Social Psychology

KU Social Psychology has achieved a national reputation for excellence in this area, and various aspects of this theme are central to work of Glenn Adams (Liberation Psychology perspectives), Monica Biernat (stereotyping processes) model), Nyla Branscombe (Social Identity approaches to intergroup relations), Chris Crandall (prejudice) and Ludwin Molina (power and intergroup relations). One tangible manifestation of this theme is the 2004 conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, which we organized and hosted at KU with funding from the American Psychological Association (Scientific Conference Grant), National Science Foundation, and American Psychology and Law Society. In the aftermath of this conference, several members of the KU Social Psychology Program collaborated to edit a book, Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination, and co-authored the book's conclusion chapter*, which won honorable mention for the Gordon Allport Prize for work on Intergroup Relations from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

*Adams, G., Biernat, M., Branscombe, N. R., Crandall, C. S., & Wrightsman, L. S. (2008). Beyond prejudice: Toward a sociocultural psychology of racism and oppression. In G. Adams, M. Biernat, N. R. Branscombe, C. S. Crandall, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination (pp. 215-246). Washington, DC: APA Books.

This theme is central to the work of Glenn Adams, who studies personal relationship processes as a window into the sociocultural foundations of mind, and Omri Gillath, who uses techniques of cognitive psychology and social neuroscience to study brain mechanisms associated with sex, love, attachment, and prosociality (not necessarily in that order). This theme is also evident in work of Chris Crandall on friendship, attraction and social influence. One tangible manifestation of this theme is the KU Close Relationships Interest Group, an interdisciplinary forum for relationship research in which members of the KU Social Psychology faculty play a foundational role. Another tangible manifestation of this theme is the conference, New directions in research on close relationships: Integrating across disciplines and theoretical approaches, that was organized and hosted at KU as the 2009 mini-conference of the International Association for Relationship Research with funding (Scientific Conference Grant) from the American Psychological Association. Fourteen members of the KU Social Psychology Program (10 students and 4 faculty members) presented their research at this conference alongside leading scholars in the area of close relationship from the US and 14 other countries spreading across five continents. The organizers of the conference (Gillath, Adams, and Adrianne Kunkel from the KU Department of Communication Studies) are in the process of editing a book to disseminate ideas inspired by presentations at the conference. These activities have given KU a reputation as an emerging international center of excellence in the interdisciplinary study of personal relationships.

Early manifestations of this theme include classic work by the late Jack Brehm (on cognitive dissonance, reactance motivation, and intensity of emotions) and Professor Emeritus Dan Batson (on the empathy altruism hypothesis). Among currently resident faculty members, this theme is a central to work by Omri Gillath on the attachment motivational system and Mark Landau on existential motivations (using terror management theory and other perspectives in existential psychology). The theme is also evident in work by Nyla Branscombe (on collective and intergroup emotions) and Chris Crandall (on justification motivations).

Cultural Psychology, Political Psychology, Social Identity Theory, and Evolutionary Psychology, a final core theme of KU Social Psychology is not a particular topic area, but rather an intellectual orientation toward various collective-level perspectives that link social psychology to other social sciences.

This core theme is central to the work of Glenn Adams, who considers sociocultural foundations of mind via the theoretical perspective of cultural psychology; Nyla Branscombe, who examines individual experience of collective identity through the lens of various Social Identity Theory approaches; Omri Gillath who uses the framework of evolutionary psychology to inform his research on close relationships; and Ludwin Molina, who is a local KU expert in the increasingly influential field of political psychology. As tangible evidence of this core theme, faculty and students in the KU Social Psychology Program have recently collaborated on research projects, team-taught graduate seminars, and/or jointly organized conferences and symposia with faculty from African Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Communication Studies, Economics, Geography, History, International Studies, Political Science, and Sociology (for example, the Culture and Psychology Research Group).