Congratulations to the 2011 SPSP Award Recipients!

The 2011 Jack Block Award

Charles Carver

This award is for career research accomplishment or distinguished career contributions in personality psychology and honors an individual who has demonstrated “analytic sophistication, theoretical depth, and wide scholarship.”
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Donald T. Campbell Award

John Dovidio

This award is for career research accomplishment or distinguished career contributions in social psychology and honors an individual who “has contributed and is continuing to contribute to the field of social psychology in significant ways.”
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Career Contribution Award

Thomas Pettigrew, Harry Triandis

New in 2011, this award honors scholars who have made “major theoretical and/or empirical contributions to social psychology and/or personality psychology or to bridging these areas.” Recipients are recognized for distinguished scholarly contributions across productive careers.
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Robert B. Cialdini Award

Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy, Leif Nelson, and Amber Brown

“Shared social responsibility: A field experiment in pay-what-you-want pricing and charitable giving.” Published in Science in 2010.

This award recognizes a publication “that best explicates social psychological phenomena principally through the use of field research methods and settings and that thereby demonstrates the relevance of the discipline to communities outside of academic social psychology.”
Endowed by FPSP

The 2011 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality

Laura King

This award recognizes a mid-career scholar “whose work substantially adds to the body of knowledge” in personality psychology and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.
Endowed by FPSP

The 2011 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology

Galen Bodenhausen

This award recognizes a mid-career scholar “whose work substantially adds to the body of knowledge” in social psychology and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.
Endowed by FPSP

The 2011 Media Achievement Award

David Brooks

This award honors a person, normally outside the SPSP community, who has “a sustained and distinguished record for disseminating knowledge in personality or social psychology to the general public through popular media.”
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Media Prize

[Situationist Co-Founders] Jon Hanson and Michael McCann

SPSP’s first Media Prize recipients – This prize recognizes a person, normally outside the SPSP community, providing the best piece or collection of pieces in popular media that represents the contributions of personality or social psychology to the general public in a given calendar year.
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Murray Award

Michelle Fine

This award, which is presented at the APA Convention, is for “distinguished contributions to the study of lives … in the demanding kind of inquiry pioneered by Henry A. Murray.“
Sponsored by the Society of Personology and SPSP

The 2012 SAGE Young Scholars Awards

To be announced in January

These awards support the research of junior colleagues and recognize “outstanding young researchers” representing the broad spectrum of personality and social psychology research areas.
Sponsored by FPSP with the generous support of SAGE Publications

The 2011 Award for Distinguished Service to the Society

Richard Petty, Mark Snyder

This award recognizes “distinguished service, either in the form of a particular, significant activity or cumulative contributions over time, to the Society.”
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Award for Service on Behalf of Personality & Social Psychology

Congressman Brian Baird

This award ”recognizes distinguished efforts by individuals to benefit the field of social and personality psychology,” including noteworthy efforts to support educational and research activities in the field, professional leadership, and achievements that enhance the reputation of the field.
Sponsored by SPSP

The 2011 Theoretical Innovation Prize

Mark Landau, Brian Meier and Lucas Keefer

“A metaphor-enriched social cognition.” Published in Psychological Bulletin in 2010.

This prize recognizes “the most theoretically innovative article, book chapter, or unpublished manuscript of the year.” It honors theoretical articles that are especially likely to generate the discovery of new hypotheses, new phenomena, or new ways of thinking about the discipline of social/personality psychology.
Sponsored by SPSP

Read the press release for the awards below the jump.

Awards honor excellence in social and personality psychology

November 14, 2011 – Racial prejudice and stereotyping, pay-what-you-want pricing, cross-cultural training  – these are just a few of the research areas of this year’s winners of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual awards. Each of the recipients has made a unique and significant contribution to understanding the individual and social factors shaping people’s personalities, interactions, and behaviors.

The Society’s highest awards – the Jack Block and Donald T. Campbell awards – go to Charles S. Carver of the University of Miami and John Dovidio of Yale University, respectively. Carver’s research on self-regulation over the past 30 years has helped shape modern personality psychology. His work has also examined individual differences in stress and coping and, more recently, the role of certain genes in self-regulation. Dovidio’s work has shed light on modern stereotyping and discrimination, in particular how contemporary forms of prejudice and discrimination are more subtle and less recognizable than traditional racism. He is currently executive officer of SPSP and past president of the Society.

