In Memoriam

This page is dedicated to those ISPP mentors and colleagues that have passed.

Click on the name to go to their tribute

Cheryl Koopman

It is with a heavy heart and profound sadness that we share Cheryl Ann Koopman, Ph.D.,
Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, died May 14 following a fall that resulted in multiple injuries near her home in South Lake Tahoe. She was 68 years old.

Dr. Koopman was an expert in her field with advanced training in psychology, education,
psychiatry, and political science from several leading research universities, including a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, M.A. in Educational Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia with double majors in Educational Psychology and Program Evaluation. She completed postdoctoral training fellowships at Harvard University and Columbia University.

Dr. Koopman was a nationally and internationally recognized academic scientist who made significant contributions to understanding stress and health in the social/political context. As a Professor Emerita, she remained active in research collaborations and mentoring following her retirement in 2015. She was a member of the faculty at Columbia University prior to joining Stanford University in 1992.

During her career, she published hundreds of peer-reviewed scholarly articles and book chapters. She was President of the International Society of Political Psychology, co-founded the Massachusetts Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and served on the Executive Committee of the New York Psychologists for Social Responsibility. Dr. Koopman was a beloved teacher and mentor to hundreds of students and trainees. She served as a Core Faculty member in the PGSP-Stanford Psy.D. Consortium and to honor her contributions, particularly as a dissertation
mentor for 44 doctoral students, the program recently named their annual student dissertation award the “Cheryl Koopman Dissertation of the Year Award”.

Our sincere condolences to her husband Glen DeMaria, her stepdaughter, Shannon, stepson-inlaw Neil Zawacki, her sister-in-law Jill DeMaria, her siblings, and the rest of her family and friends. She will be dearly missed.

Emile Bruneau

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.

Jerrold Post

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

Jim Sidanius

Jim Sidanius, John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, has passed away at age 75. A giant among political psychologists, he was a key contributor not only to the field in general, but also to ISPP in particular—serving variously as a vice president of ISPP, a member of the ISPP Governing Council over multiple terms, and as an editor of the journal Political Psychology.

It is difficult to overestimate the scope of Jim’s contributions as a scholar. His work, as embodied in over 300 scientific papers and four major books, reshaped our understanding of intergroup relations and political attitudes and behavior in group-stratified societies. After receiving his PhD in psychology from the Department of Psychology at the University of Stockholm in 1977, he held appointments at a number of prestigious institutions, including Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally Harvard University. During his lifetime, he received numerous awards and honors that attest to his stature as a giant in the field, including the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s 2013 Career Contribution Award. He was also inducted as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and he was a Fellow in both the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

His accomplishments received particular notice in ISPP, which was always his first and foremost home within social science. Most notably, he received ISPP’s Harold Lasswell Award for distinguished contribution in the field of political psychology in 2006. In further recognition of his accomplishments as a scholar and a mentor to countless students who have gone on to distinguished careers of their own, the International Society of Political Psychology recently renamed its Early Career Achievement Award after him.

Jim contributed to a number of important literatures in social and political psychology over his lifetime, beginning with his work on the nature of political extremism in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, his work on context theory offered an innovative argument: that political extremists actually showed greater cognitive sophistication than centrists on a number of dimensions, since deviating from “safe” moderate positions requires a greater level of skill in defending one’s positions. However, Jim’s most important intellectual contribution was social dominance theory (SDT). Developed in collaboration with Professor Felicia Pratto of the University of Connecticut, SDT is a general model of how group-based hierarchies are developed and reproduced. SDT explicates the personality, ideological, and even biological mechanisms through individual discrimination, institutional discrimination, and power-based asymmetries in group-serving behavior reinforce inequality between groups. Importantly, SDT centers a facet of social life that is more marginal (though not absent) in many other social-psychological perspectives on intergroup relations: group-based power differences. As Jim and his colleagues argued, intergroup conflict is not merely about seeking a positive image for the ingroup or seeking group interest, as important as these things are; rather, it is in large part about competition for group-based dominance.

