Reminiscences on 1980s U of Michigan Social Psychology

2011-11-14T15:42:00.001-08:00

An "e-True Blue" e-mail newsletter today from the UM Alumni Association includes the item that the Baits I (but not the Baits II) housing complex on the North Campus will close down. I lived in one of the Baits I buildings (Parker House) during my first year of graduate school (1984-85), before moving to a series of apartments in the Central Campus area for years 2 through 5 of my graduate training.

This Michigan Daily article on the closure includes a picture of the complex. The article alludes to one of the current Baits residents being a sophomore. Back in the day, as I recall, Baits was a primarily, if not exclusively, graduate-student complex (apparently, it also accommodated upper-level undergrads, as I've now discovered). According to the article, Baits I would have required at least $6 million in renovations, which the powers-that-be do not feel is a prudent investment. Also, Baits I does not meet the university's goal of having "complexes within five minutes of a residential dining hall."

The last claim is totally valid. The nearest dorm with a dining hall was Bursley, which I recall being a lot longer than a five-minute walk. As shown on this map, Baits II is a lot closer to Bursley than is Baits I. Usually, I would have dinner at one of the restaurants in the Central Campus area on my way home, after a day of work at the office.

2011-08-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

Lee Jussim, a 1987 Ph.D. recipient from the social psych program at Michigan, was quoted this past week by Bloomberg News, regarding how academic programs at Rutgers University in New Jersey are facing major budget cuts while the athletic department continues to furnish what many would consider lavish benefits to its coaches.

With specific regard to the Rutgers Psychology Department, which Lee chairs, he told Bloomberg that: “The cuts are sufficiently severe... that our ability to accomplish our core missions are, for the first time in my career, under serious threat.”

Sadly, Lee's department is not alone in having to watch things such as the number of photocopies made and provision of Scantron forms for multiple-choice exams. My department at Texas Tech is dealing with similar issues, as are many other institutions (just do a Google search on "university budget cuts").

2011-02-18T15:18:00.000-08:00

Not that it came as a surprise, but yesterday it was announced that the Borders bookstore company had filed for bankruptcy. Borders, of course, was founded in Ann Arbor 40 years ago, before going national around 20 years ago. Not only was Borders a great place for UM students and other Ann Arborites to hang out. For myself (and perhaps others whose careers took them away from Ann Arbor), visiting a Borders in any city provided a little reminder of Michigan days.

Many, though not all, Borders locations have been closed in recent years. My home base of Lubbock, Texas has never had a Borders (at least in the 14 years I've been on the faculty at Texas Tech University), so I've mainly visited locations in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas for the past decade and a half. No longer will that be possible, as L.A. and Chicago seem to have had all their Borders stores wiped out.

The current flagship Borders on Ann Arbor's Liberty St. (which is where the store settled after moving between State St. and other nearby locations) remains open. I hope that even if the national company goes belly-up, the Ann Arbor location can survive.

2011-01-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times features the research of Paula Niedenthal, who received her Ph.D. at Michigan in 1987 and since the late 1990s has been on the faculty at Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France. The focus of the Times article is a new theory of smiling developed by Paula and her colleagues, which "[t]hey believe ... can account not only for the source of smiles, but how people perceive them."

2010-12-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

From the December issue of the Ann Arbor Observer comes word that Village Corner, a mainstay for 40 years at the corner of S. University and S. Forest, closed in early November and is now in "hibernation," pending a move to a still-to-be-found new location. VC's website details the situation and notes that "The December 2010 issue of Ann Arbor Observer misquoted Dick [Scheer, the owner] as stating we're 'shooting for a reopening in a new location sometime in 2012.' In fact, we plan to reopen in a matter of weeks, not months or years." VC and the adjacent bicycle store are giving way to a new high-rise student apartment complex.

For those not familiar with VC (and it's hard to imagine many Ann Arborites would fall into that category), it was a store that defied easy labels. It was like a convenience store, but much bigger, or like a supermarket, but much smaller. It was also said to have one of the Midwest's finest and most extensive wine collections. My memories of VC include always seeing copious supplies of flyers for upcoming campus-area events tacked up by the entrances, and the local public radio station playing world music in the background.

Living in the South U area my second year of grad school, I frequently popped into VC, either to pick up a snack of, say, orange juice and a brownie, or for a few days' groceries. Along with VC, other South U neighborhood establishments of my grad-school days, such as Pizzeria Uno, the Bagel Factory, and Community Newscenter (bookstore), are gone.

2010-09-11T12:58:00.000-07:00

Back on May 13-14 of this year, a conference was held in Warsaw, Poland to celebrate the career of the late Bob Zajonc. The conference organizers now have videos, still photos, and abstracts from the event up on a website. Several Michigan faculty (current, relocated, and retired) and graduates of the Ph.D. program participated. There's also a Facebook group honoring Bob, which is where I learned of the conference page.

2010-08-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading the book Whistling Vivaldi, by Claude Steele. Claude's brief stint as a professor at Michigan (1987-1991) overlapped partially with my cohort's time and I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten to know him as part of my graduate training.

Though Claude spent the better part of the last 20 years at Stanford (before recently moving to Columbia University to become provost), he writes at considerable length about his time in Ann Arbor. It was at UM, in fact, that his interest in, and initial research on, stereotyped group members' college underperformance (relative to these students' entering academic credentials) really crystallized.

This research is well-known within social psychology (and beyond) under the rubric of stereotype threat. In the book, Claude details several stages of stereotype-threat research he, his students, and outside investigators have undertaken over the past 20 years. In discussing research from his own lab, Claude talks about many of the graduate students who've worked with him, including Steve Spencer. Now a professor at Canada's University of Waterloo, Steve was in on the ground floor of stereotype-threat research at Michigan and remains very active in this area. Chris Crandall, who completed his doctoral studies at Michigan shortly before Claude's arrival and has independently done research pertinent to stereotype threat, is also cited throughout the book.

2010-07-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

While leafing through my copy of the new (July-August 2010) American Psychologist, I saw that Pat Gurin had won the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest (announcement). The APF appears to be affiliated with the American Psychological Association (APA), with a focus on fundraising and grant awards to conduct research and provide services with a prosocial aim. The write-up accompanying Pat's award citation focuses on her research on the benefits of diversity in higher education (which was used in the University of Michigan's defense, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, of its affirmative action programs) and on her mentoring of students from diverse backgrounds. As the summary also notes, Pat is officially retired, but remains active at Michigan with "intergroup dialogue" research, a nine-university project.

2010-01-13T16:45:00.001-08:00

Former UM president Robben Fleming has died at age 93. As I previously wrote about, Fleming participated in the Group Dynamics Seminar during my first semester of grad school (Fall 1984).

2009-10-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went to Ann Arbor for a small academic conference. The timing couldn't have been any better, as this fall semester marks the 25th anniversary of when my cohort and I began graduate school at U of M. I took extensive photos on this recent visit, featuring some of the important people and locations from 1984, but also conveying the changes that have made the U of M what it is in 2009. One constant, of course, is the beautiful array of fall colors...

Across the top is a shot of the UM Diag, which I entered from the southwest corner. Arranged clockwise, the next picture shows a walkway behind (west of) the Social Work and Education buildings going toward the Business School; followed by a view from the Rackham Graduate School's fourth-floor patio, looking toward the North Ingalls Building. (You can click on all of the photos displayed in this entry to enlarge them.)

The only barber who has ever cut my hair in Ann Arbor is Bill, with whom I'm pictured below by one of the chairs at State St. Barber Shop (OK, maybe once or twice an associate of Bill's in the same shop gave me a haircut). I was a regular from 1984-1989 and, as I've visited Ann Arbor every few years since then, I've made it a point to get a haircut from Bill every time. This last trip was no exception. As can be seen, Bill has the shop all decked out in Michigan athletic paraphernalia, including the jerseys of many great Wolverines of modern history.

Another important figure from 1984 with whom I touched base is Professor James Jackson. When my cohort entered grad school, James was serving as social psychology program director, so part of his job was to hold a weekly seminar for us neophytes, where he would socialize us into the field, see how each of us was doing with our respective first-year projects (on which we worked primarily with our individual advisors), and just make sure we were all doing OK in general.

Back in '84 -- and all through my time in grad school, in fact -- there was no central psychology building, with each program (e.g., clinical, developmental, biopsychology) housed in a different location on campus. Social psych was housed in the Institute for Social Research (ISR; on top in the montage below). In '84, before Engineering completed its move to North Campus, there was a building on East University next to Ulrich's bookstore called East Engineering, which is where the introductory statistics course taken by all first-year psychology grad students was held. During the 1990's, East Engineering was refurbished and given the imaginative and creative new name "East Hall." Psychology (and mathematics) now occupy East Hall, shown below the picture of the ISR. You can see how, above one of the doors to the Psychology Department, the engraved title "Engineering" remains as a reminder of the building's past.

During my first year of grad school, I lived in a graduate-student dorm on the North Campus (Baits Parker), which necessitated using the campus bus system to travel to and from Central Campus, where all the academic buildings for a psychology student were. I considered visiting my old residence hall during this recent visit, but time was short, so I contented myself with a walk past the Central Campus bus station...

In contrast to the above photos depicting things that have (mostly) stayed the same over the past 25 years, this last montage shows how UM is also ever-changing. The new North Quad residence-hall complex is being constructed on State St., by Huron and Washington, where the Frieze Building once stood. As I photographed it from my room at the Campus Inn, North Quad really seems to blend in well with the surrounding area (in my opinion, at least), with the famous UM Bell Tower in the background. For traditionalists, however, a portion of the Frieze Building's exterior has been preserved and incorporated into North Quad (lower left insert)

What will UM look like in 25 more years? I hope to be around to see it, but I don't want the time to fly by too quickly!

2009-03-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Michigan Today includes an article on the 20th anniversary of the University of Michigan men's basketball team winning the NCAA championship. That Wolverine team was famous for having its coach, Bill Frieder, bolt a few nights before the start of March Madness to sign with Arizona State for the next season, following secret negotiations. Athletic Director (and football coach) Bo Schembechler denied Frieder's request to finish the season with UM, inserting hoops assistant Steve Fisher into the head coaching role. And the rest, as they say, was history.

The 1988-89 academic year was when I completed my Ph.D., so I was there for the Wolverines' basketball championship. I distinctly remember where I was during each of the team's six NCAA tournament games, and the whole thing was great fun.

2009-02-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

I recently caught up with Bob Josephs at this year's SPIT (Social Psychologists in Texas) conference in Austin. Bob was in the same graduate-student cohort with me at Michigan, although in an unconventional way.

As I and my fellow incoming students were starting out at Michigan in the Fall 1984 semester, Bob was beginning grad school at the University of Washington. However, when Bob's advisor, Claude Steele, moved from U-Dub to Michigan in the Fall 1987 semester, Bob came along. In terms of graduate-school experience, Bob was the equivalent of the Fall '84 entering cohort, so he was grouped with us.

Upon completing his Ph.D. at UM, Bob joined the faculty at the University of Texas-Austin for the Fall 1990 term, and he's been there ever since. As I discussed with Bob during SPIT, it seems relatively rare for someone to have had one -- and only one -- position since completing grad school. For one thing, it requires someone to land a tenure-track job immediately, without the need for a post-doc or visiting position. Then, one has to like one's department and university, and the department and university have to like you (i.e., grant you tenure).

Bob is by no means the only graduate of the Michigan Ph.D. program to stay exclusively in one place, but it seemed easier for us to generate names of people who've moved at least once than names of people who've stayed put.

2008-12-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have just received the following message from Shinobu Kitayama:

Hi friends,

I have to bring you very sad news. Bob Zajonc -- Hazel Markus's husband and a renowned psychologist -- passed away early in the morning yesterday... Bob was a great psychologist and a very generous and wonderful person. He is being missed by everybody.

Simply put, Bob Zajonc was a mainstay of Michigan social psychology for nearly half a century. After receiving his Ph.D. at UM in 1955, he stayed there for nearly another 40 years as a professor.

There are several ways to measure a scholar's productivity and impact on his or her academic field, such as awards or articles in major journals such as Psychological Review, of which Bob had plenty. I have my own way of conveying Bob's impact.

For readers who are not statistical experts, a meta-analysis is an exercise where one rounds up as many studies as he or she can find on the same basic research question (often 100 or more studies) and then computes the average magnitude of the phenomenon. There are at least two published meta-analyses on lines of research that Bob either initiated or advanced, thus showing his role in inspiring others to study particular questions:

Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94, 265-292.

Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 265-289.

A biographical sketch from the Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences is available here (from which I borrowed the photo). Also, on February 13, 2004, I wrote a profile of Bob (click here for February 2004 archive, then scroll down).

In my view, Bob's productivity as a scholar was equalled only by his kindness and generosity to people in the Michigan social psychology program. Several times, Bob and Hazel opened their home to the department for receptions. Even though I never worked on any research projects with him, Bob was always very encouraging when he would hear of a project of mine that he found interesting.

UPDATE: The New York Times has published this obituary on Bob.

2008-12-03T23:10:00.000-08:00

In mid-November, I caught up with Rick Larrick, with whom I shared an office in the UM's Institute for Social Research when we were grad students nearly 20 years ago. Rick and I (along with Steve Fein) also did some research at Michigan on temperature and aggression in baseball (here and here).

The occasion for our recent meeting was a one-day preconference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, held at the University of Chicago's downtown Gleacher Center. Shown in the collage with the picture of Rick (right) and me are some of Chicago's famous buildings, all just a short walk from the conference location.

It was a homecoming of sorts for Rick, as he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago's Business School (located on the main, Hyde Park, campus) from 1993-2001, before moving to Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Rick spoke at the preconference on his "MPG Illusion" research, which has gotten a lot of attention.

My presence at the preconference was largely accidental. I was coming to Chicago for my niece's Bat Mitzvah, when I realized the SJDM event was going on and that I could fit it into my schedule (with my sister's permission!).

2008-07-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

A while back, the Michigan Alumnus magazine invited reminiscences on Drake's Sandwich Shop, the longtime campus-area hangout that closed in the 1990s. I sent in a blurb and, while I don't believe it got published in the paper copy of the publication, it was included in this online version, along with lots of other people's recollections.

2008-05-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

While in Los Angeles about a week ago, visiting my family and my undergraduate alma mater UCLA, I was pleased to be able to attend a talk there by Jean Twenge, a fellow Michigan psychology Ph.D. Jean, who went through the UM program about a decade after I did, has been on the faculty at San Diego State for several years and thus is only a couple hours down the road from L.A.

I've also written a song about Jean and her research.

2008-03-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, USA Today published an extensive profile of Yost Ice Arena, where some of my fellow students and I enjoyed many an evening rooting on the Michigan Wolverine hockey team. As the article notes, longtime UM coach -- and former NHL great -- Red Berenson took over the reins in 1984; that is the same year my graduate-school cohort arrived.

2008-02-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

Hazel Markus, who spent roughly a quarter-century at the University of Michigan as a graduate student and then social psychology professor before moving to Stanford, has been named as a 2008 Distinguished Scientific Contribution award recipient from the American Psychological Association. This designation is a highly prestigious honor that is bestowed upon only three individuals per year (see here for a list of all-time winners). Congratulations to Hazel!

2008-01-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

Greg Diamond, the social scientist-turned-lawyer who went through Michigan's social-psych graduate program with my cohort, recently released a year-end "newsletter" about what's going on in his life. With his permission, I am providing a link to it (click here).

2007-11-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

I was channel-surfing with my TV remote last night, when I came across a televised Congressional hearing on C-SPAN. One of the witnesses was Stanford professor Jon Krosnick, with whom I overlapped a year in the social psych graduate program at Michigan, and with whom I've stayed in touch over the years in regard to issues of survey methodology.

It was in that methodologist's capacity that Jon helped with NASA’s National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS), and he was testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. What NASA probably brings to most people's minds is space travel, but the hearing had to do with pilots and safety in commercial aviation (as best I could tell). I guess airlines fall within the "Aeronautics" portion of NASA's title.

Here's a picture of Jon testifying, which I "borrowed" from the Committee's website (the original picture was very small, so this enlarged version is pretty fuzzy).

The most interesting part of the hearing, to me, came when Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), holder of a Ph.D. in political science from Duke, mentioned during his time for questioning that he had taken a social psychology methods workshop from Jon, while the latter was on the faculty at Ohio State.

A full information page on the hearing from the House Science Committee's website, including the original photo, is available here. A transcript of Jon's testimony is available here.

2007-10-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

I have just learned of the passing of UM psychology professor Joe Veroff, at the age of 77; his death occurred on September 30. An obituary appeared in the University Record, in which it is noted that, "A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. [Eastern] Nov. 24 in 1324 East Hall."