The recipients of this year’s Career Contribution awards are Thomas Pettigrew and Harry Triandis. Pettigrew, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been at the forefront of research on racial prejudice. An expert on black-white relations in the United States, he has also conducted inter-group research in Australia, Europe, and South Africa. Triandis, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has made significant contributions to the field of cross-cultural psychology, how human behavior and mental process differ among and between cultures. He has applied his work to design cultural training to help minority groups adjust to society.

Pay-what-you-want pricing is at the center of this year’s Robert B. Cialdini Award for excellence in a published field study. Ayelet Gneezy of the Rady School of Management at University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues conducted a field study involving approximately 115,000 individuals, some of whom were informed that half of their payment of choice for a photo souvenir would go to charity. Payments were five times higher compared to other conditions, showing how corporate and charitable interests can be aligned to benefit all parties. The paper, “Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving,” was published with co-authors Uri Gneezy, Leif Nelson, and Amber Brown in Science in July 2010.

Recipients of the Carol and Ed Diener mid-career awards in personality and social psychology are Laura King of the University of Missouri and Galen Bodenhausen of Northwestern University, respectively.  Laura King studies personality development in adults, and her work on happiness and meaning of life has attracted broad interest. Galen Bodenhausen is an internationally renowned expert on the mental processes underlying social attitudes, impressions, judgments, and decisions, as well as mental illness stigma.

The 2011 Media Achievement Award goes to David Brooks for showcasing the relevance of personality and social psychology to current events through his insightful articles, columns, and books. Brooks is a columnist at the the New York Times, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and  a commentator on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” Winners of the 2011 Media Prize are Jon Hanson of Harvard Law School and Michael McCann of Vermont Law School for creating the Situationist, an online forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to discuss the effects of situational forces on society.

The remaining SPSP awards for 2011 are as follows:

• The 2011 Murray Award: Michelle Fine of  the Graduate Center – City University of New York for her extensive contributions to the study of social injustice, including working with  urban youth and young adults in real-world settings.
• The 2011 SPSP Service Award for Distinguished Service to the Society: Richard Petty of Ohio State University for his varied work for SPSP, including as editor of its journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, president of the  Society, chair of the Publications Committee,  as well as for his significant contribution in the creation of the new journal Social Psychological and Personality Science

• The 2011 SPSP Award for Distinguished Service to the Society: Mark Snyder of the University of Minnesota for his work as SPSP president and his contributions to the leadership of the Foundation for Social and Personality Psychology.

• The 2011 SPSP Award for Service on Behalf of Personality & Social Psychology: Rep. Brian Baird, former U.S. Congressman in Washington (1999-2011), for his steadfast commitment to support and defend scientific research in general, and social and personality psychology in particular.

• The 2011 Theoretical Innovation Prize: Mark Landau of the University of Kansas with co-authors Brian Meier, Lucas Keefer for their September 2010 Psychological Bulletin article entitled “A Metaphor-Enriched Social Cognition,” which examines how people come to understand the social world through the conceptual metaphors that surround them.

A ceremony at the 2012 annual SPSP meeting in San Diego, CA (Jan. 26-28) will honor all of this year’s award recipients. www.spspmeeting.org

SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, and interact. With more than 7,000 members, the Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. www.spsp.org

From Duke Today (a press release about research co-authored by Situationist Contributor Aaron Kay):

The political unrest in the Middle East, which continues today in Syria, raises some intriguing questions: How can we explain the contagion effect of rebellion when revolution spreads from nation to nation? Is it possible to predict whether people will respond to limits on freedom with submission or rebellion?

New research from Duke University and the University of Waterloo to be published in the February edition of the journal Psychological Science finds the certainty of a restriction is significant in determining how people will respond to enforced limitations on freedom.

Across several studies, participants responded to restrictions that were certain to come into effect more favorably and valuing the restricted freedoms less, a form of “rationalization.” Participants responded to identical restrictions that were described as having a small chance of not coming into effect with “reactance,” viewing restrictions less favorably and valuing the restricted freedoms more.

“There have traditionally been two schools of thought on how people react to restrictions on freedoms,” said Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and one of the study’s authors. “One school of thought says people are likely to react to restrictions with rationalization and a level of acceptance, while a second suggests people are motivated to restore restricted freedoms and will respond negatively on attempts to constrain them. Our research reconciles these two opposing views by considering the restrictions’ degree of absoluteness.”

