JOURNEYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY RRT61343_C000.inddT61343_C000.indd i 115/12/20075/12/2007 007:45:317:45:31 RRT61343_C000.inddT61343_C000.indd iiii 115/12/20075/12/2007 007:45:327:45:32 JOURNEYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Looking Back to Inspire the Future Edited by Robert Levine s Aroldo Rodrigues Lynnette Zelezny RRT61343_C000.inddT61343_C000.indd iiiiii 115/12/20075/12/2007 007:45:327:45:32 Psychology Press Psychology Press Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 27 Church Road New York, NY 10016 Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-8058-6134-1 (Hardcover) Library of Congress Control Number: 2007943029 Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, trans- mitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Psychology Press Web site at http://www.psypress.com RRT61343_C000.inddT61343_C000.indd iivv 115/12/20075/12/2007 007:45:327:45:32 Contents Preface vii Introduction ix One Happy Autobiography 1 Ed Diener Organizing for Surprise: A Career of Arranging to Be Captured 19 Robert B. Cialdini From Social Psychology to Neuroscience and Back 39 Shelley E. Taylor A Career on the Interdisciplinary Divide: Refl ections on the Challenges of Bridging the Psychological and the Social 55 Alice H. Eagly Life Experiences and Their Legacies 69 Bernard Weiner The Journey from the Bronx to Stanford to Abu Ghraib 85 Philip G. Zimbardo The Full Cycle of an Interamerican Journey in Social Psychology 105 Aroldo Rodrigues Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion: The Story of a Career 129 Robert Rosenthal An Autobiography: Why Did Culture Shape My Career? 145 Harry C. Triandis v RRT61343_C000toc.inddT61343_C000toc.indd v 118/12/20078/12/2007 007:15:237:15:23 vi CONTENTS Toward Understanding Social Power: A Personal Odyssey 165 Bertram H. Raven A Social Psychologist Examines His Past and Looks to the Future 189 Harold B. Gerard Some Refl ections on 50 Years in Social Psychology 211 Harold H. Kelley A Career That Spans the History of Modern Social Psychology 221 Morton Deutsch Conclusions: Looking Back to Inspire the Future 241 Robert Levine and Lynnette Zelezny Author Index 251 Subject Index 255 RRT61343_C000toc.inddT61343_C000toc.indd vvii 118/12/20078/12/2007 007:15:247:15:24 Preface he chapters that follow offer fi rst-person accounts of the career journeys of 13 distinguished social psychologists. The authors describe their personal T career journeys, the signifi cant people and events that infl uenced their paths, the major turning points, the main decisions, the challenges, the opportuni- ties and setbacks they experienced, and how the lessons they learned along the way may shine a beacon for future social psychologists. Taken together, these chapters chronicle the history of modern social psychology. Also, we believe they will serve as inspiration and counsel to students considering a career in social psychology. This book grew out of two remarkable events, the Yosemite conferences of 1997 and 2006, both of which were sponsored by the Department of Psychology at California State University, Fresno. Both of these meetings took place in an idyllic setting on the edge of Yosemite National Park. The conferences followed the same general format: one- and one-half days of presentations from a small group of exceptional invited participants, along with ample time for formal and informal discussion between the participants and conference attendees. In the fi rst Yosemite conference, we brought together nine distinguished senior social psychologists to refl ect on the history of the discipline that they were very much a part of creating. (The book Refl ections on One Hundred Years of Experimental Social Psychology [Rodrigues & Levine, 1999] and a video from the conference were produced.) The second Yosemite conference, which took place in the spring of 2006, focused on a theme that was more about people. On this occasion, as in this book, we asked participants to describe the course of their own career journeys. Some participants from the fi rst Yosemite conference attended as discussants. Each of the eight presenters at Yosemite II have contributed chapters to this book: Robert Cialdini, Edward Diener, Alice Eagly, Aroldo Rodrigues, Robert Rosenthal, Shelley Taylor, Harry Triandis, and Bernard Weiner. Also in this book are chapters from fi ve of the presenters at the fi rst Yosemite conference: Morton Deutsch, Harold Gerard, Harold Kelley, Bertram Raven, and Philip Zimbardo. Some of the material in these latter chapters originally appeared in the fi rst Yosemite book but, we believe, fi ts more properly into the current theme. We thank Joann Miller of Basic Books for permission to use this