Joe's kind, gentle spirit is what I remember most. I, as well as countless other social and developmental psychology students over the years, took Joe's social-psychology core course on socialization and lifespan development (co-taught with the late Libby Douvan). As per Joe's tradition, the final day of class was a luncheon at his home. For my cohort, this event took place in May 1985. I was reminded of that by this portion of the obituary:

"It is hard to pass the old Veroff house on Granger without thinking of the many casual get-togethers for faculty and students, replete with wonderful home-cooked dishes, engaging conversation and good company that he and Jody provided for scores of scholars over the years," said Toni Antonucci...

Joe and his collaborators (and other Michigan faculty, too) were practitioners of the survey method, which I found to be a nice complement to the seeming emphasis at UM and in other social-psych programs on laboratory experimentation. Again, from the obituary:

With Elizabeth Douvan and Richard Kulka, Veroff co-authored two influential books based on findings from two nationally representative ISR surveys on these topics: "The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976" and "Mental Health in America: Patterns of Help-Seeking from 1957 to 1976."

Right around the time my graduate-student contemporaries arrived at UM in the early-mid 1980s, Joe and colleagues were beginning to launch the Early Years of Marriage Study, which continues to this day. Back on June 25, 2004, I wrote about Joe and the marriage study (June 2004 archive).

I'm sure many in the Michigan and broader psychology communities join me in expressing condolences and best wishes to Joe's family, friends, and colleagues.

2007-08-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

In mid-July, I caught up with my UM social-psych graduate-school classmate Paula Niedenthal (we overlapped three years in Ann Arbor, with Paula finishing her Ph.D. in 1987 and me in 1989). Our recent meeting occurred in Madison, Wisconsin, where each of us has been visiting at the University of Wisconsin, Paula for the past year in psychology and me in Human Development and Family Studies, teaching a four-week summer course.

Paula, who has been a faculty member for several years at Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, France, was an undergrad at Wisconsin, before moving on to Ann Arbor for grad school. To this day, she remains an enthusiastic ambassador for all things Badger-related.

A larger photo collection from my Madison visit is available here.

2007-05-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

A little over a week ago, I was at The Ohio State University, attending the second biennial U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics. While there, I was able to visit with Tom Nelson, who partly overlapped with me during our graduate training in social psychology at Michigan.

Since 1992, Tom has been on the faculty in political science at OSU, focusing on the kinds of topics one would expect from a social psychologist -- attitudes, public opinion, and methodology. In fact, Tom is a leading figure in the hybrid field of "political psychology."

Like Tom, I have a faculty appointment outside of a psychology department (in my case, human development and family studies). As I've discussed with various people over the years, social psychology is an excellent discipline in which to receive training, as the social/behavioral theories and methodological/statistical techniques one learns can be applied across a variety of disciplines.

Here's a photo from our recent visit, taken in Tom's office. He just happened to have his U of M diploma laying around, so we included it in the picture.

2007-05-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

As I wrote about in my March 4, 2004 entry (March 2004 archives), since I first arrived as a faculty member at Texas Tech University in 1997, I have carried on my own "tradition" called Michigan Thursday, in which I wear U of M garb every Thursday. Michigan Thursday complements the pre-existing Texas Tech tradition of faculty and staff members wearing the school colors of red and black every Friday. Thus, with me, Michigan Thursday leads into Texas Tech Red & Black Friday.

In the fall of 2005, upon completion of her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, an attachment theory scholar named Kazuko Behrens joined our faculty at Texas Tech. A Golden Bear through and through, Kazuko became the first (and thus far, only) Texas Tech faculty colleague to join me in the weekly use of garments to display spirit for our alma maters. In Kazuko's case, we have Cal Thursday.

The first (or sometimes second) Thursday of every month, my department has its regular faculty meeting. On May 10, we had our final meeting of the academic year. In anticipation of this final meeting, Kazuko and I decided to throw our colleagues a curve-ball, of sorts, by switching our school garb. Neither of us has any official affiliation with the opposite school. I wore a Cal shirt (which I had picked up on a previous visit to the Berkeley campus) and I loaned Kazuko one of my Michigan ones. We were pleased to see our colleagues discover the switch very quickly.

The picture below shows us at the faculty meeting. Notice, also, the matching pens we're holding (me, a Cal pen, and Kazuko, a Michigan one).

2007-05-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

In recent months, the demolition of the Frieze Building on the University of Michigan campus has been ongoing. As I first learned about and reported here in July 2005 (see monthly archives on the right-hand side of this page, midway down), the Frieze Building will be making way for a new residence hall, North Quad (which will join South, West, and East Quads).

Various online articles and photo essays about the demolition are available. The university has a blog devoted to the Frieze Building, through which you can access a link to the photo essays.

There's also a retrospective exhibit, sporting a title only a punster such as myself could love, "Frieze Frame" (click here and here for further details).

During my years at Michigan in the mid-late 1980s, social work was one of the disciplines housed in the Frieze Building. I used the Social Work Library fairly often, as it was a good source of journal articles on stress and coping, a topic I was studying at the time. Ultimately, however, a splashy new building for the School of Social Work opened several years ago by the corner of South U. and East U.

The Frieze was also home to performing arts disciplines, but new replacement theatrical facilities are in the works, too.

Given the physical size of UM, many faculty, staff, and students probably have had little familiarity with the Frieze Building, even during the years it was hosting academic departments. For some, though, it does carry nostalgia.

Monica Biernat, who obtained all of her degrees at U of M and was a member of the same entering cohort as me in grad school, e-mailed me this reflection in 2005: "I can't believe the Frieze building is coming down -- I used to study there for finals when I was an undergraduate!"

2007-05-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

I was just doing some leisurely web browsing, when I decided to check out the latest news that was fit to print at the New York Times. Front and center on the page (the online version, at least, as shown below) was a nice photograph. Was it of a major news event in Washington, DC or in some other major world capital? No. Shown in the photo was none other than Zingerman's delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The occasion for the article appeared to be Zingerman's 25th anniversary, and how the deli and the company's associated businesses are expected to bring in $30 million in revenues this year.

My cohort entered graduate school at U of M in the fall of 1984. As best as I can recall, I was never aware during my years in school there of how new Zingerman's really was, at the time. Perhaps the brick exterior just made it look old. My final two years of grad school (1987-88 and 1988-89), I lived on East Kingsley, just a few blocks east of Zingerman's. I wouldn't say that I frequented the place, but I certainly enjoyed a bagel or a sandwich there from time to time.

Congratulations to everyone at Zingerman's for their accomplishments, longevity, and recognition by the New York Times.

2007-03-02T20:07:00.000-08:00

Arthur Schlesinger, the Harvard (and later, City University of New York) historian and friend of the Kennedy family, died a couple of days ago at the age of 89. Schlesinger spoke at the University of Michigan in, I would guess, 1987 or '88. I attended and, as I recall, fellow social psych grad student Jill Klein, a longtime fan of the Kennedys, went with me.

Schlesinger's UM talk focused on his theory of 30-year cycles in American politics (the ideas of Schlesinger and others who take a similar approach are analyzed here). The Republicans, of course, dominated presidential politics in the 1920s, '50s, and '80s, whereas the Democrats held the White House for most of the 1930s, '60s, and (not known at the time of Schlesinger's appearance) the '90s.

The regular speaking appearances by eminent scholars, writers, public officials, and artists from around the nation and world are, in my view, an important part of the Michigan experience.

2007-01-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times has an article on the demographic make-up of top American universities' undergraduate student bodies, with a focus on the large percentages of Asian-American students at these institutions ("Little Asia on the Hill," by Timothy Egan). Here is a link to the article; note, however, that you may have to complete the free registration and the article will probably disappear from free access in a few days, anyway. Those of you at universities whose libraries have online subscriptions to LexisNexis might try seeking the article through that option.

Hazel Markus, a social psychology professor at Michigan from 1975-1994 before moving to Stanford, was quoted in the article, as seen in the following excerpt:

Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says.

One of the main findings of cross-cultural psychology is that Asian cultures tend to be more collectivist, with more of a premium on maintaining harmony within the group, than is the case in the U.S. In the above excerpt, I can see Asian students' stance toward professors as being consistent with preservation of harmony within the classroom. However, such a demeanor may also create the seeming paradox of Asian students being perceived as excessively individualistic.

2007-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Wolverine Nation relocated to southern California this past holiday season, as supporters of the Maize and Blue flocked to see Michigan play in the Rose Bowl football game (the less said about the game, the better).

I'm from Los Angeles and was back home visiting family. I did not go to the game, but my family and I attended a pep rally for the team at the Santa Monica Pier, Sunday, December 31, the day before the game.

I would say there were at least a few thousand Wolverine fans there. Because we were a bit late in arriving, we had to stand off to one side of the stage, behind a huge sea of humanity. Afterwards, however, a couple family members and I walked around the main area where the stage was.

UM President Mary Sue Coleman was in the area, and what looked like a dozen or so students were reacting to her as if she were a rock star, requesting to take photos with her. I waited my turn and got to take a picture with her, too (shown above). There were two points I wanted to convey to her, and did during my brief opportunity:

(1) After introducing myself as a Michigan Ph.D. recipient and current faculty member at Texas Tech University, I noted to her that my president at Texas Tech is her former provost when she was president at the University of Iowa, Jon Whitmore.

(2) In reaction to a statewide ballot proposition passed in November 2006 barring consideration of race/ethnicity (and some other demographic characteristics) in decision-making by Michigan governmental entities, President Coleman had vowed to use all legally available means to maintain a diverse student body at the university. (Many of you will recall that the U.S. Supreme Court had said in 2003 that race-sensitive admissions policies, if properly designed, were constitutional. The Court's opinion only said, however, that such policies were allowable, not required.)

In that context, I told President Coleman that, through my experiences as a social psychology graduate student, I had gotten to know some of the faculty members who would go on to play roles in defending the university's admissions policies at the Supreme Court. I then finished with my encouragement to her to, "keep fighting the good fight on educational diversity."

***

In addition to former football coach Bo Schembechler, about whom I wrote a couple entries ago, the University of Michigan lost another icon recently, former U.S. president Gerald R. Ford. Not only was Ford a UM alunmus; he also played football for the Wolverines. Also, the UM's School of Public Policy was named after Ford a few years ago.

2006-12-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

Jacqui Woolley, a Michigan developmental psychology graduate student from the mid-late 1980s and a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin ever since, just had a recent publication of hers featured in this news release by UT's media service. Congratulations to Jacqui!

2006-11-17T18:29:00.000-08:00

Glenn E. "Bo" Schembechler, the University of Michigan football coach from 1969-1989, died today at age 77. In one of those bizarre coincidences, Schembechler's passing occurred just one day before the annual Michigan-Ohio State showdown. With the Buckeyes and Wolverines both sporting perfect records coming in -- and ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the country, respectively -- some observers are calling tomorrow's game the most significant one of the long series between UM and OSU.

Cranky and "old school," but with a grandfatherly friendliness, Schembechler was -- and always will be -- a UM institution. As noted in the above-linked university tribute to him, Schembechler spoke at the 2005 Michigan commencement (a video is also available). I suspect there are not too many college coaches in any sport who would be invited to speak at a graduation some 15 years after their coaching days were over!

There's a Schembechler Hall on campus, and there was even a reference to him in the 1983 movie "The Big Chill" (see the item toward the bottom of this Big Chill trivia list).

The UM has lost one of its true icons, one who not only made things exciting for Wolverine football fans, but also really connected to the university community as a whole.

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

In response to my recent Michigan-Princeton-Waterloo overlap analysis (immediately below the present posting), I received word that longtime UM professor (and Princeton Ph.D.) James Hilton had moved to another university in an information technology (IT) capacity. After a little bit of web searching, I see that he's now at the University of Virginia (news release).

James joined the Michigan social psych faculty in the Fall 1985 semester (I'm virtually certain of the timing). I entered the graduate program in Fall 1984, and the faculty search/hiring process that yielded James was my first exposure to job talks, meetings with candidates, and other such events. James's research focused on person perception and self-fulfilling prophecies; during his first few years at UM, the graduate students with whom he primarily worked (based on a review of article references) included Steve Fein and Bill von Hippel.

As noted in the above-linked UVa news release, James also left a lasting impression with his teaching. The basic undergraduate social psychology lecture course had several hundred students, with students also attending discussion sections of around 25 for an hour a week. I was a Teaching Assistant for James one semester and, in addition to leading a couple of sections, I attended the lectures.

I would say that within the first 10 minutes of his first lecture of the semester, James had the students in the palm of his hand. His sense of humor -- sardonic, but not acerbic -- was very effective with the students.

For example, in setting the stage for his presentation on the classic social-psychological finding that people prefer to affiliate in anticipation of a stressful event rather than wait alone (see description of the Schachter study toward the bottom of this document), Hilton reminded the class of a common occurrence on exam days.

Almost invariably, it seems, students gather in the hallway before a test, to discuss material from their notes with other students. Why do students show up early? , James asked the class. Was it because they wanted to allow enough travel time in case they blew out a tennis shoe along the way? No, he insisted. It could well be because affiliation with others would help to alleviate the pre-test anxiety.

The UVa news release also mentions that James is returning to what sports fans would identify as "ACC Country," Virginia being close to Hilton's boyhood home of North Carolina. In another of his memorable classroom demonstrations, James once started lecturing in a heavy North Carolina accent, driving home the important person-perception point that the presence or absence of a Southern accent would likely lead people to judge him differently.

Best wishes to James as he begins this new phase of his career!

[The information above about the size of the large lecture courses was edited slightly from an earlier version, for clarity.]

2006-10-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

It's been almost exactly a year since my last "overlap analysis," which was between Michigan and the University at Buffalo/State University of New York (see October 2005 archives). In an overlap analysis, of course, I list people who have official affiliations with both of the institutions in question, as students, post-doctoral fellows, and/or faculty members (I tend to exclude cases in which someone served only in a brief visiting position at one of the schools).

Each of my previous analyses has looked at UM in conjunction with one other school. In thinking about which school to examine next for overlap with Michigan, I considered Princeton University and the University of Waterloo. I quickly realized that there were some people who had ties to all three institutions -- Michigan, Princeton, and Waterloo -- in addition to the many who were associated with two of the three.

Variety is the spice of life, so for a little change of pace, I now present my first three-way overlap analysis. The various combinations are shown first via Venn diagram, with a more detailed list of the named individuals following [names updated 10/17/06 ].

Michigan, Waterloo, and Princeton
(All three of the following individuals received graduate degrees from UM and had faculty/research positions at Princeton and Waterloo; see their respective webpages for further detail)

Geoff Fong

Ziva Kunda (deceased)

Paul Thagard

Michigan and Princeton

Steve Fein (Princeton undergraduate, UM Ph.D.)

Ann Ruvolo (Princeton undergraduate, UM Ph.D.)

Michelle Buck (UM undergraduate, Princeton Ph.D.)

Pete Ditto (Princeton Ph.D., UM post-doc)

James Hilton (Princeton Ph.D., UM faculty member; now at University of Virginia)

Nancy Cantor (Faculty and administration at both UM and Princeton)

Michigan and Waterloo

Diane Holmberg (Waterloo undergraduate, UM Ph.D.)

Sara Konrath (Waterloo undergraduate, current UM graduate student)

Jesse Chandler (Waterloo undergraduate, current UM graduate student)

Mark Baldwin (Waterloo Ph.D., UM post-doc)

John Ellard(Waterloo Ph.D., UM post-doc)

Sandra Murray (Waterloo Ph.D., UM post-doc)

Geoff Haddock (Waterloo Ph.D., UM post-doc)

Steve Spencer (UM Ph.D., Waterloo faculty)

Dov Cohen (UM Ph.D., Waterloo faculty; now at Illinois)

Waterloo and Princeton

Mark Zanna (Faculty at both)

2006-08-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Bob Josephs, who received his Ph.D. in social psychology at Michigan in 1990, just had his research featured in the July-August issue of the APA's Monitor on Psychology. As described in this article, Bob's study showed a congruency between people's testosterone levels and their optimal functioning context (i.e., participants with high testosterone levels functioned better in a high- than low-status role, whereas those with low testosterone exhibited the reverse pattern).

Bob started graduate school at the University of Washington (which I recently visited and photographed) in the fall of 1984, where he worked with Claude Steele. When Claude moved to Michigan for the Fall 1987 semester, Bob came along. Initially during their time at UM, Claude and Bob finished writing up manuscripts on their "alcohol myopia" research. Bob then branched into additional areas, such as self-esteem and decision-making.

Based on the starting date of his graduate training (1984) rather than the start of his time at Michigan (1987), Bob was considered part of the same entering cohort with me and my classmates. Bob had three essential attributes -- he was a nice guy, an excellent and enthusiastic researcher, and a big sports fan -- and we became good friends.

Bob and I have both been based in the Lone Star State (and Big XII athletic conference), for many years, he at the University of Texas, Austin the entire time since completing his Ph.D., and me at Texas Tech for the last nine years. Given this proximity, we sometimes see each other at meetings of Social Psychologists in Texas (SPIT) and other organizations.