The study cites several hypothetical situations to explain the varied responses to restrictions on freedom. In one survey, participants read that the government had decided to reduce speed limits after experts concluded lower speed limits in cities increase safety. Some participants were told the new limits would definitely come into effect (an absolute condition), while others were told the limits would come into effect only if a majority of government officials voted to enact it (a non-absolute condition).

Participants in the absolute group tended to rationalize the new restrictions; they reacted with more positive attitudes and lower levels of annoyance toward reduced speed limits. In contrast, participants in the non-absolute group reacted strongly against the limits.

“Our findings have a number of practical applications, potentially shedding some light on the recent string of uprisings in the Middle East,” said co-author Aaron Kay, an associate professor of management and of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

“To the extent a political regime feels absolute and permanent to its citizens, people will rationalize its actions and decisions, even minimizing the importance of freedoms. But once they learn similar regimes have been toppled and are therefore not as permanent as people once thought, they may become reactant and perhaps motivated to revolt,” he said.

The study is here.

Related Situationist posts:

• God’s Situational Effects
• Rationalize or Rebel?
• Psychology of Inequality
• Do NOT Read This Post!
• Self-Fulfilling Doomsday Prophecies
• Canons of Confabulation
• The Cause of Rioting? That’s Easy: Rioters!
• If It’s Evitable, I Don’t Like It!
• Aaron Kay, “The Psychological Power of the Status Quo
• Thanksgiving as “System Justification
• System Justification Theory and Law,
• A System-Justification Primer, 
• The Motivated Situation of Inequality and Discrimination, 
• John Jost on System Justification Theory, and
• John Jost’s “System Justification and the Law” – Video.

Image from Flickr.

From the APS Monitor (excerpts from a terrific primer on “The Mechanics of Choice”):

* * *

The prediction of social behavior significantly involves the way people make decisions about resources and wealth, so the science of decision making historically was the province of economists. And the basic assumption of economists was always that, when it comes to money, people are essentially rational. It was largely inconceivable that people would make decisions that go against their own interests. Although successive refinements of expected-utility theory made room for individual differences in how probabilities were estimated, the on-the-surface irrational economic behavior of groups and individuals could always be forced to fit some rigid, rational calculation.The problem is — and everything from fluctuations in the stock market to decisions between saving for retirement or purchasing a lottery ticket or a shirt on the sale rack shows it — people just aren’t rational. They systematically make choices that go against what an economist would predict or advocate.Enter a pair of psychological scientists — Daniel Kahneman (currently a professor emeritus at Princeton) and Amos Tversky — who in the 1970s turned the economists’ rational theories on their heads. Kahneman and Tversky’s research on heuristics and biases and their Nobel Prize winning contribution, prospect theory, poured real, irrational, only-human behavior into the calculations, enabling much more powerful prediction of how individuals really choose between risky options.

* * *

Univ. of Toronto psychologist Keith E. Stanovich and James Madison Univ. psychologist Richard F. West refer to these experiential and analytical modes as “System 1” and “System 2,” respectively. Both systems may be involved in making any particular choice — the second system may monitor the quality of the snap, System-1 judgment and adjust a decision accordingly.⁷ But System 1 will win out when the decider is under time pressure or when his or her System-2 processes are already taxed.

This is not to entirely disparage System-1 thinking, however. Rules of thumb are handy, after all, and for experts in high-stakes domains, it may be the quicker form of risk processing that leads to better real-world choices. In a study by Cornell University psychologist Valerie Reyna and Mayo Clinic physician Farrell J. Lloyd, expert cardiologists took less relevant information into account than younger doctors and medical students did when making decisions to admit or not admit patients with chest pain to the hospital. Experts also tended to process that information in an all-or-none fashion (a patient was either at risk of a heart attack or not) rather than expending time and effort dealing with shades of gray. In other words, the more expertise a doctor has, the more that his or her intuitive sense of the gist of a situation was used as a guide.⁸

In Reyna’s variant of the dual-system account, fuzzy-trace theory, the quick-decision system focuses on the gist or overall meaning of a problem instead of rationally deliberating on facts and odds of alternative outcomes.⁹ Because it relies on the late-developing ventromedial and dorsolateral parts of the frontal lobe, this intuitive (but informed) system is the more mature of the two systems used to make decisions involving risks.

