In these times when our countries, families, and universities are under stress, I want to share with you some warm news. I feel fortunate to find how many ISPP members are generous enough to offer their ideas, talents, good will, and commitment to each other and our organization. For example, nearly as soon as the September newsletter went out, our long-time colleague and leader, David Winter, emailed all of his materials for teaching political psychology for us to post for members on the new website. Our new Vice President of Communications, Joanne Miller, will be sending invitations soon to ask for several more kinds of resources we would like to offer to the general public and for members and students. The Governing Council (GC) and former GC members are very pleased that you ratified the new Constitution and By-Laws because our old ones had become impossibly inaccurate, tangled, and out of date versus the ways the GC has been reorganizing its functionality for some years. This relieves us and enables your GC members to initiate more services for members and the discipline. In addition to former President Dave Redlawsk, who extremely carefully revised and revised and revised (!) the Constitution and separated what should be constitutional from what should be a more changeable By-law, we all owe Michael Morrell a big debt for stepping into a suddenly-vacant Vice President of Conferences position and for contributing his considerable organizational expertise in how to develop By-laws and operating handbooks for the GC. The 2021 program chairs, Carla Houkamou and Allison Harrel, have recruited two well-known Indigenous political psychologists, Drs. Waikaremoana Waitoki and Jeffrey Ansloos, and Dr. Paula McClain, a leader in racial politics and in recruiting students into political science, as our keynote speakers for the 2021 Annual Meeting, and have been reaching out to scholars around the globe for participation in the conference. They have planned lots of new features for the conference, including more online networking opportunities such as themed chat rooms, advanced methods workshops, roundtable discussions of research difficulties. The program will have three time zones to better accommodate day times of more attendees. Carla and Allison perhaps have gathered the most inclusive set of section chairs ever. ISPP also has people from 19 countries serving on awards committees. Our former President and Treasurer, George Marcus, has raised enough money for us to provide a new important prize for mentoring, named in honor of John Sullivan from the University of Minnesota (US). ISPP has many wonderful mentor-members, but I know mentoring is often an unsung virtue, yet it is necessary for the continuation and development of any field. I personally am glad that John and mentoring will be recognized. Another long-term member, Art Kendall, continues to keep us informed about human rights and other important issues. All program chairs work hard to prepare organized, engaging, and inclusive programs, for which we are eternally in their debt. For 2020, Thomas Craemer and Liliana Mason deserve huge accolades not only for chairing a terrific program last July, but also for good-naturedly pivoting to our first-ever virtual meeting in a matter of only a few months. Oy! I’m very happy to report that, unlike some unfortunate sister organizations, due to Sev Bennett’s brilliant contract writing and doggedness, we did not lose money on the 2020 conference. Naturally, she, Heather Schlabach, and Nick Valentino devoted the months between March and July to working out how to execute a polished virtual meeting for ISPP. In addition, as I hope you saw (or will view on our website), Nick recruited a brilliant panel of political psychologists to address issues of racism in the US for the conference. Sev and Heather managed the craziness of the program venue shift, re-budgeting, refunding half the registration costs to all of us, and a long list of other tasks with their usual cheer. (They should bottle that!). In case you don’t know, this is far from the first time Sev and Heather managed a surprise conference crisis. While we met in Warsaw, Turkey locked down its airports and bank accounts, which left attendees from Turkey “homeless” and money-less. Sev and Heather and our Polish friends helped find housing and solutions to financial logistics for affected attendees. As a very committed ISPP member, Thomas Craemer is not only remaining active on our Scholars Under Threat committee, but is heading up a committee to research diversity within ISPP. And --I am most happy to share-- that I’ve asked many ISPP members to serve as ISPP Ambassadors, to reach out to regional colleagues and groups to connect them with ISPP and we members to them. The Ambassadors’ response has been amazing, and we have only just started. Some are organizing monthly groups to e-meet and discuss their work in progress. Ambassadors have suggested a score of new initiatives and organized roundtable discussions for the July conference. Many have informed me of needs that their students and they face (e.g., access to data and basic statistical instruction in numerous languages, research opportunities for undergraduates) and their research challenges. There is so much wisdom and generosity among us that I feel sure we members can support and promote each other and our discipline by sharing it more widely. Thus far there are ISPP Ambassadors in the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Serbia, Lebanon, Qatar, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Palestine, and South Africa, but of course there are more places we can serve political psychology. If you would like to be an Ambassador (I’m afraid you would only get a pretend sash) and/or if you would like to be connected with other Ambassadors, please email me at felicia.pratto@uconn.edu. Incidentally, in the conference, in Ambassador outreach, and for ISPP projects, we are cognizant that many members have difficult political or personal circumstances that we are glad to accommodate – just ask. From the bottom of my heart, I thank these members for sharing themselves so generously with others. Is there anything more wonderful than people transforming terrible circumstances into an agenda for good?