Probably my favor grad-school story involving Bob stems from one of the aforementioned alcohol-myopia papers he was working on (which ultimately was published in 1990 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology). Around this time (in August 1988), Sports Illustrated came out with a cover story on the role of beer in fan behavior, as seen on the right.

The SI piece actually made some conceptual points relevant to Bob's research paper, so he cited it. Then, a few months later, when he got the reviews back, Bob showed them to me. One of the referees had been taken aback by a citation to Sports Illustrated in a scholarly work! (I just checked the references for Bob's article, and the SI reference didn't make it into publication.)

Those were good times...

2006-07-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from a trip to the West Coast that included a stop at the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) conference in Long Beach, California. Below is a picture of me with Monica Biernat at our poster. As I describe below, our study's subject matter had to do with golf, and I spared no detail in trying to create a golf theme -- the poster itself was supposed to look like a golf course, I brought along a golf club, and all visitors to the poster were given a complimentary golf ball.

Monica and I were in the same entering cohort (Fall 1984) in the social psychology graduate program at Michigan, and we each finished in the summer of 1989. For the last 14 years, Monica has been on the faculty at the University of Kansas; two of her former KU graduate students, Kathy Fuegen and Terri Vescio, were also authors on the poster, but were unable to attend SPSSI.

One of the nice things about this poster is that it is the first collaboration between me and Monica in 15 years, using the official conference or article citation date (the previous one being: Reifman, A., Biernat, M., & Lang, E.L. [1991]. Stress, social support, and health in married professional women with small children. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 15, 431-445).

As I discussed a few months ago on this blog, Monica and I were both in Mel Manis's seminar on stereotyping in 1986. Monica has followed through in stereotyping and prejudice research since then, formulating the "shifting standards" model of social judgment (she has also recently come out with a book on the topic, one that would be good for a graduate seminar on social judgment).

I've gone in a few different research directions since grad school (primarily related to adolescent and young adult drinking), but I try to stay informed about the research being conducted by friends and colleagues of mine.

When female golfers Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie started playing in men's pro tournaments a few years ago, I came up with the idea of content analyzing media coverage of these women in men's tournaments, to test for evidence of shifting-standards phenomena. A detailed summary of the project, to this point, is available by clicking here.

Also while at SPSSI, I ran into another UM Ph.D. recipient from my era, Lisa Brown, on whom I can provide an update. After several years in Florida, Lisa is now on the faculty at Austin College, which is in Texas, but not in Austin (rather, it's in Sherman). Here's her faculty homepage, which is quite extensive.

2006-06-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University faculty member who received her Ph.D. in personality psychology at the University of Michigan in 1998, recently came out with a book entitled, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before (2006, Free Press).

Jean has developed a very successful line of research where, for whatever personality trait she happens to be studying at a given time (e.g., assertiveness or anxiety), she tracks down all available studies where the same questionnaire measure of the trait has been administered to college students, in articles published over the past three or four decades. With the measurement instrument and population (college students) held constant over time, she can thus uncover generational change in the traits she studies. The book reports the results of these investigations, non-technically for a general audience.

To glean all the needed research articles and reports, Jean has had to spend great amounts of time in libraries, which she writes about in a blended humorous-acerbic style. Much of her searching was, of course, done in the UM's Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, which she describes as:

...a building so vast and confusing that red and yellow lines are painted on the stone floor to help people find the exits. The university had added on to the library in 1970, smushing two buildings of different styles and floor heights together with limited access between the two. The older building ended up with floors like "4A" ... connected by narrow, apparently randomly placed staircases.... (p. 13).

To the right is a picture I took of the graduate library during one of my visits to Ann Arbor in recent years.

Jean also writes, in places, with a feisty, earthy style, referring to one particular media report about marriage trends as "unmitigated crap" (p. 200).

Her research on today's young people meshes well with one of my own areas of research, the study of "Emerging Adulthood," a life stage in between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood. Beyond our somewhat overlapping research interests and receipt of Ph.D.'s from the University of Michigan (me almost a decade earlier), Jean and my career trajectories, in fact, have a number of parallels. While it's not exactly the Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidence, consider the following:

Jean grew up in Texas and is a faculty member at a university in California. I grew up in California and am a faculty member at a university in Texas.

Also, we each did post-docs in rustbelt industrial cities off of Lake Erie, Jean in Cleveland, and me in Buffalo.

And both of our first names have four letters, and end in "an"!

2006-04-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

The website that hosts this page (known as Blogspot or Blogger) has now made available the option to include photos in one's postings. As a result, I can now post some pictures I took during my visit to Ann Arbor last summer. Pictured below in clockwise fashion are: the Bell Tower, one of the major campus landmarks; the tower portion of the Michigan Union (student union); and the Psychology Building, which opened a few years after my cohort graduated.

Now that I have this capability, I will continue to post additional pictures in upcoming entries.

2006-03-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

It is now the 20th anniversary of Mel Manis's graduate seminar on stereotypes research, which was offered in the Winter 1986 semester (see Mel, now an emeritus professor, in this group photo of the UM social psych faculty). For this write-up, I shared my recollections of the seminar, in advance, with everyone whom I recalled being in it (including Mel), to see if my memories might trigger additional ones from them. I've now heard back from a few people, and am thus including their reflections in this essay.

A good starting point is to list who was in the seminar. Based on our best recollections, the following people were students in the class (with links to their current professional homepages, where available):

Monica Biernat

Lee Jussim

Janet Landman

Chris Langston

Linda Nyquist (a post-doc at the time)

Starting with Mel, our leader, he replied to my request for reflections with the following, very kind, statement:

My main memory about the stereotypes seminar was my pleasure in meeting with such a bright, interested group. One of the (many) pleasures of the academic life.

Monica and Lee each cited the seminar as an impetus to conducting research on stereotypes with Mel. Wrote Monica in a reply to my inquiry:

I'm afraid my memory is iffy other than that I really liked the course -- it made me want to work with Mel and got me doing stereotyping research. It's frightening to me that 20 years have passed!

Lee really was able to pinpoint specific aspects of the seminar that spurred certain directions in his research:

1. I think [Mel] had some required paper. I always hated doing papers for no reason. So, I asked him if he wanted to do a study. He, being the kind of guy he was, readily agreed, even tho we did not really have an idea.

So, we met and met and just talked. For months. And then it hit us -- all the cognitive business had forgotten affect! And we guessed that affect was at least as strong, maybe stronger than cognition, in its effects on judging individuals. So, that led to a series of studies titled "Prejudice vs. Stereotypes" as sources of labeling bias in person perception, which was eventually pubbed in JPSP. Not bad for a class.

[Note, the reference is: Jussim, L., Nelson, T.E., Manis, M., & Soffin, S.(1995). Prejudice, stereotypes, and labeling effects: Sources of bias in person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 228-246.]

2. It was in Mel's class that I first read McCauley, Stitt & Segal (1980). That paper seemed to me to be one of the most clear-headed things on stereotypes I had read up to that time. It has influenced my thinking about stereotypes in particular and expectancies in general, and was a major contributor to my thinking about accuracy.

[Reference: McCauley, C., Stitt, C., & Segal, M. (1980). Stereotyping: from prejudice to prediction. Psychological Bulletin, 87, 195-208.]

It partially inspired my '91 Psych Review, and it definitely led to my collaboration with McCauley on our '95 book. And it more than partially inspired me to go down the path that has led to the talk I am giving at EPA (they concocted the title out of thin air, the actual title is "The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes").

[To see a summary of Lee's appearance at the 2006 Eastern Psychological Association conference, click here and then scroll down to the second page displayed.]

I, of course, have a few recollections of my own.

We read some chapters from Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice, and I remember being amazed at the degree to which this book (from 1954) presaged the cognitive approach to stereotyping that became very popular in the 1980s.

David Letterman's show (then on NBC) was at a high point in popularity, and references to it permeated our seminar. For example, when writing article summaries to hand out, Janet would title them "Late Night Thoughts on..." Also, in discussing ways (hypothetically) to observe unobtrusively the degree to which kids at school interacted with kids of the other gender, other racial-ethnic groups, etc., the idea of using a "skycam" (a staple of Letterman shows) came up. According to this list of Letterman milestones, the skycam debuted on September 30, 1985, thus making it a salient novelty in early '86.

[Update 4/4/06: Janet sent me a nice e-mail, in which she noted that she never watched David Letterman, and received the inspiration for the term "Late Night Thoughts..." from some other source.]

In discussing intervention studies based on the Contact Hypothesis, a robust finding appeared to be that such interventions worked only if the actual intergroup meetings were accompanied by a "little lecture" by an authority figure, stating why prejudice was wrong. Monica confirmed this latter recollection:

I also remember the "little lecture" theme, and the studies by Stuart Cook in particular.

[Some links on Cook and his research are available here and here.]

To me (and probably the others, too), Mel's represented the ideal of what a graduate-school seminar could be: a small group, in a warm, supportive environment, getting together to discuss ideas and trends in the field, and generating research ideas, plus a few memorable anecdotes!

2006-01-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

I'd like to use the occasion of today's Martin Luther King Day holiday to reminisce about the inaugural observation of the King holiday 20 years ago, January 20, 1986 (although King's birthday is January 15, the holiday takes place on the third Monday of every January).

The University of Michigan has always had an extensive series of events to mark MLK Day, including marches, speakers, symposia, and films. Although the greatest number of events are on the actual holiday, others are held in the days before and after. This year's schedule of events gives you an idea of the scope of the activities.

My main recollection of King Day 1986 was of participating in a march up South University, ending up on the Diag. The next day's Ann Arbor News ran a couple of photos of the march, which I have saved to this day (please e-mail me, via the link to my faculty website on the upper-right portion of the page, if you'd like to see a copy). If you look closely enough, I can be seen on the left-hand side of both photos. My hair and beard were a little heavier back then than now, and I wore contact lenses at that time.

The only other social psychology grad student I remember also participating in the march was Jill Klein. I can't pick Jill out among the crowd in the newspaper photos; she's a tad shorter than I am, so she must have been blocked from view.

I also remember going to the keynote addresses in the years up to and including my graduation year of 1989. According to this UM history of MLK Day events, subsumed under the title of "MLK Symposium," these speakers included: William Gray, then a member of Congress and later head of the United Negro College Fund (1987 keynoter); Douglas Wilder, then Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, later Governor, and now, after years out of public office, Mayor of Richmond (1988); and Willie Brown, then Speaker of the California Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco (1989).

Back in 1983, when the U.S. Congress was taking up the bill to create a King holiday, I was still an undergraduate at UCLA. I remember typing up a petition in support of such a holiday to send to one of our elected representatives, and getting family members to sign it. Seeing the bill become law was very gratifying, and my actual experience of the holiday during its early years was greatly enhanced by all the activities taking place at UM.

It's hard to imagine any other universities' MLK Day programs being more extensive than UM's, but I haven't done any rigorous comparisons. Michigan observes MLK Day the way I think it should be observed -- looking backward and looking forward, and trying to bring American society ever closer to realizing Dr. King's dreams.

2006-01-07T18:44:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading the book A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived Its Greatest Legal Challenge, which I picked up over the holidays. The 2004 book by Greg Stohr, refers, of course, to the two lawsuits against the University of Michigan, challenging the use of race as a factor in its admissions policies at the undergraduate (College of Literature, Science, and the Arts) and Law School levels.

As many of you will recall, the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2003 that the UM Law School's admissions policy was constitutional (Grutter v. Bollinger), but the undergraduate policy was not (Gratz v. Bollinger). In the aftermath, however, the university was able to modify its undergraduate admissions procedures to make them more like the Law School's and thus preserve affirmative action at the undergraduate level, too. (UM continues to maintain an information page on the admissions lawsuits, on which new legal and research developments are reported.)

What's notable for the UM's social and personality psychology programs is that three professors -- all of whom are discussed in the book -- played roles in the university's defense of affirmative action. A key component of that defense was the research-based claim that diversity was educationally beneficial for all students at the university, "...a case that would actually prove the value of diversity -- how it enriched a university, produced more thoughtful citizens, and helped overcome the racial segregation that still permeated American society" (pp. 79-80).

Stohr's writing, based on interviews with many of the principals in the cases, takes the reader behind the scenes into the planning, preparation, and argumentation of the cases up the federal judicial system to the Supreme Court. Particularly vivid is the description of a meeting between Nancy Cantor, a former UM psychology professor and UM provost during the early stages of the lawsuits (she's currently chancellor at Syracuse) and John Payton, one of the attorneys representing UM.

Cantor urged Payton to get in touch with the chairman of Michigan's psychology department, Patricia Gurin, who had been studying students' experience with diversity on the campus since 1990... And Cantor gave the attorneys the name of Claude Steele, a Stanford psychology professor who had studied the effect of race on standardized test performance (p. 79; Claude had previously been on the faculty at UM).

The roles of Nancy, Pat, and Claude are discussed further in the rest of the book.

One of the testimonial blurbs on the back cover refers to the book as a "page-turner." I concur with that characterization, as I zipped through the book's 300-plus pages in just a few days.

I have alluded to the UM affirmative action cases in a previous posting reminiscing on Pat's 2002 retirement festschrift (see June 14, 2004 entry in that month's archives). Stohr's book, like Pat's retirement event, reminded me of how important diversity and helping members of historically disenfranchised groups participate fully in the university and in the broader society are to members of the UM family. You could even say that these values are part of the very fabric of the University of Michigan and perhaps even synonymous with it.

Having either done research with, taken classes from, or served as a Teaching Assistant for each of the three aforementioned professors during the 1980s, it has been especially exciting for me to see the fruits of their work in the historic Supreme Court cases.

2005-12-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

A couple of brief items this week:

I exchanged e-mails the other day with University of Wisconsin-Madison Political Science Professor (and University of Michigan Ph.D.) Charles Franklin. Every summer, the UM's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) offers a summer statistics program that attracts both instructors and students from around the nation; people from UM also participate.

Charles has taught many ICPSR summer courses over the years, and it so happens that I took his 1985 class on linear models (multiple regression), which occurred during the summer between my first and second years of grad school. At the time, Charles was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis.

I recently re-discovered Charles after 20 years via his blog on statistical analysis in political science, Political Arithmetik. He had done a series of postings on the rise in President Bush's job approval rating in various polls from roughly 35 percent a little while back to the low 40s at the moment. I e-mailed Charles to suggest that perhaps Bush's recent increase resulted, at least in part, from regression toward the mean; I also mentioned that I had taken an ICPSR course from him, and let him know where I had ended up. He sent me a nice reply, although he was less than convinced on the matter of regression toward the mean.

***

Also this week, completely out of the blue, I received an article reprint in the mail. Describing himself as an "old Ann Arbor graduate" in an attached note, Norm Feather had sent me a recent article of his entitled "Social psychology in Australia: Past and present," from the International Journal of Psychology. From the article, it appears Norm has taught at Australian universities for roughly the last 45 years, including at Flinders University since 1968.

In a section of the article covering the period from immediately after World War II until the 1980s, Norm notes that among "early figures in Australian social psychology... the majority obtained their doctorate in the United States -- Harvard and Michigan being two of the major centres..." (p. 266, my emphasis added).

In fact, two of my fellow UM grad students from the 1980s, Bill von Hippel (social psychology) and Bonnie Barber (developmental), have moved to Australia for faculty positions in recent years.

2005-11-18T14:03:00.000-08:00

The University of Michigan announced earlier this month the establishment of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (news release). As noted in the release, the Center is an outgrowth of the UM's defense of affirmative action up to the U.S. Supreme Court a few years ago. Pat Gurin, a faculty mentor to numerous students in the 1980s and other decades and now with Emerita status, will be the acting director of the NCID. As can be seen in the linked documents, Pat holds a Distinguished University Professorship named after Nancy Cantor, now the Chancellor of Syracuse University; Nancy, a former Michigan psychology professor, was Provost at UM during the build-up to the Supreme Court cases. The NCID's website can be accessed here.

2005-10-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

The First Annual Ziva Kunda Memorial Lecture was held a few weeks ago (September 26) at the University of Waterloo, where Ziva spent the last several years of her career before her death in 2004 (earlier note on her passing). Fittingly, the inaugural speaker in this lecture series was Dick Nisbett, Ziva's advisor during her graduate training at the University of Michigan in the 1980s.

2005-10-10T19:33:00.000-07:00

Time for another "overlap" analysis, this time looking at social psychologists (and others in related fields) having affiliations with both the University of Michigan and the University at Buffalo. The latter was known previously as the University of Buffalo, when it was a private institution before joining the State University of New York (SUNY) system, but either way the school has long been referred to by local residents as "UB" (click here for the school's history). I have previously done Michigan-UCLA (June 2004), Michigan-Stanford (February 2005), and Michigan-Ohio State (May 2005) listings.