A 2004 study by Vassar biopsychologist Abigail A. Baird and Univ. of Waterloo cognitive psychologist Jonathan A. Fugelsang showed that this gist-based system matures later than do other systems. People of different ages were asked to respond quickly to easy, risk-related questions such as “Is it a good idea to set your hair on fire?”, “Is it a good idea to drink Drano?”, and “Is it a good idea to swim with sharks?” They found that young people took about a sixth of a second longer than adults to arrive at the obvious answers (it’s “no” in all three cases, in case you were having trouble deciding).¹⁰ The fact that our gist-processing centers don’t fully mature until the 20s in most people may help explain the poor, risky choices younger, less experienced decision makers commonly make.

Adolescents decide to drive fast, have unprotected sex, use drugs, drink, or smoke not simply on impulse but also because their young brains get bogged down in calculating odds. Youth are bombarded by warning statistics intended to set them straight, yet risks of undesirable outcomes from risky activities remain objectively small — smaller than teens may have initially estimated, even — and this may actually encourage young people to take those risks rather than avoid them. Adults, in contrast, make their choices more like expert doctors: going with their guts and making an immediate black/white judgment. They just say no to risky activities because, however objectively unlikely the risks are, there’s too much at stake to warrant even considering them.¹¹

Making Better Choices

The gist of the matter is, though, that none of us, no matter how grown up our frontal lobes, make optimal decisions; if we did, the world would be a better place. So the future of decision science is to take what we’ve learned about heuristics, biases, and System-1 versus System-2 thinking and apply it to the problem of actually improving people’s real-world choices.

One obvious approach is to get people to increase their use of System 2 to temper their emotional, snap judgments. Giving people more time to make decisions and reducing taxing demands on deliberative processing are obvious ways of bringing System 2 more into the act. Katherine L. Milkman (U. Penn.), Dolly Chugh (NYU), and Max H. Bazerman (Harvard) identify several other ways of facilitating System-2 thinking.¹² One example is encouraging decision makers to replace their intuitions with formal analysis — taking into account data on all known variables, providing weights to variables, and quantifying the different choices. This method has been shown to significantly improve decisions in contexts like school admissions and hiring.

Having decision makers take an outsider’s perspective on a decision can reduce overconfidence in their knowledge, in their odds of success, and in their time to complete tasks. Encouraging decision makers to consider the opposite of their preferred choice can reduce judgment errors and biases, as can training them in statistical reasoning. Considering multiple options simultaneously rather than separately can optimize outcomes and increase an individual’s willpower in carrying out a choice. Analogical reasoning can reduce System-1 errors by highlighting how a particular task shares underlying principles with another unrelated one, thereby helping people to see past distracting surface details to more fully understand a problem. And decision making by committee rather than individually can improve decisions in group contexts, as can making individuals more accountable for their decisions.¹³

In some domains, however, a better approach may be to work with, rather than against, our tendency to make decisions based on visceral reactions. In the health arena, this may involve appealing to people’s gist-based thinking. Doctors and the media bombard health consumers with numerical facts and data, yet according to Reyna, patients — like teenagers — tend initially to overestimate their risks; when they learn their risk for a particular disease is actually objectively lower than they thought, they become more complacent — for instance by forgoing screening. Instead, communicating the gist, “You’re at (some) risk, you should get screened because it detects disease early” may be a more powerful motivator to make the right decision than the raw numbers. And when statistics are presented, doing so in easy-to-grasp graphic formats rather than numerically can help patients (as well as physicians, who can be as statistically challenged as most laypeople) extract their own gists from the facts.¹⁴

Complacency is a problem when decisions involve issues that feel more remote from our daily lives — problems like global warming. The biggest obstacle to changing people’s individual behavior and collectively changing environmental policy, according to Columbia University decision scientist Elke Weber, is that people just aren’t scared of climate change. Being bombarded by facts and data about perils to come is not the same as having it affect us directly and immediately; in the absence of direct personal experience, our visceral decision system does not kick in to spur us to make better environmental choices such as buying more fuel-efficient vehicles.¹⁵

How should scientists and policymakers make climate change more immediate to people? Partly, it involves shifting from facts and data to experiential button-pressing. Powerful images of global warming and its effects can help. Unfortunately, according to research conducted by Yale environmental scientist Anthony A. Leisurowitz, the dominant images of global warming in Americans’ current consciousness are of melting ice and effects on nonhuman nature, not consequences that hit closer to home; as a result, people still think of global warming as only a moderate concern.¹⁶

