From the President

    By Susan Clayton, SPSSI President


SPSSI is not just a loose association of like-minded psychologists; it’s an organization structured to advance our mission of applying psychological research to address social issues. Its “products” include not only a number of distinguished publications but also conferences, policy statements, congressional briefings, and so on. Becoming SPSSI president suggested to me that I need to become more familiar with the internal workings and organizational processes that deliver these outcomes, and I was delighted to find that it is the opposite of visiting a sausage factory. The more I know about the processes and people that are responsible for the things SPSSI produces, the more impressed I am by how smoothly things run and by the dedication of those who run them, both the paid staff and the many volunteers who are committed to expressing their values through their work with SPSSI.

I bring up the organizational nature of SPSSI because it illustrates a few key SPSSI principles. One is that good things don’t just happen, and good intentions are not enough. Good things happen – from the SPSSI office to the international level – because specific people take specific actions in a context that allows them the resources they need to succeed. Policy changes that will ameliorate some of the problems we care about, like prejudice, poverty, and conflict, require people to care, but they also require people to inform themselves and to act. SPSSI has a distinctive role in providing the research-based information to not only motivate but also enable action. We need to think about how the sausage gets made: how the appropriate information gets to the appropriate people.

A second key principle is interdependence.  As a professional society we function not simply as a collection of individuals but as an interdependent network of people who occupy different roles, each necessary to advance our objectives.  This can be a difficult lesson to learn for people who have been trained in a very individuating graduate program, where the emphasis is typically on each person’s individual contribution and unique ideas. Advancing SPSSI’s goals requires us to consider not only what we can each contribute but also what other people can contribute that we can’t, and then to figure out how to bring those people on board.  This means reaching out to psychologists and social scientists from underrepresented groups who enhance our diversity and bring new knowledge and understandings. It may also mean trying to involve people with different political perspectives.  Importantly for SPSSI, it means working with people who are not social scientists but whose knowledge, influence, or expertise is necessary to get the best policies implemented. We need to think about the best ways to interact with people from a variety of different roles.

The final principle is the need to consider multiple scales. SPSSI takes psychological research that may have been conducted on a few dozen college students, and considers the implications for society. (I don’t mean to imply that the link is direct; of course we consider the quality of the research, and typically wait until a body of evidence has accumulated!) We also take public policies and consider their implications for individuals. The point is that we are used to transitions of scale, moving things from one level to another.  We need to highlight this as we consider the relationship between individual behavior and social policy, and between individual and societal well-being.

Let me illustrate these principles with the example of climate change.  The potential contributions of psychologists are often overlooked, in part because the behavior of individuals is often seen as irrelevant to processes that occur at a global scale. But we know that individual behavior matters. However, for our research on individuals to have influence, we need to find ways to interact and communicate with researchers from other disciplines as well as with policymakers.  We have an important part of the answer, but we certainly don’t have the whole answer. 

Finally, one specific thing we need to do is to get the right information to the right people.  And here is where the well-oiled SPSSI organization can help.  I’ll be working this year with SPSSI’s new policy director, Sarah Mancoll, and with a number of motivated SPSSI volunteers, to think about ways to get psychological research about climate change into the hands of those who can do something with it: policymakers, conservation scientists, and community groups working at a local level, among others.  It’s my hope that we can develop an approach that could be usefully applied to other social issues as well. If you have ideas or want to be involved, please contact me!

—Susan Clayton

sclayton@wooster.edu