Lora Park, now a new faculty member at Buffalo after completing her Ph.D. at UM, deserves co-authorship on this entry. When, at some point early in 2005, I put out a request for suggestions for future overlap lists, Lora e-mailed me with a list of Buffalo-Michigan people and mentioned that she, herself, would be joining the UB faculty. During my visit to Ann Arbor this past July, I was able to meet Lora in person.

Buffalo has special importance for me, for a couple of reasons. First, I was based at the Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) near downtown Buffalo from 1991-1997 and also taught a couple of classes at UB in 1995 and '96. In fact, in one of the great "small world" instances in my life, shortly after I arrived at RIA, I learned that the institute's librarian, Ann Sawusch, was the daughter of former Michigan personality psychology professor John (Jack) Atkinson. I have not included visiting professors and lecturers in my previous cross-school listings, and I shall not include myself in the list below; still, I wanted to mention my connection to Buffalo.

Second, two distinguished (and now deceased) figures in the history of social psychology, Daniel Katz and Hal Gerard, each had ties to both Michigan and Buffalo. Katz (who got a degree at Buffalo in 1925 [!] before going to Syracuse for his doctoral work) spent the bulk of his career at Michigan, whereas Gerard spent the bulk of his career at UCLA (where I did some research with him during my undergraduate years).

Here is the list (updated October 19) :

Buffalo undergraduate-UM faculty member

Daniel Katz

UM undergraduate-Buffalo faculty member

Jim Pomerantz (cognitive, now at Rice University)
Jim Sawusch (cognitive)

Graduate school at both Buffalo and UM

Diane Quinn
Connie Wolfe

Buffalo graduate student and UM post-doc

Riia Luhtanen

UM graduate student-Buffalo faculty member

Irving Biederman (neuroscience, now at U. of Southern Calif.)
Walter Cohen (exper./cog., UB faculty member 1948-1974)
Hal Gerard (deceased)
Jack Meacham
Lora Park
Joel Raynor
Egan Ringwall (clinical, UB faculty member 1949-1977)
Phil Shaver (now at University of California, Davis)
Steve Spencer (now at University of Waterloo)

UM post doc-Buffalo faculty member

Sandra Murray

Faculty member at both Buffalo and UM

Jenny Crocker (lab page)
C. Jim Smith (behavioral neuroscience, at UM 1953-1961 and at UB 1961-1999)

Thanks to Jack Meacham for supplying names of some earlier Buffalo-Michigan overlappers.

2005-09-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

Jan Jacobs, a developmental psychologist who received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1987 and later served on the faculty at the University of Nebraska and Penn State, died on Friday (click here for obituary). At the time of her death, she was vice president and dean for undergraduate education at Penn State. Some of you may also remember Jan's husband Wayne Osgood from his time in the 1980s as a scientist at the UM's Institute for Social Research. Condolences to Jan's family and friends.

2005-08-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

The 113th annual American Psychological Association convention was held August 18-21 in Washington, DC. I attended and came across several people with current and former University of Michigan ties. I figure the best way to recap the convention is just to proceed in chronological order.

August 18

Opening night, last Thursday, the UM psychology department held an Alumni Social Hour. Most other schools participate in an overall Alumni Night with each school getting its own table in a large ballroom, but the Michigan program is large enough to have its own social hour. The Michigan social hour was very well attended in the 1980s and early 90s, as I recall, but less so after that; it may even have been scrapped for a time in recent years.

Thus, it was nice to see the Michigan social hour being held this year. Due to a delay in my connecting flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Washington, DC, I was barely able to get to the final 20-30 minutes of the Michigan social hour, but I was glad I did. The event was co-hosted by current Department Chair Rich Gonzalez and Professor Emeritus Bill McKeachie. I was able to chat with both of them, as well as with a couple of current graduate students.

Copies of the annual departmental newsletter, On Our Minds..., were also available at the social hour (the newsletter is also available online). In addition to news items and profiles about people in the department, the newsletter also announced the merger of the personality and organizational psychology programs into a new one called Personality and Social Contexts.

August 19

The first several sessions I attended on Friday (one of which I participated in) did not include any former Wolverines. However, in the late afternoon at a social hour for researchers of alcohol and other drug use and addiction, I saw 1987 Michigan Ph.D. Kerth O'Brien. Although I didn't immediately associate Kerth with research on substance use, she has studied health and high-risk behavior for roughly two decades, so I guess her presence at the social hour wasn't that surprising.

August 20

Saturday afternoon, things really started to get rolling, in terms of seeing former Michigan people. At a 1:00 poster session, I saw Danny McIntosh. Danny's time in the graduate program (1987-1992) overlapped with mine (1984-1989), and we collaborated (along with Phoebe Ellsworth, whose research interests I described a few entries ago) on a study of stress, coping, and health among law students during the latter part of my time at UM (and continuing after my graduation). References to a couple of articles we published from that study are available on this list of Danny's publications. It had been years since Danny and I had seen each other in person, so it was nice that he was at APA. In recent years, Danny has been part of a colllaborative group studying psychological reactions to 9/11, the products of which include an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

While Danny and I were conversing, another person, Chris Davis, joined in. I did not know Chris, but it quickly became clear that his research background in stress and coping matched Danny's very closely. Chris received his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, working with UM Ph.D. Darrin Lehman. Chris also did a post-doctoral fellowship at UM in the 1990s with sociologist Ron Kessler (more on Kessler later) and along the way co-authored several papers with former UM faculty members such as Camille Wortman and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.

Then, at 2:00, the aforementioned Ron Kessler, a professor at Harvard Medical School after many years on the Michigan faculty, gave a major address on the National Comorbidity Survey, which he has headed up. The NCS was the first nationally representative survey to examine the prevalence of clinically diagnosable mental disorders in the United States, as well as treatment utilization. Thus, even though Ron is a sociologist, the relevance of his work to psychology could not be clearer. During his APA address, in setting up the historical context for the NCS, Ron alluded to the Michigan heritage in this type of research, citing the 1957 study, Americans View Their Mental Health, by Gerry Gurin, Joe Veroff, and Sheila Feld (Ron has also cited this earlier project in his writings).

From there, at 3:00, I went to see a talk by Sheena Iyengar, a rising star in the field of decision-making research. Sheena was introduced by Stanford professor Hazel Markus, who was a Michigan professor during my time in grad school.

Conclusion

In addition to the "maize and blue" presence at the APA convention, another thing I found interesting was the layout of the convention area in downtown Washington. The 2000 APA convention had also been held in the nation's capital, but at the old convention center. The old convention center was imploded in 2004 (see the video!), so now there's a huge dirt field, surrounded by a number of attractive, modern buildings (some of them hotels and the others probably office buildings), with the huge, new convention center slightly off in the distance, though still visible. I think a park or garden would round off the area nicely, but it seems likely some new commercial venture will go in the empty space. It will be interesting to see what the same area looks like when the APA convention comes back to DC in 2011.

2005-08-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Completing the trilogy of my write-ups from my Ann Arbor visit...

Part III: The Ann Arbor Art Fair

Among Ann Arbor's traditional events, the Art Fair every summer would seemingly have to be the most heavily attended -- perhaps a half-million people pass through -- and perhaps the best known. As those of you who have attended know, the town's biggest streets (State St., South U., Liberty, Main, and others) are shut down to auto traffic, in favor of artist booths/tents. Restaurants and other businesses take their commerce onto the sidewalks in front of their stores, and bands perform on musical stages scattered throughout the area.

This year it was held from Wednesday, July 20 to Saturday, July 23. The latter part of my visit overlapped with the Art Fair, allowing me to attend all through the day Wednesday and in the morning Thursday.

Although often referred to in the singular -- the Art Fair -- the event technically comprises four separate fairs, each concentrated in a different region of the general campus/downtown area. The Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, billing itself as the original, dates back to 1960.

All of the fairs are juried, which I understand to mean that artists must submit their work (or photos thereof) for judging, with only the top ones invited to participate. According to the webpage for another of the individual fairs, the Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair, works include "ceramics, painting, jewelry, sculpture, photography, glass, wood, fiber and much more," which can be purchased.

I just like to browse around and soak up the atmosphere. As I mentioned in Part I, the weather was quite hot, so I didn't walk around as much as I typically would have. In fact, it was only in the early evening on the Wednesday, after a brief but intense rainstorm, that I felt it was comfortable to walk around. Going along State St. between North U. and South U., most of the booths were still open. My informal observations revealed most of the artists to be from either the Midwest or Southeast.

Although there are subtle changes between the Art Fairs of the mid-late 1980s and those of today, such as in where the musical stages are located, things mostly seem similar. My most lasting memories tend to be of the throngs of people. I couldn't find any photographs on the web from this year's event that I felt captured the atmosphere as I see and feel it. However, someone named Chuck Lohr posted some nice photos from the 2000 Art Fair on the web (if you visit his page, scroll down and click on the photos from the intersection of South University and East University, and of Main and Liberty, to see what I consider the most illustrative photos in the set).

As crowded as it gets, I always tell people that not too long after the 6:00 p.m. Saturday conclusion of the Art Fair, the set-up crews will have taken down the booths so quickly that you'll have to remind yourself of the massive undertaking that just was.

2005-08-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Continuing on with my summary of my July visit to Ann Arbor...

Part II: My Visit in the UM Psychology Department

Several of the professors from my graduate-student days (1984-89) in the UM social psychology program remain on the faculty, plus I've met other people who've joined the Michigan psychology department in the years after my departure. Thus, my trips to Ann Arbor always include a visit to the psychology building on campus.

Not as many people tend to be around in the summer as during the regular school year (many, presumably, are either traveling or just not coming into the office as much). Still, I was able to visit with Phoebe Ellsworth, the professor who launched me on the psychology and law component of my research. Phoebe and I have stayed in regular communication for the entire 16 years since I graduated, exchanging e-mails whenever any new court decisions bearing on social science research come along. We've also collaborated on academic articles, our most recent of which came out in 2000, in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.

Phoebe actually has a joint appointment in both the law school, where she studies jury behavior (her law school homepage), and in psychology, where she studies emotions (her psychology homepage). Phoebe arrived at Michigan for the 1987-88 academic year, having formerly been on the faculty at Stanford (I had applied to graduate school at Stanford and been rejected, but it worked out nicely as I was now able to work with Phoebe at Michigan).

My association with Phoebe began when she put a notice on the bulletin board seeking a Teaching Assistant for the Psychology and Law course she would be teaching in the Winter 1988 term. I got the job, and things went from there. As I've noted previously, my primary research area for roughly the last 15 years has been in adolescent and young adult drinking. However, psychology and law has been a solid secondary area for me. In addition to periodic academic publications in psychology and law, I also write an informal e-mail newsletter every summer for friends, colleagues, and family members, summarizing that year's U.S. Supreme Court term.

The timing of my recent meeting with Phoebe was perfect, as the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts had only been announced the evening before. In addition to the Roberts nomination, Phoebe and I discussed the usual stuff, such as what kind of research each of us was currently working on.

I also toured the floors of the psychology building to see who else I might run into or what news items I might see posted on the bulletin boards, and ended up chatting briefly with a few other people.

One thing I noticed for the first time was a series of photographs on display on the social psychology floor. They were taken by Emeritus Professor Mel Manis, of current and former UM social psychology faculty members. The photos make for an excellent documentation of the recent history of the social psych program.

While walking through the developmental psychology section of the building, I noticed a posted announcement of a very sad nature. Harold Stevenson, a longtime UM professor, had recently died, at the age of 80. Stevenson's obituary appeared in numerous newspapers, including the Washington Post, a testimony to his stature in the field.

2005-07-29T19:46:00.000-07:00

A little over a week ago, I visited Ann Arbor, my first trip back in three years. Most things in town looked the same as in 2002, or even as in 1984, my first year of graduate school at UM. Yet, things also change. Over the next few weeks, I plan to write a three-part entry about my Ann Arbor visit, focusing on (1) the town and campus, (2) my visit in the psychology department, and (3) the Ann Arbor Art Fair, which partially overlapped with my visit. Today, I'll start with...

Part I: The Town and Campus

Assuming one flies into Detroit Metro Airport, the first task after retrieving one's luggage is, of course, to get to Ann Arbor. Some of you may remember a shuttle system where you could go to a ground transportation counter at the airport and purchase a ticket for a ride to Ann Arbor (and could set up a trip in the opposite direction from the Michigan Union). Well, that shuttle system is gone and has been for a few years. There are some other options that appear to require one to do some advance planning (including one university-based shuttle that only runs around the time of the major school breaks), or else one has to take a taxi (which is about $45 one way) or rent a car.

After traveling west on I-94, one approaches the campus from the south, along State St. Upon reaching the beginning of the campus area, one of the first things a visitor would probably notice is the construction on the new building for the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy (the construction can be watched via webcam -- be sure to scroll to the bottom of the new page that comes up).

Another area of active construction is a bit further north on State St., at the intersection of Washington St. (between Liberty and Huron). At what I believe is the former location of Olga's cafe, there is now a high-rise apartment building with a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant on the ground floor. To the east of this block (in the direction of the Modern Languages Building), there is another construction site, this one for a UM building. Also in the same vicinity, the Frieze Building will be converted into a dormitory. Some photos of the general scene in this area can be accessed here.

A completed construction project, one more in the heart of campus, is the "jazzing up" of the Mason/Haven Hall area off the Diag.

I went to many of my old favorite establishments, such as State St. Barber Shop (where Bill, the barber who cut my hair during grad school, is still going strong), Borders bookstore (multiple visits), Moe's Sport Shop and Steve and Barry's for t-shirts (including one commemorating this year's NCAA women's softball championship won by UM), the restaurants Seva and Cottage Inn, Bruegger's and Einstein Brothers for bagels, and, on different evenings, the adjacent Stucchi's and Ben and Jerry's for ice cream. One new place I went to, on State St. in the area where North University comes in, is Noodles and Company.

Ann Arbor summers are typically mild, except when a national heat wave is going on. Well, this year, there's been a national heat wave, and Ann Arbor has not been exempt. That inhibited my walking a little bit, but as can be seen from the above, I still got around.

2005-06-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

A few brief items on developments from roughly the past month involving people associated with the social psychology program (and related ones) at the University of Michigan in the 1980s...

The Spring 2005 issue of Dialogue, the newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, came out recently. Paula Niedenthal, an '87 UM Ph.D., wrote a piece on the process of becoming an academic in France, where she's been since the late 1990s (she previously had served on the faculties at Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University in the U.S.).

Separately within the same Dialogue issue, Paula contributed a two-page cartoon series under the rubric of "Social Psychology: Graphic Version -- Ch. 1, Conformity." Paula and I overlapped for three years during graduate school and I remember her, back then even, having a talent for drawing cartoons reminiscent of those in the New Yorker magazine (click here for the New Yorker's "cartoon bank").

The Dialogue issue also contained an extensive display of statistics -- both on individual researchers and at the institutional level -- on publication patterns in the top social-personality psychology journals from 1994-2004. Many Michigan faculty members, alumni, and former post-docs were among those listed. Further, in the institutional statistics, UM topped the publication productivity statistics for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and was the only school to appear among the top publishing institutions for all six journals considered.

Beyond the issue of Dialogue, here are two additional items...

University of Texas professor David Buss, a faculty member in UM's personality psychology program from 1985-1996 and longtime researcher in evolutionary psychology, has published a new book entitled The Murderer Next Door. An extensive description of the book is provided in this UT news release.

Ron Kessler, a UM sociologist from 1979-1996 before moving to Harvard Medical School, has released some new results from a national survey on the prevalence of mental health disorders. During his years at Michigan, Ron collaborated on various projects with faculty, post-docs, and graduate students in psychology in the broad area of stress, social support, coping, and health.

2005-05-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I traveled to Ohio State University. I was there primarily for a conference on the teaching of statistics, but while there also gave a talk before the Group for Attitudes and Persuasion within the social psychology program and visited with faculty and graduate-student members of the group. I enjoy photographing college campuses, so I put together a photo essay of the Ohio State campus.

I thought it would be fitting to do a list of the "Ohio State-Michigan connection," enumerating social psychologists (and others in related disciplines) with formal ties to both universities (I have previously done UCLA-Michigan and Stanford-Michigan lists, which can be found in this blog's archives).

Considering the physical proximity of Michigan and Ohio State (such that an undergrad at one school might want to go to grad school at the other), both schools' membership in the Big Ten athletic conference, and the fact that both schools have long had thriving social psych programs, I would have expected a large list of people with both Buckeye and Wolverine ties. However, in my first cut at it, at least, the list is fairly small. As always, suggestions for additions to the list and any factual corrections are welcome. Here's the list (updated 6/2/05):

Ohio State undergraduate-UM graduate student

Bert Raven

Graduate degrees from both schools

Susan Cross (M.A. in Higher Education, Ohio State; Ph.D. in social psych, UM)

Ohio State graduate student-UM post doc

Roger Kirk (Baylor University, psychology/statistics)

Ohio State graduate student-UM faculty member

Monique Fleming (now at UCLA)
Joseph Priester (now at UCLA)
David Ronis (researcher in UM School of Nursing)
Denise Sekaquaptewa
Claude Steele (now at Stanford)

UM graduate student-Ohio State faculty member

Hal Arkes (quantitative)
Jon Krosnick (now at Stanford)
Tom Nelson (also a UM undergrad, Ph.D. in social psych, faculty position in political science)
Bill von Hippel (now at University of New South Wales)

2005-04-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

I just received my Spring 2005 issue of the Michigan Alumnus magazine. One of the articles was entitled, "The Institute for Social Research: Interdisciplinary, International, Influential" (full text not available from the magazine's website).