Thank you to all our members for helping each other, your communities, your students, and us collectively to survive and thrive. Should you feel alone in the dark, I promise if you look to other ISPP members, you will find a warm flame of hope.
Felicia Pratto
ISPP President
Save the dates! ISPP's upcoming meetings
Our 2021 Annual Meeting will be held online 11-13 July 2021.
Our 2022 Annual Meeting is planned to be held in Athens, Greece.
If you are interested in hosting a future conference of ISPP, please contact the Central Office to obtain the necessary guidelines and materials.
Call for the New Twinning Program
Call for the Twinning Program in English [see below for the call in Arabic, French, Spanish and Turkish]
We are happy to announce that we are still accepting applications for our New Twinning Program among Scholars under Threat (ISPP members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution). The New Twinning Program has been set up with the aim of facilitating scholarly collaborations between threatened political psychologists and program partners. These collaborations can offer the opportunity for threatened scholars to continue their academic activities, maintain and advance their careers, and integrate into international political psychology; furthermore, partners can engage in political advocacy on behalf of threatened scholar. We are grateful to the 24 scholars who have already expressed their interest to work together with a scholar under threat as partners. We would kindly like to ask our members to reach out to those scholars within their networks around the world who may benefit from participating.
You can find more information about the Twinning Program here.
ISPP is committed to the protection of its members whose academic freedom is at risk anywhere in the world due to the political context where they work and/or live. Therefore, we offer emergency funds to members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution and are without an official affiliation or income in their current location. You can help by donating to the ISPP Scholars under Threat fund through this link.
ISPP has recently supported 17 scholars from Turkey. Therefore, at the moment we cannot accept applications for emergency funds. We are currently collecting donations in order to be able to reopen the emergency fund.
Associate Professor in Social Psychology, UMass Amherst
The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (http://www.umass.edu/pbs/) is inviting applications for a faculty position at the Associate Professor level in its Social Psychology program, starting in Fall 2021.
We are seeking outstanding applicants with expertise in any area of social psychology, including interdisciplinary fields connected to social psychology, whose work complements and broadens existing strengths in our program. Additionally, the Department is interested in candidates who have demonstrated ability to contribute to the inclusive excellence and diversity mission of the department, college and university in research, teaching, and/or outreach.
Tenure track Assistant Professor Positions, Ashoka University
The Department of Psychology at Ashoka University invites applications for full-time tenure track faculty Assistant Professor positions. Ashoka University is a private research-intensive university based near New Delhi, India. The selected candidates will be expected to have an internationally competitive research profile in any area of Psychological Science (e.g., Social). At Ashoka, we emphasize Psychology as an empirical science. Tenure-track faculty are supported with lab start-up costs and
have access to internal research/travel grants.
The School of Education is seeking to appoint a Research Associate to work with Dr Shelley McKeown-Jones (University of Bristol), Professor David Manley (University of Bristol) and Dr Laura K. Taylor (Queen’s University, Belfast/University College Dublin) on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project, “Shared Spaces: The How, When and Why of Adolescent Intergroup Interactions”. The Shared Spaces project takes an interdisciplinary approach approach to examine the interplay between the individual and contextual factors that influence whether adolescents in Belfast and Bradford choose or not to engage in intergroup interactions with people from other ethno-religious groups. Working together with project consultants from the National Children's Bureau and in collaboration with City Councils, this project will address gaps in the research literature and inform evidence-based social cohesion strategies.
Post-doc Position in Social Developmental Psychology, University of Exeter
The College wishes to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to work on a multi-site international longitudinal project evaluating the impact of youth educator programs within informal science learning sites (museums and science centres) on children’s and adolescents’ psychological engagement with and attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust & ESRC and was awarded to Professor Adam Rutland at Department of Psychology, University of Exeter.