Among social-psychological theories of intergroup relations, SDT stands out for the scope of its contribution. It is a truly integrative theory, bringing together multiple levels of analysis and perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines—the psychology of individual differences, sociology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, rather than dismissing the insights of other perspectives, it weaves them into a broader multilevel model of intergroup attitudes and behavior. In this respect, Jim’s most

important theoretical contribution helped bring social psychology back to the classical, “big-picture” roots of its founders, and it also helped popularize interest in the evolutionary roots of social behavior among social and political psychologists. SDT is now part of the core “canon” of major theories in the psychological study of intergroup relations, placing it in the same realm as social identity theory and contact theory. In short, Jim’s work is a model of intellectual breadth and integrative imagination that has few peers.

Despite his vast record of accomplishment, he was always humble and generous with students and colleagues alike. Though he expected much of his students, he always did so with deep respect and with complete confidence in their ability to deliver—and he was always ready to provide whatever support his students required along the way. His door was always open, both literally and figuratively.

He will be missed, and his influence will live on.

Bob Jervis

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that intellectual virtues were those faculties of the mind that people wished for themselves. The political mind—more specifically, how political actors think (or sometimes don’t)—was the focus of Robert Jervis’s scholarship and numerous contributions to political psychology. I suspect he found very few decision makers whose thought processes he coveted—not because he disapproved of their choices (although he often did) but because decision makers by definition have to decide. Among the most striking characteristics of Bob’s approach to analysis, however, was his reluctance to decide or cast final judgement. His intellectual virtue was found in a driving need to ask whether a given question, problem or puzzle could be viewed from yet another perspective, one that might lead to the identification of different causal processes and assessments of the effectiveness, reasonableness, or perhaps even wisdom of some decision maker’s choice. Whether in the classroom, the political psychology research seminar he convened for interested faculty and graduate students, work-shops for historians and political scientists, or his famous lunch groups, Bob was always probing others in search of novel perspectives. Suspending final judgment meant eschewing theoretical and methodological trench warfare, mistrust of assertions of authority, openness to new ideas and people, and above all, humility with respect to his own claims to knowledge. Robert Jervis was crucial to my ad-mission to graduate school more than thirty years ago. He introduced me to the field of political psychology and sent me to my first ISPP convention. He guided me through my dissertation and served as a professional mentor ever since. His death leaves a void that no one person can ever fill. Though his intellect will forever be beyond my reach, I can think of no better tribute to my teacher and friend than to recommit myself to following his scholarly example and passing it along as best as I can.

James W. Davis
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Sam McFarland

With great sadness and love, ISPP acknowledges the passing of Sam McFarland on January 11, 2022. Sam served ISPP in numerous roles, including as President in 2009-2010, on the Editorial Board of Political Psychology, as a member of the ISPP Caucus of Concerned Scholars, and on so many other initiatives and committees that he was awarded the Jeanne Knutson award for service in 2001. Sam was in active service to ISPP and to our discipline up until his death.

Sam spent his post-PhD career at Western Kentucky University, where he was a Distinguished Professor, but his interests and reach were global. Sam was granted a Fulbright fellowship to spend time in the USSR in 1989, and through ISPP he developed collaborations and friendships with fellow ISPP members from numerous countries. Sam published work in several languages and in numerous international journals. He was an active scholar through retirement to the end of his life, and was pleased to have just published a book, Heroes of Human Rights (Cingella).

A deeply caring person, Sam was always concerned with the darker sides of political psychological behavior, including repression, torture, and human rights violations. He has a body of work investigating the psychology of religion, including political psychological orientations of Christian fundamentalists, a politically significant group in the U.S. since the 1980s. With undergraduate and graduate students, he published important empirical critiques of interpretations of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Implicit Attitudes Test. He conducted some of the earliest work comparing authoritarianism across the East-West divide, thereby resolving the 40-year debate about the existence of “left-wing authoritarianism.” Those on the Governing Council when Sam was President recall fondly the difficulty he had with using the gavel to bring the room to order; his predilection as a leader was to build consensus rather than to exercise authority and dominance. Sam was instrumental in bringing attention to and support for respect for human rights through his advocacy in professional associations and his research.