The Institute, widely known as the ISR, was where nearly all the social psychology faculty and graduate students had their offices during the 1980s (and perhaps before). East Hall, which houses the psychology department and all its subdisciplinary components, opened some time in the early '90s.

Today, I would say, the ISR is best known for conducting at least four prominent national surveys: the Monitoring the Future (on high school seniors' drug use), National Election Study, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and Consumer Sentiment surveys.

Although my primary research area for nearly the last 15 years has been adolescent and young-adult drinking, I mainly conducted laboratory experiments during my graduate school years (in the ISR's basement labs) and never had any connection to the Monitoring the Future project (the only 1980s-era student from the social psych grad program I can think of who worked on Monitoring the Future was Greg Diamond; you can see here where he has some publications from that work).

One of the undergraduate courses I teach at Texas Tech University is called Problems of Adolescence; I regularly refer to findings from the Monitoring the Future study in that class. In my other undergrad course, Research Methods, I draw upon various ISR studies as occasions warrant.

Some of the key areas covered in the Michigan Alumnus article (which was not very long) were:

*The potential applications of ISR research to public policy.

*ISR's role in helping develop social science research centers around the world.

*The long history of experimental/laboratory social research within ISR's Research Center for Group Dynamics.

*ISR's long history also in the field of longitudinal research.

Today, many UM social psych professors retain an ISR appointment, as seen on this list (not everyone on this list is a UM social psych professor; the social psych program is big, but not that big). Also, talks and other events continue to be held at ISR.

Although the ISR probably does not play as central a role in most social psych grad students' training as it once did, it is one of the many outstanding academic resources at UM.

2005-04-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

One of the more unique, although to outsiders, obscure, aspects of going to school at the University of Michigan is how early the academic year ends. I have purposely chosen to write this entry today, because today happens to be the final day of regular instruction for the Winter 2005 semester at UM.

As noted in the linked academic calendar, UM's classes end today, Tuesday, April 19. Students have Wednesday, April 20 (as well as the weekend) as study days, then begin final exams Thursday, April 21. Although various commencement activities appear to take place between April 29-May 1, the big graduation is Saturday, April 30 in Michigan Stadium (aka "The Big House," due to its current seating capacity of 107,501).

I never got to participate in a graduation at The Big House. I defended my dissertation in August, 1989, and so had to come back for the December graduation at Crisler Arena. I remember a couple of other students, Monica Biernat (social psych) and Dori Frewald (individually designed program in environmental psych) also coming back for that graduation. Having come in from Houston, where I was on a post doc, I got a major cold during that visit back to Ann Arbor.

At Texas Tech University, where I'm currently on the faculty, we don't end classes until May 3.

One way that UM gets to have its second semester end early is by starting early, January 5, this year (Texas Tech started only a week later, January 12, so there's got to be more to it than the starting date). UM is also known for its early spring break, usually beginning in late February.

Within the state of Michigan, at least, word gets around about UM's early end to school. As seen in this newsletter from Michigan Technological University, where there was a proposal a few years ago to cut back from 15-week to 14-week semesters, "...MTU students complain[ed] that students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which has 13-1/2-week semesters, get a jump on summer jobs because their semester ends two weeks earlier."

I certainly enjoyed the early end to the second semester and the early start to summer. After the cold winters, it's nice to have some extra time to be outdoors, and the timing of the semester end allows more opportunity to travel during the summer.

2005-03-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things to do in the spring was to field a co-ed intramural (IM) volleyball team of social psychology graduate students (and also organizational psych students). We didn't have a team my first spring (1985), but did in '86, '87, '88, and '89.

Southern California is the hotbed of U.S. volleyball, where people grow up playing on the beach. Besides myself, others in the Michigan social psych program hailing from this region, who played one or more years on the IM team, included post doc Pete Ditto and grad student Kari Edwards. Org psych grad student Susan Hatter was from L.A. and had played volleyball for Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) as an undergrad. Social psych grad student Eric Lang was from even further west, Hawaii.

Some of the social psych grad students from the Midwest were also good. I remember seeing Paula Niedenthal, who went to undergrad college at Wisconsin, playing volleyball one year at the social psych program's beginning-of-the-school-year picnic and I knew I had to recruit her for the team. Steve Spencer, who came from Hope College in western Michigan, lent some height to the team; Steve's wife Shelly appeared to be an experienced, well-trained volleyball player and was a major asset the years she played.

Two additional organizational psych grad students who joined in with us were Philippe Byosiere and Helen Robillard.

(I hope I'm not omitting anyone; I'll certainly update this entry to add anyone I missed.)

Our games were played in the Intramural Building, a nice walk south several blocks from the heart of central campus on State St., then off on a side street.

Our games were always played on midweek evenings and afterwards, we frequently went to the Cottage Inn on William St. (near the Institute for Social Research, where we had our social psych offices) for pizza and whatever one's favorite beverage was.

In the early years of the team, we used to practice on weekends, but as time went on and we all got busier, we stopped doing so. I don't remember exactly what our records were in the IM competition, but I think we probably won at least as often as we lost.

Naturally, teams had to use three men and three women at all times. An additional rule was that, if a team used its full complement of three hits during a given possession (to try to dig, set, and spike the ball), a female player had to contact the ball at least once. One year, in honor of this rule, we named our team "She's Gotta Hit It," a play on a Spike Lee movie title from the same era, She's Gotta Have It.

Volleyball is probably as team-oriented a sport as any. Unlike in basketball, football, soccer, and hockey, where individual players can hold the ball (or puck) for several seconds at a time, volleyball players must perpetually and instantaneously direct the ball to a teammate (or hit it over the net). More so than in these other sports, volleyball players must have a constant awareness of their teammates' locations, creating an enhanced level of interdependence. In retrospect, it seems fitting for a team of social and organizational psychologists to gravitate to volleyball.

2005-03-17T17:56:00.000-08:00

According to this month's issue of the Ann Arbor Obserser, tonight is the 20th Anniversary Concert of the Chenille Sisters. The event is being held at The Ark in Ann Arbor.

The Chenille Sisters -- Cheryl Dawdy, Connie Huber, and Grace Morand -- used to play at free entertainment events in town, such as Top of the Park and the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. I first saw them play in the summer of either 1986 or '87. They were definitely a group I and a number of fellow graduate students enjoyed going to see.

The Observer characterizes the group as possessing an "unbeatable combination of breaktakingly precise and resonant vocal harmonies, a comic wit that's both corny and subversive, and a delightfully eclectic repertoire of original songs mixed with jazz, swing, folk, and blues standards."

A recent profile article in the Ann Arbor News contends that "...it would be tough to identify a local performer or group that has reached as many people or been as successful during the past 20 years as the Chenille Sisters."

That about sums it up!

I just found a pretty thorough list of funny folk songs and there's a pretty healthy-sized section on the Chenille Sisters.

Their song "Walk Like a Beautician" is a parody of the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian." One of the Chenille Sisters' members, Grace, is indeed a hair stylist, as noted in the Ann Arbor News article linked above. The Chenilles' version uses scissors (the sound of the two blades hitting each other at the end of each cutting motion) as a percussion instrument. Further, the part that the Bangles sing "Way-Oh, Way-Oh," the Chenilles sing, "Wave-Oh, Wave-Oh... Permanent Wave-Oh."

The Chenille Sisters also did a mid-90s PBS special that I watched while living in Buffalo, New York.

I hope to be able to see the Chenilles perform again in the future, either some time when I visit Ann Arbor or in another city.

Congratulations to the ladies!

2005-03-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

During the five years (give or take) of graduate school needed to complete the Ph.D. and amass enough publications to be competitive on the job market, students in the UM social psychology program can draw upon a number of resources. These include the faculty in social psychology and other disciplines, fellow students, and the "intellectual infrastructure" on campus (e.g., research centers, libraries).

Professors from other universities who spend a semester or year at UM are additional assets to the program. Ideally, the arrival of visiting professors will initiate a mutual cross-fertilization of research ideas and skills, benefiting both the visitor and host institution.

During my five years (1984-1989) as a graduate student in the UM social psych program, we had at least six prominent social-personality psychologists serve as visiting professors. They are listed below in roughly chronological order (note, I have updated the entries, based on feedback by two of the former visiting professors; the new information is shown in italics):

Alice Isen spent the entire 1984-85 year at Michigan. For over 30 years (including the time she was at Michigan), she has studied how being in a positive mood influences an individual's behavior and cognition. Research on affect and cognition was a key part of the UM social psych program in the 1980s, with Bob Zajonc and many students working in that area. Alice's presence strengthened the program's research portfolio on affect, both by bringing in additional perspectives and increasing the opportunity for graduate students to conduct research on the topic.

The one student, I recall, who worked closely with Alice was Greg Diamond. The following publication is a product of this collaboration:

Isen, A.M., & Diamond, G.A. (1989). Affect and automaticity. In J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.) Unintended Thought (pp. 124-152). NY: Guilford.

Alice later notified me that:

While I was at Michigan, I also worked with Paula Niedenthal and Nancy Cantor, producing the following paper:

Isen, A.M., Niedenthal, P., and Cantor, N. (1992). The influence of positive affect on social categorization. Motivation and Emotion, 16, 65-78.

Susan Fiske spent the Fall '84 semester at UM. I remember Susan appearing before our little informal first-year social psych grad-student seminar to talk about her research (I was also part of the team to meet with Susan in advance of her presentation). Her book (with Shelley Taylor) Social Cognition came out that year.

After 20 years, it's hard for me to remember the details of what Susan discussed (both at the preparatory meeting and with the full group), but I recall some type of "piecemeal" processing model she was working on (see the list of publications from that era on her vita, which is linked to the beginning of the previous paragraph). I can't remember if this was related or not, but Susan discussed primacy effects in person perception, including Asch's "change of meaning" theory. Susan also studied political psychology, publishing some articles with UM's Don Kinder.

Suzanne Thompson visited in the Winter 1985 semester. She is probably most identified with health psychology, stress and coping, and perceptions of control. Suzanne's vita (see link at beginning of this paragraph) contains the following publication:

Davis, C. G., Lehman, D. R., Wortman, C. B., Silver, R. C., & Thompson, S. C. (1995). The undoing of traumatic life events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 109-124.

Although the publication date of this article is a decade after Suzanne's semester as a visiting professor, it's at least conceivable that this collaboration stems from her time in Ann Arbor (Camille Wortman was a UM professor at the time and Darrin Lehman was a graduate student; Roxy Silver, a student of Camille's from back at Northwestern, later was a visiting researcher at UM's Institute for Social Research).

Suzanne received her Ph.D. at UCLA, working with Hal Kelley and Shelley Taylor (it's hard to get better training than that!). Suzanne gave a Group Dynamics Seminar at UM on attributions of intentionality, which may have derived from her work with Kelley. In fact, I still have the handout from that talk, which took place on March 26, 1985.

Bill Graziano, whose academic interests fall at the intersection of social, personality, and developmental psychology, was a visiting professor of developmental psych during at least the Winter 1985 semester, if not the full 1984-85 academic year. Based at the University of Georgia at the time, Bill later spent many years on the faculty at Texas A&M University. After my arrival in 1997 as a faculty member at Texas Tech University, Bill and I were able to renew our acquaintanceship at SPIT (Social Psychologists in Texas) conferences.

As can be seen from the link to Bill's current homepage at the beginning of the previous paragraph, he now chairs the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Purdue University. I am in a similar department at Texas Tech, Human Development and Family Studies. Largely as a result of our being in the same kind of department, I have been seeing Bill increasingly at conferences of organizations such as the Society for Research in Child Development, National Council on Family Relations, and International Association for Relationship Research.

Bernie Weiner, himself a UM Ph.D. and for many years a professor at UCLA, came back to his graduate alma mater as a visitor during the Winter 1987 semester. Since I had received my bachelor's degree from UCLA, I quickly introduced myself to Bernie upon his return to Michigan. I always visit UCLA when I go home to see my family in Los Angeles and often run into Bernie, either in the UCLA psychology department (Franz Hall) or at Pauley Pavilion, home of Bruin basketball.

Reuben Baron, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, visited UM in Fall 1988 (as he updated me). Reuben received his Ph.D. from NYU (not at Michigan, as I originally wrote). However, he spent a post-doctoral year with Herb Kelman at Michigan in 1962-63. Reuben's son Michael was in school at UM in 1988; I had Michael in the small section of intro psych that I taught.

I remember that Reuben, who described himself as a "neo-Gibsonian," and James Hilton, a traditional person-perception/self-fulfilling prophecy scholar, had some extended talks about perception and the nature of stimuli; they even gave a joint presentation on this topic.

In recent years, Reuben has applied his interest in perception in another direction, namely art. He is a curator and art critic. As seen in this art review that he co-wrote, Reuben continues to draw upon social psychological research.

He also manages to keep a hand in social psychology. He is carrying out NSF-sponsored research on cooperation as well as being a co-editor (with Eagly and Hamilton) and chapter author of a Festscrift volume dedicated to the work of Herb Kelman, The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict (2004, APA Press).

All told, the six visiting professors all brought their considerable expertise to UM and complemented existing research areas. There is no question they enriched the students' graduate education. I hope the visitors feel they benefited, as well, from their Michigan experiences. I continue to stay in touch with many of these professors, at least via occasional exchanges of e-mail or by running into them at conferences.

2005-02-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

In my June 5, 2004 entry (June 2004 archives), I presented a list of all known social psychologists (and individuals in related fields) having ties to both the University of Michigan and UCLA (I thank many colleagues for helping augment my list).

I now present the second installment of the series, this time focusing on overlap between Michigan and Stanford. And, as you'll see in the list below, there's a lot of it. Virtually all of the connections with which I've come up are at the graduate-student level and higher (e.g., post-doctoral fellowship, faculty). I'd have to think there are additional people, beyond the few I have, who went to Michigan or Stanford as an undergraduate, then went to the other school in some later capacity. Please let me know of such individuals (or any other people I'm missing at any level).

Here, now, is the list (updated as of February 10, 2006):

Stanford undergraduate-UM graduate student

Geoff Fong

Stanford undergraduate-UM faculty member

Donald Kinder (trained as a social psychologist, on the political science faculty)
Laura Klem (Senior Research Associate, Center for Statistical Consultation and Research)
Lorraine Gutierrez (joint social work/psychology; also attended grad school at Michigan)

UM undergraduate-Stanford post doc

John (Jack) Mayer

UM undergraduate-Stanford faculty member

Barbara Gans Tversky (cognitive psych; also attended grad school at Michigan)

Stanford graduate student-UM faculty member

Angus Campbell
Nancy Cantor (now Chancellor at Syracuse University)
Barbara Fredrickson
Susan Gelman (developmental psych)
Rich Gonzalez
John Hagen (developmental psych)
Barbara Smuts (biopsychology)
Harold Stevenson (developmental psych, emeritus)

UM graduate student-Stanford post doc

Christy Miller Buchanan (developmental psych)
Julie Garcia (post doc upcoming)
Joseph Mikels
Daryl Wout
Elissa Wurf

UM graduate student-Stanford faculty member

Daryl Bem (now at Cornell)
Sandra Bem (now at Cornell)
Jon Krosnick (social psych Ph.D., faculty appointments in communication, political science, and psychology)
Eleanor Maccoby (developmental psych)
Michael Morris (business, now at Columbia University)
Robert Roeser (ed psych, currently W.T. Grant scholar)
Larissa Tiedens (business)
Amos Tversky (deceased)

Faculty at both Stanford and UM

Phoebe Ellsworth (also received Ph.D. from Stanford)
Leon Festinger (deceased)
Hazel Markus (also received Ph.D. from Michigan)
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (clinical psych, now at Yale)
Edward E. Smith (cognitive science; also received Ph.D. from Michigan)
Claude Steele
Bob Zajonc (also received undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from Michigan)

Miscellaneous

Phil Converse (former director of both UM's Institute for Social Research and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which, though not officially affiliated with Stanford, is on Stanford property)

I want to thank the following people for their comments and for suggesting individuals for the list, beyond those I had initially put up: David Buss, Barbara Fredrickson, Julie Garcia, Jon Krosnick, Mark Lepper, John (Jack) Mayer, Jennifer Overbeck, Steve Peck, David Sears, and Christian Waugh.