7 Doctoral Researcher Positions in Research Training Group at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences
AThe Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) invites applications for 7 doctoral researcher positions in its new Research Training Group (RTG) 2513 “Social Dynamics of the Self” (SELF), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). BIGSSS is an international inter-university graduate school in the social sciences, located at the University of Bremen and Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Successful applicants will receive a work contract for 36 months, based on salary scale E13 TV-L/TVöD (65%), at Jacobs University or the University of Bremen.
IIE-SRF announces a January 4th deadline for its next round of applications from professors and
researchers facing threats to their lives or careers. Fellowships support temporary academic positions at universities and other higher education institutions anywhere in the world where the scholars can continue their academic work in safety.
Who can apply:
Professors, researchers, and public intellectuals from any country, field, or discipline may apply. Please refer eligible candidates and forward this announcement to any academic colleagues who may be interested.
Qualifying applicants are currently facing or have recently fled from direct and immediate threats.
Preference is given to scholars with a Ph.D. or other terminal degree in their field, and who have extensive teaching or research experience at an institution of higher learning.
Women and scholars from under-represented groups are strongly encouraged to apply
Linh Vu, Margarita Leib, Joël van der Weele and Shaul Shalvi are conducting a meta-analysis assessing the overall effect size of willful ignorance and the factors influencing it. If you have a study (published or unpublished) that fulfills the criteria below, please let them know by emailing Linh Vu (m.l.vu@uva.nl).
Deadline: December 18th, 2020
Special Issue: Bridging the gap between intergroup and face perception research: Understanding the mechanisms underlying the other-‘race’ effect
This special issue aims to enhance cross talk between psychological subdisciplines, to offer insights to researchers from both domains. For example, intergroup theorizing may provide insights about the impact of motivational processes on basic face perception. Conversely, theories of face perception may provide insights into the boundary conditions of motivational effects on the ORE.
We invite empirical papers or review articles focusing on one or more of the following topics. All contributions should adhere to the BJP author guidelines.
The impact of intergroup contact and expertise on the ORE
The impact of motivational factors and/or intergroup-attitudes on the ORE
Joint contribution of expertise and socio-motivational factors to the ORE
Cognitive mechanisms underlying the ORE
Mental representation: Strengths and limits of (norm-based) face space accounts of the ORE
Neural mechanisms underlying the ORE
Developmental aspects of the ORE
Consequences of the ORE
Comparison between the ORE and other group-based memory biases (i.e., age, gender)
Comparison between the ORE for faces and other social memory biases (i.e., voices, places)
Meta-analysis on the impact of linguistic cues on behavior: Call for data
For a meta-analytical assessment, we seek unpublished data reporting on the impact of linguistic cues,
expressed as verbs vs nouns, on behavior.
We are gathering data that meet the following criteria:
1. The study/sample includes experimental manipulation which
include some linguistic cues for behavior (including, but not limited to providing cues in instruction or other study materials)
manipulate word class of the cues, i.e. verb vs noun (for instance vote vs voter, drawing vs drawer, helping vs helper, let’s do science vs. let’s be scientists)
2. The study includes any measure of:
behavior (for instance voting, helping, playing)
behavioral intentions
attitudes towards behavior.
If you have unpublished or nearly published data (including thesis data) that might meet these criteria,
please complete the following survey: https://psychodpt.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3wsC1PGk13TVby5.
A Remembrance of Prof. Jerrold Post / A Profile of the Profiler by Ruthie Pertsis
Dr. Jerrold Post, founding member of ISPP, passed away on November 22, 2020. Many of you have already heard or read about his passing in the news, which is a testament to his larger-than-life presence in this world.
Jerrold Post was born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA in 1934. He completed his B.A. and M.D. at Yale University and his post-graduate training in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1965, he founded the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, and the work he did there profiling world leaders earned him the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 1979 and the Studies in Intelligence Award in 1980. Most notably, he prepared profiles of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin to help President Jimmy Carter navigate the Camp David Accords of 1978. From the CIA, he moved to George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he taught his craft for the next thirty years. Over the course of his career, he wrote and edited 11 books, the most recent published only one year ago.