material. Harold Kelley and Harold Gerard died in early 2003. We modifi ed their chapters for the present book with the input and the approval of their wives, Dorothy Kelley and Desy Gerard, respectively. vii RRT61343_C000e.inddT61343_C000e.indd vviiii 110/31/070/31/07 99:57:23:57:23 AAMM viii PREFACE We owe thanks to many people. The Yosemite II conference was generously supported by Jeronima Echeverria, provost and vice president for academic affairs, and Kin Ping Wong, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at California State University, Fresno. Thanks are also due to Sheri Osborn, Christine Thiboudeax, and Liliana Oceguera for their outstanding supportive roles in the organization of this endeavor. Many graduate and undergraduate students of California State University, Fresno dedicated hours of their time to the conference that led to the present book. Debra Riegert, our editor at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, and Rebecca Larsen, her editorial assistant, were supportive and helpful in every phase of the production of this volume. Finally, we wish to express a special word of thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to read the manuscript and make many helpful suggestions. Without the concerted effort of many, this book could not have come to light. Robert Levine Aroldo Rodrigues Lynnette Zelezny Fresno, California RRT61343_C000e.inddT61343_C000e.indd vviiiiii 110/31/070/31/07 99:57:24:57:24 AAMM Introduction n this book, 13 prominent social psychologists refl ect on their careers. You will read fi rst-person accounts of the history and events that guided their I career paths, the people and places that made a difference in their lives, the stepping-stones they took, the detours and bumps on their roads, and the choices they made along the way. What makes for a successful social psychologist? Is there a social psychologist type—a personality or typical value system—that is drawn to the discipline? Or is the attraction mostly the result of happenstance and quirks of experience, perhaps a defi ning life event or an inspirational professor? Is there a path that personifi es the great teachers? The best researchers? Can we predict or explain why one person’s career takes a particular course while the next person’s moves in another? Why do different people make different choices along the way? Why can the same decision have such different consequences for different people? No people should be more qualifi ed to answer questions like these than social psychologists. Charting the course of individuals through situations is, after all, what social psychology is about. Modern social psychology was founded on the belief that an interdisciplinary approach was needed to take on such broad, unwieldy questions about life. We are a hybrid of two older disciplines: personality psychology and sociology. The fi rst of these tends to focus on the private, internal functioning of people; the latter focuses on their social groups. Social psychologists, at our best, take in the entire dynamic picture, across space and time. We study the give and take between individuals and the environments that guide their behavior, what our founding father Kurt Lewin called the “life space.” Our fl agship journal is aptly titled the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP). Social psychologists are used to studying the most personal of subject matters. Our bread-and-butter topics include questions about the self, persuasion, helping and altruism, aggression and violence, prejudice, and even the dynamics of liking and love. When social psychologists study the interaction of people in their environments, they are studying the living of life itself. Thematically, then, the study of career paths fi ts neatly into the domain of social psychology. The chapters that follow, however, are hardly what we are used to reading from mainstream social psychologists. Although the content fi ts in the mainstream, the form does not. Social psychology, at least as it is practiced in today’s world of academia, is among the most empirical and methodologically rig- orous of disciplines. Look through practically any social psychological textbook and ix RRT61343_C000f.inddT61343_C000f.indd iixx 001/11/20071/11/2007 112:34:502:34:50 x INTRODUCTION you will be hard pressed to fi nd a theory or concept or even a comment that is not accompanied by empirical, scientifi cally derived research fi ndings. Our fl agship journals are almost totally composed of empirical studies or empirically grounded theories. If social psychologists were asked to write an article about career paths for one of our academic journals, most of them would approach the problem via either or both of two tracks.