I'll continue doing these Michigan/other school linkages. Please send me your suggestions of schools to link with Michigan!

2005-02-10T22:24:00.000-08:00

It was just recently announced that James Jackson will become the new director of the UM's Institute for Social Research (ISR). The news release gives a pretty extensive summary of his career history and achievements, so I won't repeat it.

James was the social psychology area chair when my cohort entered the graduate program in Fall 1984. In that capacity, James presided over our first-year students' introductory seminar, helping socialize us into the program and the field. I always found him very enthusiastic and very helpful.

Congratulations to James!

2005-02-07T19:43:00.000-08:00

Mark Blumenthal, who operates the website Mystery Pollster (and who, as noted in my October 18, 2004 entry, did his undergraduate work at UM; click for October 2004 archives) recently reviewed polling data on President Bush's Social Security proposals. In my opinion, Mark's is the webpage of record for explaining the mechanics of polling to a general audience.

In analyzing recent polls on Social Security, Mark invokes the concept of "non-attitudes," coined by Phil Converse. "Non-attitudes" refer to opinions that are spontaneously generated by respondents who want to create the impression they are well-informed. Converse, though best known in political science circles, received his training as a social psychologist.

For nearly the entire time that my cohort and I were in graduate school at Michigan, Converse was the director of the Institute for Social Research, where social psychology faculty and student offices were located at the time. Converse then moved in 1989 to become director of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a position he held until 1994.

Converse is today listed as a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Michigan.

In at least two of the graduate courses I took at UM -- Hazel Markus's on advanced social psychology and Don Kinder's on public opinion -- we covered Converse's work.

2005-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Today marks the exact one-year anniversary of the launching of this website. During the first year, I wrote 46 entries, close to my goal of weekly postings (the most recent writings are shown further down on this page, whereas older ones are automatically moved to the archives, which can be accessed via headings over to the right, midway down). This website has helped put me back in contact with several classmates and professors from my Michigan days. I've enjoyed working on the website and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

I will, of course, continue to post writings. However, to really keep this page fresh and vibrant, I would like to invite all of you out there who have any sort of connection to the Michigan social psych program to supply me with "guest commentator" write-ups.

You can discuss anything, including your favorite research projects, professors, courses, parts of campus, Ann Arbor establishments, etc. If you had to boil down your favorite or most significant UM experience, what would it be?

You can just e-mail me some text (a link to my Texas Tech faculty webpage, which has an e-mail link, is available in the upper right of this page) and I'll put it up. I really want to make this website an historical repository (an electronic yearbook or scrapbook, if you will) and having multiple contributors will help immensely.

I hope to continue with this website for a very long time and, as always, Go Blue!

2005-01-20T20:23:00.000-08:00

One aspect of life at the University of Michigan people who go there know they'll have to put up with is the cold winter weather. In thinking about the coldest days I could remember, I'm highly confident that the most severe weather occurred exactly 20 years ago to this day.

January 20, 1985 was a Sunday, a Super Bowl Sunday, in fact. It was also, of course, a presidential inauguration day, for Reagan's second term (more on that later). The combination of these two major national events makes the date very memorable.

The Ann Arbor weather that day, as I recall, was around -40°F with the wind chill factor. And windy it was! Being out in that weather was literally painful to my exposed skin.

Two grad students hosted a Super Bowl party at their apartment. I lived in the graduate dorms on North Campus that year (my first year) and the party was at an apartment complex south of campus near the Briarwood Mall, so I got a ride from someone.

Other than walking for a few minutes at a time between residences and the car, I was indoors all day, but even the relatively short periods outside were highly memorable.

The bitter cold spell was not limited to the state of Michigan or even the Midwest. In fact, it went as far east and south as Washington, DC, where the inauguration was taking place. As described in a history of the second Reagan inauguration:

"Because January 20, 1985 fell on a Sunday, the public Inauguration ceremony was scheduled for Monday, January 21, 1985. Reagan was sworn in privately on January 20. Owing to record cold temperatures on January 21, 1985, however, the public Inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Rotunda, and became a semiprivate ceremony."

For the record, the DC temperature was reported to range from -10°F to -20°F wind chill.

For my remaining years of graduate school (ending in 1989), I lived in apartments in the Central Campus area, where virtually everywhere one would want to go was within short walking distance. During these latter years, I remember two or three other occasions where I thought, "Wow, this is really cold!," but these did not match the intensity of January 20, 1985.

I remember being told once that, ostensibly because such a high percentage of the people who need to be on campus (i.e., faculty, staff, and students) live within walking distance of the university, UM has never once cancelled classes due to inclement weather. That may be an overstatement, but I don't recall any cancellations during my five years.

I just checked the Weather Channel's Ann Arbor data (see link in upper right-hand corner) and for the present January (2005) to date, the average high temperature has been 30°F. This confirms my impression that the Super Bowl/Inauguration weekend 20 years ago was unusually cold.

Lastly, I want to add that while the weather may deter some people from going to UM, I was one of three Californians in my entering social psychology graduate cohort and there were additional Californians in other years (and even one person from Hawaii, Eric Lang).

2005-01-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

Within social psychology, most observers would consider the top three empirical research journals to be the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP). Unlike medical journals that sometimes have one-word names such as Eye, Pain, and Thorax, social psychology journals have long names that necessitate the use of the aforementioned abbreviations in our conversations.

Just as January marks the start of a new year, it also marks the beginning of a new annual volume for most academic journals, at least those that publish monthly (some journals publish two or more volumes a year, but one of them would often start in January). The beginning of a new publishing year provides a nice opportunity to note the 1980s-era University of Michigan social psych Ph.D.'s serving in editorial roles for these three social/personality journals.

Most journals in the field tend to have the same editorial structure. Each journal has an editor, a small set of associate editors, and a pretty large board of consulting editors. When an author submits a manuscript to a journal to be considered for publication, the editor will either oversee the review process for that manuscript him/herself or transfer it to an associate editor to oversee. The editor/associate editor will generally send the manuscript to around 3-5 reviewers (from among the consulting editors and experts not on the board, the latter being known as "ad hoc reviewers"). The editor/associate editor overseeing the review of a given manuscript will then integrate the reviewers' evaluative comments along with his/her own independent judgment, leading to an editorial decision of accept, revise-and-resubmit, or reject (immediate acceptances are extremely rare).

At this moment, there is at least one UM Ph.D. grad serving as an associate editor at all three of the social/personality journals listed above. JPSP is such a large journal that it is divided into three subsections: Attitudes and Social Cognition, Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, and Personality Processes and Individual Differences. Monica Biernat serves as an associate editor for the Attitudes and Social Cognition section of JPSP (this latter link takes you to lists of the editorial teams for all three JPSP sections).

PSPB's list of associate editors includes two Michigan grads, Paula Niedenthal and Bill von Hippel.

Finally, Steve Spencer is an associate editor for JESP.

In looking at the larger category of consulting editors for these journals (available via the above links), the Michigan alums (and post docs) listed are too numerous to mention. I particularly applaud the associate editors, however. I have only served as a reviewer (both as a consulting editor for JPSP in previous years and as an ad hoc reviewer for many journals), and simply reviewing a manuscript is a lot of work. I'd imagine that the effort must be magnified considerably for an associate editor or editor.

2005-01-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to everybody! Later today, Michigan will be playing in the Rose Bowl against the University of Texas. As I've noted in previous postings, I've lost considerable interest in football over the years, due to the violence and injuries of the sport. Football is, however, an enormous part of the fabric of the University of Michigan, so I think at least a brief mention of the Wolverines' bowl-game history is warranted. Further, this provides me an opportunity to recommend a major book that came out a few years ago on the role of athletics in university life.

First, regarding today's game, this will be Michigan's 19th appearance in the Rose Bowl, played in Pasadena, California (I found a web document on Michigan's history of bowl appearances, which is up to date through January 1, 2003; the Wolverines have also earned trips to the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day of 2004 and 2005). In fact, dating from when a previous policy forbidding the Big Ten from sending teams to any other bowl besides the Rose Bowl was eliminated in the mid-1970s, Michigan has made it to a bowl game for 30 straight seasons. And these bowl appearances have often been of the prestigious New Year's Day variety.

Based upon an unscientific survey I recently conducted of family members with Michigan ties, there seems to be somewhat less enthusiasm for the Wolverines' Rose Bowl game this year than in previous ones. This probably stems in large part from the fact Michigan lost its traditional regular-season finale to Ohio State and made the Rose Bowl only through losses by key Big Ten rivals.

Further, the Rose Bowl has traditionally pitted the champions of the Big Ten and Pacific Ten conferences. However, this year, Pac Ten champion USC is playing in the Orange Bowl, under a relatively new provision that if a Big Ten or Pac Ten team is ranked in the top two nationally heading into the bowls, then traditional conference linkages to particular bowls can be overridden to let the top two teams play for the national championship. As a result, Michigan is playing a non-Pac Ten opponent, in the Texas Longhorns. Just as a matter of novelty, I would think the Texas team and its fans would be more fired up for the game than their Michigan counterparts. However, once the game starts, Michigan should be fired up, too (if the players weren't already).

As I suggested above, football is a major part of UM's identity, both to the external public and to people associated with the school. What else can be said about a university whose home games consistently draw over 100,000 fans per game? How should we feel, both at Michigan and elsewhere, about the huge role of athletics in university life, with tens of millions of dollars being used to build palatial sports facilities, coaches at big-name schools making salaries perhaps 10 or 20 (or more) times those of faculty members, and schools' lowering their admissions requirements for athletes (relative to students at large at the same institutions)?

As someone who is both a sports fan and one who cares deeply about universities' academic missions, I have been concerned about this issue for a long time and have sought out information on the topic. One source I would highly recommend is the 2001 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen.

Shulman and Bowen begin by reviewing mission statements from some select universities and asking, "How, then, does intercollegiate athletics relate to such missions?" (p. 3). The authors then present an enormous research study of three generations of alumni (some of whom were athletes) at 30 academically selective universities, including the University of Michigan. From admissions to academic performance while in college to post-college achievements, the book provides statistical analyses on virtually every kind of comparison imaginable -- high-profile sport-, low-profile sport-, and non-athletes; participants in men's and women's sports; and alumni from different generations. The appendices have a lot of further information, including athletic budgets from the schools in the study.

Lastly, and tying this all back to Michigan social psychology, two former UM professors are mentioned in the book. Nancy Cantor, who as discussed in my February 20, 2004 entry (February 2004 archives), is now the Chancellor at Syracuse University, gave one of the testimonial blurbs on the back of the book and had some of her research cited inside. Also, the research of Claude Steele, who moved from Michigan to Stanford over a decade ago, is featured in the book.

2004-12-23T13:14:00.000-08:00

As December and the holiday season got underway, I began to think about traditions in the UM/Ann Arbor community at this time of year. Given that most people probably leave Ann Arbor for the holidays (often for warmer climes), I could not come up with a lot. One tradition that quickly came to mind, however, was the Galens Tag Days. This event is conducted by UM medical students every December to raise money for children's groups generally, with an historic focus on children in medical settings. Then, several days into December when my Ann Arbor Observer magazine arrived, the cover illustration featured a Galens volunteer, so I knew I was on the right track.

The campaign is named after Galen, an ancient Greek physician. The Tag Days date back to 1927. According to an article in the publication Medicine at Michigan :

"Funds from the first drive were used for a December party for the children in University Hospital, and a portion was saved to found the Galens Workshop the next spring.

The Workshop, which still exists, offers pediatric patients the opportunity to be more 'kid' than patient. Held on the eighth floor of Mott Hospital since the mid-1960s, the Workshop offers events ranging from art projects to Halloween costumes, from parades to parties, from face painting to visits by Michigan collegiate athletes."

As described in the same article:

"The appearance of Galens members in their red ponchos, standing on Ann Arbor street corners with their buckets on the first weekend in December, is a familiar sight to local residents. 'It’s Galens time again,' people say, either preparing to drop coins or paper bills into the buckets or flashing a tag to show they already did. The trademark red and green tags can be seen on almost every winter coat in town that weekend, proud symbols of wanting to help the children of Washtenaw County."

I can't remember if I used to put my tags on my winter jacket or on my backpack.

According to an article in the Michigan Daily (student newspaper):

"The funds granted to Mott are used toward the Child Life Program, which provides activities for children in the hospital and helps them cope with their illness. 'We do it during holiday time because it's a giving time, but it is not holiday-oriented. The money funds activities throughout the year for the children,' said [medical student Paul] Pfeiffer."

As I've mentioned in some of my earlier postings, I'm a faculty member in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University. I remember from a few years back that an undergraduate I had in class wanted to become a child life specialist.

In concluding, I just want to wish everyone inside (and outside) the UM community a happy holiday season!

2004-12-19T22:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Texas Tech University's commencement ceremony for the fall semester. As a faculty member at the university, I regularly attend the graduations. The commencement speaker was writer Thomas Mallon, a former English professor at Texas Tech and at Vassar and currently a presidential appointee to a panel within the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The message I extracted from Mallon's talk involved the importance and value of preserving artifacts of one's past, so that one could look back on these items and interpret the memories associated with them from new perspectives. Two examples given by Mallon were his old Little League jersey his mother had saved for 30 years (which made him reflect upon how different the times were when he was a child, as opposed to the present) and a box of hundreds of cancelled checks written decades earlier by his deceased father (which drove home all that his father had done for the family).

Preservation of the past, both of individuals and of communities, has been a steady theme in Mallon's career. Roughly 20 years ago, as I learned from some web research I just did, he wrote a book entitled A Book of One's Own, examining diary writing and famous historical practitioners of it. Currently, his work within NEH involves a major project to digitize newspapers (not just, as he pointed out, those from big cities, but from small- and medium-sized ones, as well) going far back in history, thus increasing their availability to citizens. As Mallon noted, it is communities, as well as families, that say a lot about the fabric of our lives.

Naturally, I view this retrospective Michigan social psychology website in a similar light. I sometimes refer to it as an "electronic scrapbook." As I've alluded to in some of my earlier postings, however, I also have retained physical artifacts of my Michigan education, primarily my course notebooks.

I certainly do not believe people should live their lives exclusively in the past. I nevertheless found it validating to hear a speaker encourage the young, newly minted college graduates (and faculty, administrators, and parents) to preserve their personal histories. Who knows? Maybe 20 years from now, one of the Texas Tech graduates from this past weekend will create a website similar to mine, looking back on his or her years as a Red Raider.

2004-12-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

Bonnie Barber, whom I've known since we were both undergraduates at UCLA (and then later both graduate students at Michigan), is now at Murdoch University in Australia. Her new faculty webpage can be accessed by clicking here. A developmental psychologist, Bonnie previously served on the faculty at Penn State and University of Arizona. To Bonnie's friends and colleagues in the United States, this gives a whole new meaning to the song lyric, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

2004-12-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

Gretchen Lopez, a Michigan social psych Ph.D. who was at UM in the late 1980s and early 90s, has just been named as a Faculty Associate for Diversity at Syracuse University. As described in a Syracuse news release, it appears that Gretchen will be participating in a number of campus initiatives.

Gretchen has been studying intergroup relations for many years and, as noted in her profile on the Social Psychology Network, has continued to publish extensively in this area. Gretchen also co-edited a 2004 issue of the Journal of Social Issues (along with fellow UM Ph.D.'s Sabrina Zirkel and Lisa Brown) on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

2004-11-30T21:43:00.000-08:00

With the airing today of the Jeopardy show (filmed in September) on which Ken Jennings had his winning streak snapped at 74, I feel compelled to point out that among the all-time Jeopardy greats is Chuck Forrest, who appeared on Jeopardy while attending the University of Michigan Law School in the mid-1980s (1985 or '86, if I had to guess).

I suspect that relatively few people nationally -- outside of the hardest of hardcore Jeopardy fans -- would have heard of Chuck or would remember him if they had seen him play. In addition to the passage of time, another likely factor preventing Chuck from achieving the kind of status reached by Jennings is that during Chuck's run (and indeed for most of Jeopardy's history), contestants had to leave after five consecutive wins. Also, of course, there was no Internet during Chuck's run, so that websites celebrating Jennings's streak (such as Andy Saunders's compilation of Jennings-related statistics) could not have helped fuel a similar Jeopardy mania for Chuck.

As noted in the web document linked above to Chuck's highlighted name, he was the show's all-time leading money winner at one point, amassing over $100,000. That, of course, pales in comparison to Jennings's final cumulative total of $2,520,700. However, in addition to Jennings's not having any limit on the number of shows on which he could appear, dollar values for the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds were doubled within the last couple of years.

Don't get me wrong. For Jennings -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to win 74 straight games is an enormous, mind-boggling feat. No question about it. The point I want to make, however, is that the five-show limit of yesteryear did not allow Forrest and other previous greats the opportunity to see how astronomically far they could potentially take their winning streaks.