In addition to being one of the founding members of ISPP, Dr. Post enthusiastically championed the Society for more than five decades. He served on the editorial board of Political Psychology since 1987, with his dedication to the journal measurable by the mountains of issues that he kept in his office (and his refusal to get rid of them even after the journal became available online). He served as Vice President from 1994-1996, and won the Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political Psychology in 2002 for his important contributions to the Camp David Accords and long-time excellent work on the psychological assessment of political leaders and on the psychology of terrorism. He was a regular contributor to the annual meetings – it would be hard for most to remember a meeting that he did not attend – and, having worked with him from 2010-2013 and accompanied him to several of those meetings, it was clear that the ISPP community was his intellectual home. Because of him, it is also now mine and that of many others.
Dr. Post’s work conveyed his extraordinary intelligence and insight, but anyone who was lucky enough to know him could see that he was also insatiably curious, completely genuine, remarkably kind, and that he had a brilliant sense of humor. He loved telling the story of when he flew to attend a conference on terrorism, accidentally telling security that he was going to a “terrorist convention” and immediately getting shuffled off to the tiny airport interrogation room. There was also the terrifying life-sized Saddam Hussein doll that he stubbornly kept in his office, which was sent to him as a prank by a friend – initially prompting an FBI lockdown and investigation – after he testified in Congress at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Despite dedicating his life to the study of dark and difficult topics, he maintained a lightness and ease that inspired everyone around him.
He was many things to many people. To me, he was a mentor, an advocate, and a friend. He will be missed.
Ruthie Pertsis
With great sadness, we acknowledge the October, 2020 death of our colleague, Dr. Emile Bruneau, of a brain tumor. Emile embodied virtues as a person and a scholar-activist that many of us strive for: international and interdisciplinary research, persistent curiosity, scientific imagination and systematic research, wonderful mentoring and collaboration, positivity, humor, and compassion for his intimates, students, friends, and even for people engaged in intergroup conflict that wounded others.
GC member Nour Kteily, and one of Emile's several collaborators, contributed this remembrance:
Emile Bruneau’s guiding mission—and he was certainly a man on a mission—was to “put science to work for peace.” Emile’s doctoral training was in cellular and molecular neuroscience, but his life’s passion was to use the tools of social and political psychology to improve intergroup relations. A trademark of his research program was identifying a barrier to peace, and then working—often with partners ‘on the ground’ around the world—to develop evidence-based interventions to help increase tolerance. His postdoctoral research explored intergroup empathy, examining when and why we express empathy parochially to members of ingroups versus outgroups, and uncovering mechanisms (such as the use of individuating narratives) to attenuate this bias. Shining a spotlight on the role of power, he showed that whereas high-power groups benefit from perspective-taking interventions, low-power groups benefit more from having the opportunity to give their perspective. In subsequent work, he examined the causes and consequences of blatant forms of dehumanization, including research that showed that dehumanization is in part facilitated by the meta-perception that one’s own group is dehumanized by others. Indeed, Emile was fascinated by the tendency for metaperceptions to be unduly negative, identifying false polarization—our proclivity to believe that we are more divided and despised than we actually are—as an opportunity for corrective interventions. Emile was particularly excited by the power of what he called ‘intervention tournaments,’ sourcing ideas for and then testing a large number of interventions to see what was most effective and then investigating why. This approach yielded an intervention he was especially proud of, a ‘collective blame hypocrisy’ intervention that reliably reduced anti-Muslim bias by gently highlighting individuals’ tendency to collectively blame outgroups but not their own group for the condemnable actions of individual group members. Fittingly, one of Emile’s final projects (soon to be published) was an intervention tournament based on video stimuli generated from interviews he conducted with former FARC members at demobilization camp in rural Colombia to overcome barriers to re-integration and lasting peace. Emile’s work will leave an indelible mark on political psychology—and the world.
Another ISPP member friend, Anca Minescu, shared that there are many interviews with and talks by Emile on the internet that you may appreciate. Here are just a few:
The next ISPPNews will be published in January 2021.
To submit your contributions for ISPPNews please send an email to the ISPP Central Office.
Benefits of your ISPP Membership
Six issues per year of the journal Political Psychology; online access to the journal of Political Psychology and Advances in Political Psychology; issues of ISPPNews; ISPP's Teacher's Corner; reduced registration fees at ISPP's Annual Scientific Meetings; discount on selected publications; access to ISPP's Members-only Portal; access to the online member directory; voting rights for ISPP leadership
Your ideas for further improvements or additions to ISPPNews are welcome! Please let us know what you would like to see here in the future by sending us an email.
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