2018 Distinguished Service to SPSSI Award Recipient

Chris Crandall is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas. His career in psychology began by running rats at the University of Washington; he received a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan while Ronald Reagan was President, with a dissertation on the social contagion of binge eating. Out of this beginning came a decade’s worth of research on anti-fat prejudice. He edited the now-missing Dialogue with Monica Biernat, and edited The Psychological Foundations of Culture and The Social Psychology of Prejudice with the now-eminent Mark Schaller. He joined SPSSI in Ann Arbor as a graduate student and has been member since the early 1980s. At SPSSI he has been a member and chair of the Grants-in-Aid committee, the Membership Committee, the Publications Committee, and the Teaching Award for Graduate Institutions Committee, a member of the Kurt Lewin Award and Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize Committees and the SPSSI Policy Committee, a SPSSI Council Member, and SPSSI President. He has been late paying his dues, but always catches up! His current research is on how people justify their prejudices—minimizing their guilt while still managing to express them. He is disappointed that the current political climate creates so much opportunity for research on the acceptability of prejudice. He is currently the Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.