Reframing options in terms that connect tangibly with people’s more immediate priorities, such as the social rules and norms they want to follow, is a way to encourage environmentally sound choices even in the absence of fear.¹⁷ For example, a study by Noah J. Goldstein (Univ. of Chicago), Robert B. Cialdini (Arizona State), and Vladas Griskevicius (Univ. of Minnesota) compared the effectiveness of different types of messages in getting hotel guests to reuse their towels rather than send them to the laundry. Messages framed in terms of social norms — “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels” — were more effective than messages simply emphasizing the environmental benefits of reuse.¹⁸

Yet another approach to getting us to make the most beneficial decisions is to appeal to our natural laziness. If there is a default option, most people will accept it because it is easiest to do so — and because they may assume that the default is the best. University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler suggests using policy changes to shift default choices in areas like retirement planning. Because it is expressed as normal, most people begin claiming their Social Security benefits as soon as they are eligible, in their early to mid 60s — a symbolic retirement age but not the age at which most people these days are actually retiring. Moving up the “normal” retirement age to 70 — a higher anchor — would encourage people to let their money grow longer untouched.¹⁹

Making Decisions About the Environment

References and Further Reading:

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of “Opting Out”
• Dan Kahneman on Fast and Slow Thinking
• Dan Kahneman on the Situation of Experience and Memory
• Dan Kahneman on the Situation of Well-Being,
• Dan Kahneman on the Situation of Intuition,
• Dan Kahneman’s Situation,
• The Situation of Financial Risk-Taking,
• Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I,
• Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part II.
• Nicole Stephens on “Choice, Social Class, and Agency”
• Sheena Iyengar on the Art of Choosing
• Just Choose It!
• Sheena Iyengar on the Situation of Choice,
• The Blame Frame – Abstract,
• Sheena Iyengar’s Situation and the Situation of Choosing,
• Sheena Iyengar on ‘The Multiple Choice Problem,’
• ‘Situation’ Trumps ‘Disposition’- Part II
• The Cause of Rioting? That’s Easy: Rioters!

You can review hundreds of Situationist posts related to the topic of “choice myth” here.

SALMS is excited to announce the opening of 2012 Officer Selection process, and to prepare for the new year with a Board meeting on Friday, 1/27 at noon in Houser 101:

1. NEW OFFICER SELECTION: In the next few weeks, SALMS will begin a transition from its current officer class to the leadership that will direct SALMS into the New Year. Tentative Officer titles and descriptions for the 2012 year include:

i. President

- responsible for setting the vision and agenda of the organization, for delegating responsibilities to the SALMS officers and Board, and for collaborating with the Vice President to manage the daily operations of the organization (including managing logistics of Speakers Series events).

ii. Vice President and Treasurer

- responsible for managing the SALMS budget and collaborating with the president to manage the daily operations of the organization (including managing logistics of Speakers Series events).

iii. Speakers Chair

- responsible for organizing and overseeing the selection process for the SALMS Speakers Series, as well as managing invitations and coordinating with speakers.

iv. Communications / Technology Chair

- responsible for updating and running the SALMS website and blog and maintaining the SALMS email list.

1Ls interested in serving in these positions should email dkorn[at]jd13.law.harvard.edu to schedule a meeting (please include a copy of your resume, though no prior mind science background is required).

2. SPRING ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING: At noon on Friday, January 27, 2012, in Hauser 101, the SALMS Board will meet to discuss the upcoming semester. In addition to dividing up responsibilities for the spring, we will look ahead to our scheduled Speakers Series events.

Matty McFeely, former President of SALMS and current 3L, just had a situationist-inspired letter to the editor published in The New Yorker.  The article to which he was responding (by Rachel Aviv’s “No Remorse,” January 2, 2012) was about a 15-year-old sentenced to life without parole for shooting his grandfather.  Before the murder, the boy’s girlfriend had just dumped him and a number of other things weren’t going his way, and the article asked whether putting a minor away for life was appropriate. Matty’s letter read as follows:

Aviv’s article forces us to rethink the justice system’s treatment of young adults, but it should also be a call for stricter gun control. It was too simple for Eliason to take “his grandfather’s loaded gun off the coatrack” and then shoot his grandfather. Eliason’s grim tale shows what surveys have already told us: the availability of guns is linked to higher rates of both suicide and homicide. A teen-ager’s rather routine funk became a senseless tragedy because a lethal device was at hand. A person’s situation has a lot of power over his or her behavior; we would be wise to recognize that fact and shape our situations accordingly.

