or something to read in my

self-confidence, the sort of “defensive briefcase, so that unexpected minutes

pessimism” that, ironically, can enable

waiting for the dentist or for a late

success—when it goads us to believe plane could be put to use. Noting that it

that only by utter diligence will we ever took emotional energy to gear up for

do work on a par with that done by all class and to descend after class, I

those more brilliant people at more bunched my classes together into

famous places. It was because I knew I

Tuesdays and Thursdays—leaving the

wasn't a gifted writer (my worst college other days emotionally freer to

grade was in a writing class) that I concentrate on research and writing.

focused on developing my writing

Having multiple preparations of the

skills—by reading great writers such as same course—teaching all social

C. S. Lewis and Carl Sagan; by psychology one semester, all

studying style manuals such as Strunk introductory psychology another, if

and White's Elements of Style, Jacques possible—further reduced the work

Barzun's Simple and Direct, and load without compromising the

William Zinnser's On Writing Well; by teaching load.

subjecting my writing to a computer

grammar checker; and, especially, by

Another time management strategy is

engaging a writing coach—a poet to set big goals, then break them down

colleague who has closely edited some into weekly objectives. Before

5,000 of my manuscript pages while

Lessons I have learned

(Continued from page 28) beginning work on a new textbook, I would lay out a week by week schedule. My goal was not to have the whole 600 page book done by such and such date; that's too remote and formidable. But writing three manuscript pages a day is a relative cuppa tea. Repeat the process 400 times and, presto!, you have a 1,200 page manuscript. It's really not so hard, nor is reaching many goals when attacked day by day. (Although we often overestimate how much we will accomplish in any given day, we generally underestimate how much we can accomplish in a year, given just a little progress every day.) Moreover, as each mini-deadline is met one gets the delicious, confident feeling of personal control.

Lesson # 12: Professing psychology is a wonderful vocation. What more fascinating subject could we study and teach than our own human workings? What teaching aims are more worthy than restraining intuition with critical thinking and judgmentalism with understanding? What subject is more influential in shaping values and lifestyles than our young science of psychology? There are “two sorts of jobs,” wrote C. S. Lewis in Screwtape

Proposes a Toast:

Of one sort, a [person] can truly say, “I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid while I do it.” The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is the earning of money: work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid. I am thankful that I am blessed with a vocation that is decidedly in the first category. A vocation that is mindexpanding, full of fresh surprises, and focused on humanly significant questions. ■

SPSP Diversity Program Update 

of Texas at Austin).   

Janelle Jones (York University), Sun

No (University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign), Chandra Osborn

(University of Connecticut), Lora Park

(University of Michigan) Arelys

Feliciano Sánchez (Brandeis

University), Michelle See (Ohio State

University), Simine Vazire (University Announcements

travel/research awards of $300-$1000 payable on arrival at the meeting.

Conference topics for May 2003 include

Personality and Social Behavior; Selves,

Dyads, and Groups; Group and

Individual Identity; Emotion and

Motivation in Individuals and Groups;

Group Perception, Cognition, and

Decision; and Groups, Networks and Organizations. For more information or to register for the conferences, go to http://www.seafrolic.org.

SPSP Member to Ride 100 Miles for

Charity

SPSP member Joe Tomaka will be participating in the 2003 Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation “Ride to

Cure Diabetes.”  The Ride to Cure Diabetes is a one-day, 100-mile, bicycle ride/charity event that will raise funds for research to find a cure for juvenile diabetes.  

Joe will be riding on behalf of ten-yearold El Pasoan Shari Joseph who was diagnosed with diabetes in 2001 and has been living with the disease for nearly two years.  Shari, and the thousands of children with type 1 diabetes, must inject insulin every day in order to stay alive. This means undergoing multiple injections daily, or having insulin delivered through an insulin pump.  It also means testing their blood sugar by pricking their fingers for blood six or more times a day. 

 In order to help the thousands of kids like Shari, Joe needs to raise $3000 to support of JDRF-funded research and it is here that he is seeking the generous help of society members.  Donations can be made out directly to the JDRF and sent c/o Joe Tomaka at 1101 N. Campbell Ave., El Paso, TX 79902.  All donations are 100% tax deductible and donations of greater than $250 will receive a donation receipt from the JDRF.   Please feel free to contact Joe at anytime at 915-747-7237 or [email protected] if you have any questions or want to know how you too can get involved.  You can also visit the JDRF website at http://jdrf.org. ■

four times a year, and updating the student web page to also include a diversity page with links to resources for members of under-represented groups.  Join the graduate student listserv to get updates on these events and more.  The listserv is moderated and extremely low volume, but provides the best way for the GSC to communicate with you.

This year promises to be just as exciting and productive as last year’s activities and accomplishments, and we look forward continuing our work with SPSP to address the needs and interests of our student members.  If you have any ideas or concerns—or want to help out, please feel free to contact any member of the GSC.

•           Jennifer Harman, President      [email protected] •      Arlen Moller, Member at Large      [email protected]

•           Chandra Osborn 

                     [email protected]

•           Michele Schlehofer-Sutton                         [email protected]

•           Jacek Jonca-Jasinski                                      [email protected]

•           Camille Johnson, Past - President             [email protected]

 To subscribe to the listserv: send an email to [email protected] with the following message on a single line:  

SUBSCRIBE SPSP-GRAD <FIRST NAME> <LAST NAME>.

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