Despite studying general prejudice and authoritarianism through much of his career, Sam advocated that rather than focusing only on prejudice and dominance tendencies, political psychological research should examine what makes people refuse to participate in repression, what makes them anti-prejudicial, and indeed what makes them more fully human. In the latter stages of his career, he drew attention to the concept that some individuals identify very broadly with all humanity, a more psychologically inclusive stance than group-focused identification or group-focused prejudice. His work developing the Identification with All Humanity scale, a review of which was published in the 2019 issue of Advances in Political Psychology, shows the scientific care and thoroughness that characterizes his publications. In several papers and his recent book, he strove to highlight individuals who took extraordinary expansive steps towards promoting human rights and international humanitarian law, such as Henry Dunant. Sam was also instrumental in the American Psychological Association’s response to reports that trained psychologists had facilitated torture of American captives in Abu Ghraib.

Sam was the epitome of hard work, graciousness and restraint, whether presenting research, being ISPP Program Chair for the 1999 meeting, chairing the ISPP Governing Council during his term as President, or reviewing a colleague’s manuscript. Indeed, through 2021 Sam continued to offer warm and encouraging reviews for our journal, providing respectful and thoughtful feedback to each paper he reviewed. Sam served and led ISPP as an active member and in many official capacities, yet after his friendliness and wit, his most apparent quality might well have been his modesty. Sam McFarland was the exemplar of humility and humanity, and when we remember our better selves, we will honor his gifts to us.

Sam’s last publication list is available here. (http://people.wku.edu/sam.mcfarland/)

Memorial Donations to honor Sam’s memory may be made to any of the following:

Human Rights Watch

www.hrw.org

Doctors Without Borders

www.doctorswithoutborders.org

Habitat For Humanity

www.habitat.org

Herbert C. Kelman

Our ISPP community is deeply saddened to have lost one of our past presidents and seniors in our field. Herb Kelman’s research inspired and guided generations of political psychologists who work on ethnic conflict, dehumanization, civil rights, nationalism, peace and social justice. His seminal works stress the power of psychology to shed light to the deepest and darkest aspects of political life and offered insights that are all the more relevant today. A dedicated scholar, a gifted practitioner, and a caring mentor, Herb is missed dearly. He lives in our hearts and in the knowledge he has gifted us.

An obituary can be found HERE.

Bernhard (Berni) Leidner

Dr. Bernhard (Berni) Leidner passed away on November 19th 2022. He was one of us: A social psychologist who spent half of his 39 years of life conducting research on intergroup relations. Berni graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 2006 and in the same year he joined Emanuele Castano’s lab at the New School for Social Research, where in 2010 he received his Ph.D. He spent his entire academic career at UMass Amherst where, earlier this year, he was promoted to Full Professor. Among his various awards and recognitions, in 2013 he was named a rising star by the Association for Psychological Science, and in the following years he did indeed rise, carrying out important research on social identification processes, morality, and the role of collective trauma and narratives in the perpetuation of violent intergroup conflict. Berni was also a devoted mentor who cared deeply about his students. Aside from his scientific contributions, which remain with us, Berni leaves us a legacy of inspiration. Confined to a wheelchair for all his truly too-short life, and being able to move only his head and forearms, Berni had no patience for pity or pretense. He preferred for the rest of us to acknowledge that he had been bloody unlucky; he continuously joked about his situation; and appreciated when you did, too. He overcame obstacles that we can hardly imagine and, most importantly, he did so with wit and humor. He was a true friend with a big heart, his laugh was contagious, and this is how we want to remember him.