Committee Updates: December 2019

Updates from SPSP committees for December 2019

Diversity and Climate Committee – Inspired by the climate survey, SPSP is testing their ability to provide live captioning during parts of this year’s convention. Live captioning will occur during a plenary, two invited sessions, a professional development session, and at the award presentations.  Our hope is that this test run will be successful and that we will see more accommodations at future SPSP Conventions. In other news, the Community Catalyst grant program (formerly a pilot program) was officially approved by the SPSP board with an expanded budget. 

Early Career Committee – This year marks the inaugural year for SPSP having an official Early Career committee! The EC committee has been actively looking into how we can best support our EC members. We have been examining results from the survey posted after SPSP in Portland. We have looked through these open-ended responses from EC SPSP members, and are now creating concrete proposals to address some of EC members’ concerns and will put these to the Board Meeting in 2020. 

Fellows Committee – The SPSP Fellows Committee is delighted to recognize and welcome 28 new Fellows. We are committed to honoring the many forms of excellence within personality and social psychology. The committee is making small but important tweaks to the nomination process which we will roll out this spring. We hope you will nominate yourself or a deserving colleague – or both! 

Fundraising and Development Committee – The Development Committee is happy to report that we reached our fundraising goal of $50,000 for 2019.  Thank you to all who donated in large and small amounts to make SPSP programs sustainable.  It’s never too late to contribute. 2019 honorees on the Heritage Wall are: Joel Cooper, Jack Dovidio, Carol Dweck, Susan Fiske, Elaine Hatflield, Hazel Markus, Richard Petty, and Claude Steele.

Government Relations Committee – The Government Relations Committee had an active first year. Besides participating in the COSSA Social Science Advocacy Day, we collected multiple concise vignettes that summarize faculty and students’ applied research related to current legislative priorities, e.g., climate change, opioid crisis. In collaboration with the SPSP staff, we are currently developing an advocacy website outlining the committee’s activities and opportunities for others to engage with this work. We are also expecting to collaborate with other SPSP task forces, such as the Climate Task Force, in the future.

International Committee – The International Committee has been aspiring for ways to make SPSP more international, both in terms of the people involved in doing SP research, and in the samples that we study. We have created enhanced travel awards for SPSP members from outside of North America to help defray their higher travel costs to the annual convention, as well as a new award targeting innovative ways of sharing the content of the SPSP convention with people outside of North America. In addition, we have begun conversations with the publication committee to help identify novel ways to encourage more diverse samples in SPSP publications.

Student Committee – This year, the Student Committee conducted a survey of social and personality psychology PhDs on the academic job market. The results outlining the characteristics and outcomes of job candidates are available now here. The committee has also been busy planning events that will take place at the annual convention, like mentoring lunches, the student award ceremony, a professional development panel on jobs outside academia, and more!

Summer Institute (SISPP) Committee – After another successful SISPP at New York University in 2019, the planning cycle of the committee began again. The first and probably most important step was finding the next host institution. The committee is happy to announce that the Ohio State University will host SISPP 2021. The next step for the committee is to select courses and instructors. Please look out for the call for instructors in early 2020!