I never knew Chuck Forrest during the time we were both at Michigan. However, given the extensive media coverage he was receiving at the time (locally, at least), he almost certainly would have been very well known in the UM/Ann Arbor community. And now, at a time when Ken Jennings and Jeopardy are being lauded nationally (with no less than tonight's ABC Nightline being devoted to the show), I feel a welling up of Maize and Blue pride for a Jeopardy giant of two decades ago.

2004-11-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

The recently arrived issue of the Michigan Alumnus magazine included some poll results taken from online surveys at the UM Alumni Association website. I don't know how representative the samples were compared to random cross-sections of Wolverine alums, but the findings comport with what I would have expected.

One question asked about the alums' favorite season of the year in Ann Arbor. Not surprisingly, fall (81%) won overwhelmingly. On most college campuses around the nation, each fall brings the "buzz" of a new academic year, students returning to campus (or first arriving), pleasantly cool autumn temperatures, and (if you're a fan) the start of the college football season. At Michigan, this means action at the "Big House" (the 100,000-plus-seat Michigan Stadium).

In addition to these aspects of fall that are pretty uniform around the country, there are, of course, aspects that are unique (or relatively unique) to Ann Arbor. First on my list are the fall colors, which are more pronounced in some regions of the country than in others (and virtually non-existent in some). I found an excellent slide-show on the web of Ann Arbor fall colors at a site called "Phlog" (above each photo, there's a heading that says "next >>" that you can click to advance the slides; the heading may be hard to see on some screens). Having grown up in Los Angeles, which has little change of season, the Michigan fall colors were a major treat (now if we could do something about those winter temperatures...).

Another poll question inquired into alums' favorite UM sport. Naturally, football (74%) was a runaway winner. The second-place finisher -- ice hockey, with 21% -- may be a surprise to some, given that men's basketball is usually among the top two favorite sports on a college campus (the generic "basketball" finished third among Wolverine grads with 4%). Michigan's hockey program is, however, the most successful one historically in the nation. Also, whether by rules, custom, or some combination of both, college hockey (like that in the Olympics) has remained a game of speed and finesse, avoiding the gratuitous violence characteristic of professional hockey.

Talking about gratuitous violence, this Saturday is the annual Michigan-Ohio State football game, considered by some the greatest rivalry in college football. Though they have been away from the sidelines for quite some time, the rivalry almost certainly would be embodied in many people's minds in the coaching match-up of UM's Bo Schembechler and OSU's Woody Hayes. Schembechler retired as Wolverines' coach shortly after I finished up at Michigan.

Though football was one of my favorite sports for many years, starting around 1993 I decided that the sport's violence and injuries overshadowed the athleticism, in my mind. I have not attended a football game for over a decade. If I'm at home and one of the schools with which I'm affiliated is playing on TV, I may peek in a little for short stretches. That's probably what I'll end up doing on Saturday.

2004-11-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

The November 2004 APA newsmagazine Monitor on Psychology includes an article on a July conference held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) that brought together evolutionary and cultural psychologists. Several current and former University of Michigan professors participated in the conference and were mentioned in the article.

In fact, one can trace the origins of much of this research to the mid-late 1980s at UM. Consider the following scholars mentioned in the Monitor article...

Hazel Markus, who as a graduate student and faculty member was at Michigan for approximately 20 years before moving to Stanford in 1994, progressed through different stages of studying processes related to the self-concept during the years I was in grad school (1984-89).

Hazel appeared to be moving from self-schematicity (Markus, 1977; Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Siladi, 1982; Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985) to possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Cross & Markus, 1991; Ruvolo & Markus, 1992) to cross-cultural differences in self-conceptions. I saw Hazel give some talks at Michigan on her early ideas in the cultural area, ideas that came to fruition in publications such as Markus and Kitayama (1991, 1994). In my February 2, 2004 entry, I summarized Hazel's Presidential Address at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, in which she presented her continued cross-cultural research (February archives).

(Many of you who are familiar with these lines of research, as well as others mentioned later in this entry, can recognize the articles in question; if you want more information such as the journals they appeared in, just e-mail me.)

Hazel's frequent collaborator, Shinobu Kitayama, was also mentioned in the Monitor article. Shinobu received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Michigan (where he was my office mate for about two or three years). After serving on the faculty at the University of Oregon and then at Kyoto University in Japan, Shinobu recently returned to UM as a professor.

Dick Nisbett, who is approaching 35 years on the UM faculty, appeared in the mid-late 1980s to be transitioning from his longtime concentration on reasoning and cognitive processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, & Kunda, 1983; Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng, 1987) to cultural studies. One of Dick's first major lines of cultural research (with then-graduate student Dov Cohen) involved the southern "Culture of Honor," culminating in a 1996 book by that name. More recently, Dick has blended cognition with cross-cultural studies, probing thought processes in Eastern and Western cultures. That work produced the 2003 book, The Geography of Thought.

Ara Norenzayan, a 1999 Michigan Ph.D. who is on the faculty at UBC, was also mentioned in the Monitor article.

On the evolutionary side, the Monitor article mentioned University of Texas, Austin professor David Buss, who served on the UM faculty in personality psychology from 1985-1996. A prolific author, Buss, along with his students and collaborators, has published numerous books and articles on evolution-related topics, focusing on mate-selection and related topics. Also mentioned in the Monitor article was UM psychiatrist Randolph Nesse. He spoke in the psychology graduate proseminar when I was in school.

The spread of culture is also a major interest of mine. It would have been great to go see the aforementioned (and other) speakers, but it just didn't fit within my travel plans last summer. I maintain a website on the spread of culture.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention two people featured elsewhere in the same Monitor issue with UM ties. Personality-social psychologist David Winter, who has been on the Michigan faculty since around 1988, was mentioned in an article about presidential personality traits. Finally, Steve Behnke, a UM clinical psychology Ph.D., regularly writes in the Monitor on ethical issues in psychology, in his capacity of APA Ethics Director (profile of Steve from when he began at APA).

2004-11-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

This past spring, when I was teaching an advanced graduate statistics course at Texas Tech University on structural equation modeling, I wrote a tribute to the late Frank Andrews and Laura Klem (who is still active at UM), who taught the same course to me at UM in 1988 (April 13 entry, April archives).

Right now, in the Fall semester, I am teaching introductory statistics at the graduate level. Accordingly, I thought I'd say a few words about the professor I had for intro stats at Michigan during my first year of graduate school (1984-85), the late J.E. Keith Smith.

Keith was always very friendly with a quirky sense of humor, but he taught intro stats very rigorously, deriving formulas and attempting to document their theoretical background. In all candor, the material was complex and sometimes difficult to follow.

However, if you went to Keith's office with a specific data-analysis question (either while in his class or even several semesters after you'd had him), he was as clear as could be. He would instantly grasp the type of analysis you'd need to do given your research design, and his instructions for how to implement the analysis on the computer were easy to follow. I know that several faculty members and graduate students would consult Keith on various statistical and experimental-design questions and his advice was always valued.

(As an aside, I still have my textbook that I used in Keith's class, Statistics [3rd ed.], by William L. Hays. Hays, who passed away in 1995, had himself been a faculty member at Michigan until 1973 and finished his career at the University of Texas, Austin. My Hays book was bound so poorly that within a year of my purchasing the book, chunks of pages were falling out; I've had to scotch tape these pages back in over the years. Although I do not teach with the Hays book, I continue to refer back to it for formulas and explanations.)

In my second year of graduate school, I sat in on a categorical data analysis course Keith was teaching. Essentially, this latter course covered more advanced and sophisticated variations on the basic chi-square test. Given a table showing, for example, how many people fell into each of the six cells created by the combinations of gender (male/female) by party identification (Democrat/Republican/Independent), we would typically compare the frequencies in the table as a whole to what would be expected by chance. Keith was working toward facilitating tests of how the frequencies in one (or more) cell would compare to the frequencies of other cells.

When I remarked during one class that the technique he was showing looked very similar to contrasts in Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), which we had learned about in intro stats, he replied, "You've been with me long enough to know that eventually everything will look like a contrast!"

At the time, there was a famous categorical data analysis program called ECTA (Everyman's Contingency Table Analysis). Keith said he was working on a program called VECTA (Very Easy Contingency Table Analysis), which, Keith also noted, was how a New Yorker would pronounce "Vector."

Keith died in 2002. His obituary is available here (you have to scroll down once the page comes up).

To this day, I have a love of numbers and statistical analysis, as exemplified not just in my teaching of research methodology and statistics, but also in fun endeavors such as my hot hand website, which applies probability and statistics to the analysis of sports streaks. I think this represents, at least in part, a legacy of my having learned statistics from Keith.

2004-10-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight begins the 2004 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals. Twenty years ago, during my cohort's first semester of graduate school, baseball fans in the UM community got to root for the Detroit Tigers as they won the 1984 World Series. One list places this Tiger squad as the No. 9 best World Series-winning team of all-time.

At the start of the Fall '84 semester, there was about a month left in the regular season, as the Tigers coasted to the American League Eastern Division title. The Tigers then made short work of the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series and the San Diego Padres in the World Series (back then, there was one fewer round of play-offs than today).

The '84 Tigers started the season off 9-0 (including a no-hitter by Jack Morris against the White Sox) and 35-5 (click here for a full game-by-game log). That they were in first place every day of the season inspired the title of George Cantor's book on the team, Wire to Wire, which I read recently. The book, published earlier this year, features a series of short chapters each focusing on a different member of the '84 Tigers. Many former players were interviewed to get their reminiscences on the championship they won two decades earlier.

That Detroit team was noteworthy for the fact that its core consisted of a number of players who had come up through the Tiger farm system within a few years of each other. These players included the aforementioned Morris, Alan Trammell (now the Tigers' manager), Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish, and Kirk Gibson (pictured on the book-cover photo linked above).

Gibson is well-known for a dramatic home run he hit while injured for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series. He also hit an important one for the Tigers in the closing (fifth) game of the '84 World Series; against San Diego pitcher "Goose" Gossage, who had overruled his manager's decision to walk Gibson intentionally, Gibson blasted a late three-run homer to give the Tigers, who had been leading by only one run at the time, some insurance runs. In fact, on one list of greatest World Series moments, Gibson appears twice: his '88 homer is No. 1 and his '84 homer is No. 9.

I lived in a graduate dormitory (Baits) on North Campus my first year and I remember watching Gibson's homer off Gossage, as well as the Tigers' recording the final out against the Padres, from one of the nearby dining halls, where I had gone for a late afternoon snack on a Sunday.

Among the Detroit pro sports teams, the Tigers appeared to have the most support among the people I hung out with at UM. Now that the Tigers' on-field performance has plummeted in recent years, it wouldn't surprise me if hockey's Red Wings and basketball's Pistons, both of which have won championships in their respective sports within the last few years, have overtaken the Tigers.

The '84 Tigers are one of the very few World Series champions to have none of their players in the Hall of Fame (among teams going far back enough so that their players would have sufficient opportunity to be voted in). Morris, Trammell, and Whitaker are most commonly discussed as potentially deserving to get in. Cantor discusses this a few times in his history of the '84 Tigers, but even people not linked to the Tigers make similar arguments. Rob Neyer, whose Big Book of Baseball Lineups seeks to determine the best historical lineups fielded by every team, writes that:

"If you study the issue with any sort of sophistication, it's pretty clear that Trammell, like... [teammate Darrell] Evans, ranks among the all-time greats at his position" (p. 90).

The Tigers were managed by Hall of Fame skipper Sparky Anderson, who had previously managed two World Championship teams with Cincinnati. (As an aside, this year the Cardinals' Tony LaRussa will attempt to join Anderson as the only people to manage World Series winners in both leagues; LaRussa led the 1989 Oakland A's to the title.) Anderson was (and presumably still is) a very colorful personality, with his own unique style of expression.

I also had the opportunity during my Michigan years to listen to Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell on the radio. I consider Harwell and the Dodgers' Vin Scully (whom I listened to growing up in L.A.) to be the two top baseball broadcasters I've ever listened two (not favoring one over the other).

Another important piece of the team's history is Tiger Stadium, which hosted its last game at the conclusion of the 1999 season. Author Tom Stanton attended every Detroit home game that year in doing research for his book The Final Season. The book, which I read a couple of years ago, really transcends baseball. Stanton used the Tigers as a vehicle for blending in reflections on his family life. He also interviewed a lot of the "everyday people" who worked at Tiger Stadium.

Since 2000, the Tigers have played at the new Comerica Park. I attended one game at Tiger Stadium, in 1987, during my graduate school days.

2004-10-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

With the 2004 presidential election quickly approaching, people are paying increasing attention to the polls (my favorite poll compendia are Polling Report for national polls and Race 2004 for state ones). For a variety of reasons there are questions about how accurate the polls will ultimately turn out to be on Election Day. As one example, a small but growing segment of the American population does its telephone communication only by cell phones, which survey researchers are by law not allowed to call.

Mark Blumenthal, who works in the polling industry, recently created a blog called Mystery Pollster in an attempt to address virtually the full spectrum of issues regarding how pre-election surveys are conducted and what the implications of these controversial issues are for the polls' potential accuracy. Blumenthal's biographical sketch notes that he is a graduate of the University of Michigan in political science and that he later did some graduate work at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland.

As part of the research methods course I teach at Texas Tech University, I had developed a website on one specific aspect of this year's polling controversy, sample weighting by party ID. I e-mailed Blumenthal to let him know about my webpage and also the UM connection, and he sent me a nice reply. It turns out that Don Kinder, from whom I took a graduate seminar in public opinion in Fall 1985, advised Mark on his undergraduate honors thesis. (Don is also mentioned in my June 5, 2004 entry on the Michigan-UCLA connection; click here for June archives.)

Yet another Michigan graduate is playing a role in 2004 presidential polling. Jon Krosnick, a 1985 UM social psych Ph.D. who is now at Stanford after many years on the faculty at Ohio State, is collaborating on a large Internet-based survey with The Economist magazine and "You Gov" polling firm, both British concerns. Further information is available via a Boston Globe article on the project. The paper by Morris Fiorina and Jon that was alluded to in the article can be accessed here.

Jon is quite a versatile guy. He has academic appointments at Stanford in communications, political science, and psychology. He is also an accomplished jazz drummer, as noted in my May 14, 2004 entry (May archives).

2004-10-09T13:12:00.000-07:00

In various previous postings, I have alluded to the wide array of seminars, colloquia, and lecture series available for individuals in the University of Michigan community to attend on campus. One that I have not yet discussed is the Group Dynamics Seminar, hosted by the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) in the Institute for Social Research (ISR).

Just as a historical note, the original RCGD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was founded by Kurt Lewin, one of the most eminent social psychologists of all time. According to a UM biography of one of Lewin's colleagues, Ronald Lippitt:

"In 1946 Lippitt resumed work with Kurt Lewin, helping him to found the Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T., where Lippitt was also an associate professor of social science from 1946 to 1948... Upon Lewin’s death in 1948, Lippitt moved the Research Center for Group Dynamics to the University of Michigan’s Institute of Social Research, acting as program director in the Research Center, as well as associate professor of sociology and psychology at the university."

Back during the 1980s, social psychology faculty, staff, and graduate students had their offices within RCGD; other subdisciplines of psychology such as developmental, personality, and biopsychology were also scattered around the campus. Some time in the early-mid 1990s, however, the long-awaited psychology building (East Hall, a renovation of the former East Engineering) finally opened, bringing all the areas under one roof. Never having been based full-time at UM in the "new-building era," I cannot compare the experiences of being in the social psych program in the ISR versus East Hall. My strong speculation, however, is that links to the Group Dynamics Seminar and other RCGD activities would have been stronger in the former era.

For the first few years I was in grad school at UM (starting with Fall '84), the "Group Dy," as people referred to it, was held every Tuesday night during the Fall and Winter semesters. Toward the latter years of my time at UM, it moved to a late-afternoon time.

As is still the case today, each semester's Group Dy series would have a theme. One thematic series that I'd like to discuss in the remainder of this posting is the one focusing on social conflict, which as I recall was held during Fall '84 (I have a folder with handouts from many Group Dy talks, but none from the social conflict series).

Given UM's strong overall social science portfolio, the Group Dy series on social conflict included, among others, professors speaking on anthropological and political science approaches to conflict. Each semester's series is organized by one of the social psych faculty members; this one was organized by Gene Burnstein.

Interestingly, among the attendees during the semester on social conflict was Robben Fleming, who had served as UM President from 1968-1979 (and then later as Interim President in 1988 during the gap between Harold Shapiro and James Duderstadt). Fleming's background was as a law professor and labor mediator. Given the tumult on the UM campus in the 1960s and '70s over the Vietnam War and Civil Rights issues, the book The Making of the University of Michigan 1817-1992 by Howard H. Peckham, notes that Fleming "brought to the office of president... a unique combination of skills that seemed tailored for the times" (p. 290).