Related Situationist posts:

• Brain and Blame
• Sarah Palin a Naive Cynic?
• The Psychology of Guns and Race
• Andrew Papachristos Explains Why Criminals Obey the Law – Video
• The Situation of Handguns on Urban Streets-Abstract
• Interview with Professor Robert MacCoun on Drug Policy
• The Situation of Criminality – Abstract,
• Deindividuation and Seung Hui Cho
• The Situation of First-Person Shooters
• Clarence Darrow on the Situation of Crime and Criminals, and
• Why Criminals Obey the Law – Abstract.

A former student of mine, Brett Murphy, has co-authored a fascinating and sophisticated paper on the roots of psychopathy, which you can download on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

“Psychopathy” is a psychopathological construct involving a diverse set of affective deficits and behavioral disinhibitions that result in substantial antisocial behavior, and includes traits such as extreme egocentricity, profound lack of empathy, and limited ability to experience guilt and remorse. The costs that “psychopaths” impose on society are enormous. Researchers have estimated that they comprise more than 15 percent of the adult prison population and are even more highly represented among repeat violent offenders. Although psychopaths are not necessarily violent, when they do commit violent offenses, their violence is very often coldblooded, predatorial, and instrumentally employed in the pursuit of another goal, such as money, sex, or power.

This unpublished manuscript extensively reviews and summarizes much of the psychological and neurobiological literature related to “psychopathy.” In addition to reviewing the existing findings regarding psychopathy and the prominent hypotheses regarding its etiology and unifying characteristics, this manuscript also offers a novel theory of the primary form of psychopathy, the “power assessment” hypothesis. This “power assessment” hypothesis argues: (1) that much of human behavior and cognition is causally influenced by bioregulatory mechanisms related to internal, subconscious assessments of power; and (2) that abnormalities in these mechanisms, when present starting early in childhood, may generate the cognitive, attentional, and behavorial characteristics of primary psychopathy.

Download the paper for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Low-Status Situation of Corrupting Power
• Shocking for Money,
• Psychology of Inequality,
• Jim Sidanius “Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law,”
• The Psychopath Test,
• The Embodied Situation of Power, and
  
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture.

Image from Flickr.

From RADIOLAB:

Cruelty, violence, badness… This episode of Radiolab, we wrestle with the dark side of human nature, and ask whether it’s something we can ever really understand, or fully escape.

We begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgrim’s famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it’s both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918…around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why?

Go to the RADIOLAB website to listen to the podcast.

Related Situationist posts:

• Assistance and Obedience
• The obedience experiments at 50
• The Milgram Experiment Yet Again (Again!)
• Milgram Experiment at 50 Years
• Shocking for Money
• The Power of the Situation
• Video on the Original Milgram Experiment,
• Milgram-Inspired Movie
• The Situation of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments,
• Milgram Replicated on French TV – ‘The Game of Death’,
• A Shocking Situation,
• Zimbardo on Milgram and Obedience – Part I,
• The Case for Obedience,
• Replicating Milgram’s Obedience Experiment – Yet Again,
• Jonestown (The Situation of Evil) Revisited,
• Milgram Remake, and
• The Milgram Experiment Today?

Experimental psychologist Professor Bruce Hood illustrating how human vision works (from the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2011).

Related Situationist posts:

• Beau Lotto on the Situation of Sight,
• The Situation of Sight,
• Brain Magic,
• Magic is in the Mind, and
• The Situation of Illusion

Click here for a collection of posts on illusion.

From The Association for Psychological Science:

Psychology textbooks have made the same historical mistake over and over. Now the inaccuracy is pointed out in a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

For generations, social psychology students have read that Norman Triplett did the first social psychology experiment in 1889, when he found that children reeled in a fishing line faster when they were in the presence of another child than when they were alone.

But almost everything about that sentence is wrong. The new paper’s author, Wolfgang Stroebe of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, had recently published a handbook on the history of social psychology (with Aria W. Kruglanski) when he came across a 2005 reanalysis of Triplett’s data and dug farther.

It turned out that the children in the study were turning a reel, but not reeling in a fishing line, and that Triplett was studying whether children performed better with competition. For his study, he eyeballed the data—an acceptable scientific practice in the 19^th century—and decided that some children performed better when competing, some performed worse, and others were not affected. The 2005 analysis found that these results were not statistically significant by modern standards.

So the modern textbooks have the details of the study wrong. But they’re also wrong that Triplett was the first psychologist to look at how people are affected by each other.

In the 1880s, Max Ringelmann studied whether workers pulled harder when they were together than when they worked alone. In 1894, Binet and Henri published a study of social influence among children and in 1887, Charles Féré authored a book that described experiments on how the presence of others could increase individual performance. But the field didn’t find its modern identity until 1924, says Stroebe, when Floyd Allport published a textbook defining social psychology as the experimental study of social behavior.

“I think the more interesting fact is that in the 1890s so many authors tried to answer questions relevant to social psychology with experimental methods,” Stroebe says. “This is much more important than to figure out who was really the first author.”

It’s time to fix the textbooks, Stroebe says. “I especially tried to get the article into a major journal in the hope that authors will take more notice of it than of articles published in historical journals.” He thinks his paper is important even though it isn’t at the cutting edge of research. “I was trained many decades ago in a period where one would have considered correcting the history of the origin of an important subfield of psychology to be important,” Stroebe writes in the conclusion of his article. “We even had a word for it. We called it scholarship.”

Peruse dozens of Situationist posts about classic social psychological experiments here.

* * *

Monday’s holiday provides an apt occasion to highlight the fact that, at least by my reckoning, Martin Luther King, Jr. was, among other things, a situationist.

To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.

Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.

King’s amazing “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is illustrative. While being held for nine days, King penned a letter in response to the public statement of eight prominent Alabama clergymen who denounced the Birmingham civil rights demonstrations. The prominent clergymen called King an “extremist” and an “outsider,” and “appeal[ed] to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

Regarding his “outsider” status, King insisted that the us-and-them categories were flawed, and that any meaningful distinction that might exist among groups was that between persons who perpetrated or countenanced injustice, on one hand, and those who resisted it, on the other:

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . .”

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

In describing the injustice itself, King sought to remove the focus from individual behavor and choice to the situational forces and absence of meaningful choice that helped to shape that behavior:

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”

In terms of his methods, too, Dr. King was a situationist. He understood that negotiating outcomes reflected the circumstances much more than the the disposition, of negotiators. The aim of demonstrations was to create a situation in which questions otherwise unasked were brought to the fore, in which injustice otherwise unnoticed was made salient, and in which the weak bargaining positions of the otherwise powerless were collectivized and strengthened:

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

In the letter, King expressed his frustation, not just with the egregious racists, but also — no, moreso — with the moderates who were willing to sacrifice real justice for the sake of maintaining the illusion of justice. King put it this way:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’ . . . .”

And King recognized the role that laws could play in maintaining an unjust status quo. Of course, he criticized the laws that literally enforced segregation, but he didn’t stop there. He criticized, too, the seemingly neutral laws, and the purportedly principled methods of interpreting and applying those laws, that could serve as legitimating cover for existing disparities:

“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

King explained that many churches, too, were implicated in this web of justification — caught up as they were in making sense of, or lessening the sting of, existing arrangements:

“So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.”

So, yes, Reverend King urged us all to help create a world in which people were “not . . . judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But King said much more. He recognized and tried to teach those who would listen that getting to that world would mean examining and challenging the situation — including our beliefs, our laws, our ideologies, our religious beliefs, our institutions, and existing allocations of opportunity, wealth, and power.

Judging those who are disadvantaged by the content of their character is not, taken alone, much of a solution. It may, in fact, be part of the problem. As Kathleen Hanson (my wife) and I recently argued, the problem “is, not in neglecting character, but in attributing to ‘character’ what should be attributed to [a person's] situation and, in turn, to our system and ourselves.” Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, far more effectively: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

* * *

For a sample of related Situationist posts, see

• “Larry Lessig’s Situationism,”
• “Al Gore – The Situationist.”
• “Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t,”
• “Black History is Now,”
• “Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” - Video,”
• “What does an Obama victory mean?,”
• “The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions,”
• “Guilt and Racial Prejudice,”
• “Perceptions of Racial Divide,” and
• “Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part IV.”