The book reported on one incident during Fleming's tenure as president that I find absolutely fascinating:

"Despite public criticism, Fleming refused to take inflexible stands on unimportant matters. When the Inter-Faith Council for Peace wanted to dig a large 'bomb crater' on the Diag to symbolize the destruction of North Vietnam, Fleming found them a safe place to do it. His reaction to the crater affair was typical of his willingness to co-operate with peaceful dissent. 'Why not let them dig one? Everybody else is digging holes for new buildings, and so forth. It's not a big job to throw the dirt back in the hole after they get tired.' In response to those who objected to his willingness to compromise, Fleming reasoned, 'If you make an issue of activities that do no harm and don't interfere with the running of the University, you run the real risk of attracting a lot of other students who will then be sympathetic to their other demands' " (p. 292).

Fittingly, toward the end of the Group Dy semester on social conflict, Fleming himself was the speaker. He recounted various instances of protests he had to handle, and how he did so. One had to do with students who occupied the Administration Building. I don't recall the details, but I remember Fleming saying that it had been resolved satisfactorily to both sides, to the point where the protesters exited the building singing the UM fight song, "The Victors."

According to a 2003 article on the lives of retired academics, "Fleming, now 86, has lived on one campus or another since he and his wife Sally were college sweethearts at Beloit College in Wisconsin. The couple decided to retire to Ann Arbor and Michigan's 92-unit University Commons."

I'm tempted to say that "only at UM" could you have a speaker series where you'd hear stories like that; it may not be "only" at UM, but the number of such universities would likely be very small.

As a concluding note on the topic of social conflict, I would like to recommend strongly the new (2004) book How Soccer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer. In this book, you'll learn of bands of soccer fans who, in their cheers (more like taunts) and fight songs, spew the most hateful and even violent rhetoric you could imagine (sometimes followed up by actual violence). I wrote a review of this book for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) electronic discussion list.

2004-10-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

Seeing the first Bush-Kerry presidential debate a few nights ago prompted another memory from my first semester of graduate school 20 years ago. In 1984, the incumbent President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, was being challenged by former Vice President Walter "Fritz" Mondale, the Democratic nominee. During the Fall '84 semester, Mondale spoke at a campaign rally on the UM's Diag and -- as best I can recall -- that appearance took place just a few days after the first Reagan-Mondale debate.

Nowadays (and perhaps then, too) political analysts talk about "rallying the base" of support within a candidate's own party, then "reaching out to the middle," i.e., moderate and undecided voters. Although it did not occur to me 20 years ago, the fact that Mondale was still rallying the base (very few cities in America are more liberal than Ann Arbor) in mid-October was a sure sign of how deeply in trouble Mondale was. In fact, despite by most accounts winning the first debate, Mondale ended up losing the election 59-41%. Mondale carried only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

I attended the Mondale rally along with two other grad students. We found a spot behind a tree and got a decent view. Mondale was accompanied at the rally by former Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO), Mondale's nearest rival during the primary campaign. I searched pretty hard on the web for any record of the rally, but couldn't find anything. Twenty years ago would probably be too far back for web-archived newspaper accounts of the event. Further, given Mondale's lopsided defeat, it's understandable that nobody associated with the campaign would create a web-based tribute to Election '84.

Many of you will remember Hart from his failed 1988 campaign, which he started in many people's minds as the front-runner. Suffice it to say that Hart, the self-proclaimed "candidate of new ideas," got into trouble from something resembling one of the world's oldest ideas.

2004-09-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

Just a few items from the September 2004 Ann Arbor Observer magazine:

One of the major articles, entitled "Borders Grows Up," reviews the recent ups-and-downs of the now 33-year-old icon of Ann Arbor bookselling. As virtually anyone reading this blog would know, Borders was founded (and located exclusively for many years) in Ann Arbor. In the mid-80s, Borders expanded, initially to some Detroit suburbs and then nationally. The article delves into issues such as competition with Barnes and Noble, competition from internet sales, and the healing process from last year's strike at the flagship Ann Arbor store.

Historically, Borders did a lot to cultivate a cerebral image, most notably making its workers pass a test (which, according to the recent Observer article, was "dropped years ago"). George Will wrote the following in a 1991 Washington Post article:

"Reading the torrent of essays about the end of reading, and the glut of books about the death of the book, leaves little time for savoring the significance of Borders bookstores, which are flourishing.

There are 14 of them so far. The first was in Ann Arbor, Mich. The one here in Rockville [Maryland] is typical. It has more than 100,000 titles, 1.3 million volumes and a staff who when asked `Where is `Billy Budd'?' will not reply, `He doesn't work here.'

No one works here who cannot pass a quiz featuring questions like, `In what subject areas would you look for books by or about Jean Piaget, Gustav Klimt, Dorothy Sayers, Karen Horney, Ludwig Wittgenstein'? `Who wrote `Tin Drum'? `Native Son'? `Where the Wild Things Are'?' Non-readers need not apply at Borders, which unlike lots of supposed bookstores sells neither games nor globes nor garden hoses.. . .

A better way of doing business in books began 20 years ago with the Border [sic, it should be Borders] brothers, University of Michigan graduate students, Tom, an English major, and Lewis, a computer wiz. Their idea was to use modern information systems to make possible, meaning profitable, small-volume purchases of many titles rather than large-volume purchases of titles that will sell at a high velocity."

I love that "Billy Budd" quote and am glad to be able to have found a reference to it on the web. Many parts of Will's article are obviously dated, including the test and the number of stores. Heck, today's Borders stores in the L.A. and Chicago areas alone might come close to numbering 14 (those are where I do most of my Borders visiting; my current home of Lubbock, Texas doesn't have one). I also, of course, love to visit the Ann Arbor flagship store, but I haven't been back since 2002.

The Observer article also provides an update on the Borders brothers: Tom now lives in Austin, Texas, and Louis is in Silicon Valley.

One quote in the Observer article really hits the nail on the head, in my view, regarding why Borders has been so successful:

"The saving factor for Borders, [its CEO] says, was that people still like to come to bookstores to browse."

. . .

In my May 14 entry on this blog (May archives), I wrote about Ann Arbor's jazz scene, including a mention of the Bird of Paradise club. We learn from the September 2004 Observer that, after 20 years, "The Bird" is no more, a casualty of financial difficulties. Here's an article on the club's farewell from the Ann Arbor News.

2004-09-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Lerner, a Michigan undergraduate in the late 1980s and now a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, has won an early career award from the National Science Foundation. Back in the 1980s (and perhaps still today) the introductory social psychology course for undergrads was taught as a huge lecture by a professor, with probably around 300 students. Each undergraduate student would also attend a weekly one-hour discussion section of around 25 students, led by a graduate-student Teaching Assistant (TA). Jennifer was in the section I led. I got to know her pretty well then, and have stayed in touch with her over the years.

Also, as featured in my June 5 write-up on this blog (June archives), Jennifer, like me, is a "Bru-verine" (someone with ties to both UCLA -- the Bruins -- and Michigan -- the Wolverines). After completing her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (during which time I only rarely saw her, at conventions), she did a health psychology post doc at UCLA. Given that I regularly visit UCLA on my trips back to L.A. to visit family, I was able to visit with Jennifer every few months in Franz Hall.

Congratulations to Jennifer!

2004-09-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago, almost to this exact day, the other members of my cohort and I began classes at the University of Michigan as new graduate students. The incoming social psychology grad-student cohort in Fall 1984 included Monica Biernat, Rick Blake, Steve Bright, Greg Diamond, Eaaron Henderson-King, Ann Ruvolo, Judy Shapiro, and myself. Bob Josephs (for whom 1984 was the start of his overall graduate-school career) came over with his advisor Claude Steele from the University of Washington in Fall 1987, but became part of our cohort (Claude later moved on from Michigan to Stanford).

Monica received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology Award in social psychology in 1999 (news release from her current university). She wrote about our cohort in her award statement, published in the November 1999 American Psychologist (based on this article, Monica had a particular fondness for cohort-mates who loaned her their cars!). In all seriousness, our cohort was pretty tight the whole 5-6 years people were there, but extremely tight the first year or two (people joked that all eight of us even crossed the street together). Just within the first week or two of arriving, I recall, we all went together on a Saturday morning for apple cider in one of the neighboring towns (I think it was Dexter) and also played ultimate frisbee on that outing.

As is virtually inevitable, however, as we no longer were taking classes together and people were spending more time with spouses and partners or other interests, we drifted apart somewhat during our later years at Michigan. Also, based on research interests and personal hobbies, each of us in our cohort developed ties to students in other cohorts, thus diluting the intra-cohort ties. That's not to say that all the bonds within the '84 entering cohort have diminished. I would say I have maintained very close ties to a couple of people in the cohort, more moderately intense ties to others, and have lost touch completely with others. Talking to others in the cohort, this distribution seems fairly typical.

What I thought it would be fun to do was look at the current UM graduate psychology course list and compare the versions of the courses my cohort took in Fall '84 to the current versions of the same courses. To preview my findings (shown below), the course numbers are entirely the same, the instructors are all different (virtually a given, since many professors from '84 have either moved to other universities, retired, or passed away), and the content/format of some courses has changed somewhat. First-year social psych students took the following courses in Fall '84...

Psych 600, Psychology Graduate Proseminar. New students in all areas of psychology -- not just social -- took this course during their entire first year (Psych 601 was the second semester). In '84, a different UM psychology faculty member would come in to lecture each week on his/her respective research area. Faculty speakers were clustered in sequence around larger themes (i.e., a few weeks of biopsych, a few weeks of cognitive development, a few weeks of social). Faculty speakers each assigned a set of readings, with the course providing for discussion of the readings and integrative writing assignments. The purpose was clearly to present the breadth of psychology to students in all of the department's programs. Breadth is apparently still an important goal today, but it is accomplished differently. According to the current 600 description:

"This course is a graduate-level overview of psychology with special attention to its coverage of (a) biological; (b) affective/cognitive, (c) developmental, and (d) social/organizational aspects of behavior... Students will do background readings in each of the four areas on focus [sic], and for each area, attend at least three department- or campus-wide lectures of their choice in which current research is presented... Upon completion of the relevant readings and attendance at the lectures for an area, each student will write a reaction paper... that integrates and responds to the relevant readings and lectures attended."

The description also alludes to some live meetings/discussion between the coordinator and students, but it seems this course is now more individually paced. It is also credit/noncredit, which I don't think was true 20 years ago. In Fall '84, the faculty coordinators were Hazel Markus (now at Stanford) and Bill Stebbins. Currently, the coordinator is Chris Peterson. Chris was on my dissertation committee in '89. For the last 20 years or so a clinical/personality researcher, Chris was actually a social psych Ph.D. (University of Colorado).

Psych 613, Statistics. This class also was for all new psychology students for the full year (614 was the second semester). Back in '84, we had Keith Smith, who passed away a couple years ago (click here and then scroll down for obituary). I plan to do a future entry specifically on Keith. For now, though, I'll just say that the current 613-614 sequence, taught by Kai Schnabel Cortina (who apparently arrived at UM in the late 90s), seems to represent a compression of the old stat courses. Multivariate techniques now appear to be incorporated into 613-614, whereas students of my era had to wait until their third semester to take a separate multivariate analysis course.

Psych 681, Orientation to Social Psychology (now known as Survey of Social Psychology). This was not a "class" in the traditional sense, but rather a forum for first-year social students to receive socialization into the program and field. James Jackson, then the social psych program director, led this workshop. Some of the main activities included helping us along on our first-year projects and having speakers from the social psych faculty. One or two students would invite each speaker and have a preparatory meeting with him/her to discuss the faculty member's presentation to the 681 group. The current version is led by Norbert Schwarz, who arrived at UM in '93. Both my old syllabus (which I've saved, along with my notebooks) and the current desciption list 681 as a three-semester sequence. In all honesty, all I remember is the first semester; perhaps we mainly worked independently later on.

Psych 682, Advanced Social Psychology. This course provided a pretty intensive introduction to our subject matter, with a lot of classic stuff (e.g., Sherif, Asch, Lewin, Festinger). In Fall '84, it was taught by Hazel Markus, who was also mentioned above. The current version is taught by Rich Gonzalez. As I've noted in previous entries to this blog, I first met Rich when he was visiting UM as a prospective grad student and now he's the department chair!

Those were the days!

2004-08-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight will mark the 11th anniversary of the start of David Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS, which continues to run. Before that, he did a virtually identical show called "Late Night" on NBC for 11 years (1982-1993). Although Letterman's CBS show has received many honors (including six Emmys for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Program in 1994, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002), it is my feeling (and probably that of numerous other Letterman watchers) that he was at his most creative during those mid-80s NBC years when we were in graduate school.

Letterman did the kind of things during those years that had us graduate students asking each other on many a morning, "Did you see what Dave did last night?" And when Dave did an anniversary show, at least the first few ones, watching was de rigueur. There's an online list of "The 80 Greatest Late-Night Episodes of All Time" and, by my count, 44 of them involved Dave (you need to scroll down a bit when the web document comes up, to see the list).

Granted, some of Dave's stunts appear to have been "borrowed" from Steve Allen's work in an earlier era. But, how can you not love Dave's physical comedy, such as dressing in a jumpsuit covered with probably hundreds or thousands of bits of Rice Crispies and being lowered into a vat of milk, or wearing a suit of Alka-Seltzer tablets and being lowered into a vat of water? (I heard a rumor that during pre-testing of the Alka-Seltzer stunt, a stagehand filling Dave's role passed out from the resulting gases, so Dave had to wear a gas mask when doing the actual stunt.)

From the elevator races, to the "democracy show" where the audience got to vote on which features to implement during an actual taping, to the velcro suit, to "supermarket finds," to riding on a luge sled, the Letterman gems are endless. Though Dave gets less physically involved today on his CBS show (perhaps a result of his health problems), he still gives us such cerebral exercises as "Will it float?," a physics lesson viewers don't even realize they're getting.

Among my fellow Michigan grad students, the one who probably got the most enjoyment out of Dave's antics is Steve Fein, a professor at Williams College since graduating from UM. Back then, Dave's NBC show "Late Night with David Letterman" came on at roughly 1:00 AM on the local Detroit affiliate. Michigan is in the Eastern time zone, meaning "The Tonight Show" (then hosted by Johnny Carson) would be on from 11:30-12:30. Then, instead of putting Letterman on at 12:30 AM, which was plenty late, the NBC affiliate put him on at 1:00, with a half-hour of Barney Miller (and other similar shows') repeats filling the gap.

Rather than stand passively by like the rest of us, Steve called up the NBC affiliate to ask why Letterman didn't come on at 12:30. The answer he got had something to do with local affiliates' being able to pocket advertising revenues for shows aired only in the local market (such as the "filler" rerun), whereas the revenues for a national show such as Dave's went to the national office. Steve got a kick out of many of Letterman's stunts and even was known to imitate one or two of them.

Another feature of the show I find interesting is that, in the early years, there was a fair amount of turnover in the band (known variously as "The World's Most Dangerous Band," "The NBC Orchestra," and "The CBS Orchestra"). Sid McGinnis replaced Hiram Bullock on guitar in '84, and Anton Fig (whom Dave used to jokingly refer to as "Antop Zip") replaced Steve Jordan on drums in '86. Bandleader/keyboardist Paul Shaffer and bassist Will Lee have been there all along. But since '86 (which is 18 years ago, for heaven's sake), there have been no personnel changes on these four instruments (there have been additions to the band, however).

I was a little disappointed that Dave didn't change up the show more when he moved from NBC to CBS, and I recall Steve feeling the same way from our correspondences. The question of what facets of Dave's NBC show he could take to CBS reached the point of absurdity when, as stated in one online biography of Letterman:

"NBC claimed that many of Letterman's gimmicks and jokes, including throwing the pencil at the camera, the top ten list, and Larry Bud Melman, among many others, were 'intellectual properties.' NBC lost, but Larry 'Bud' Melman would now be called Calvert DeForest on the CBS show."

And you think I'm kidding when I say that Dave gave many Michigan social psych graduate students intellectual enrichment during our years in Ann Arbor?

* * *

On a somewhat related note, any longstanding show such as David Letterman's on NBC and CBS, will have its detractors, people who feel the show "jumped the shark" and started heading downhill. The term "Jump the Shark" derives from an episode of Happy Days on which Fonzie, clad in his trademark leather jacket, jumped over a shark on water skis. That, to many, was a signal that Happy Days was seriously on the decline. In keeping with the theme of the Michigan retrospective website, it turns out that the creator of the term "Jump the Shark" (and host of the website and author of the book by the same name) is Jon Hein, a 1989 UM alumnus (to my knowledge, I never met Jon at UM, but with tens of thousands of people there, that's not surprising). People can submit their opinions to the Jump the Shark website on when a given show has started to decline. Here are the entries for Letterman's NBC and CBS shows.

2004-08-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's New York Times had a thorough article on the debate over psychotherapy effectiveness research (whether insurance companies should rigorously base their reimbursements on demonstrated effectiveness, should practitioners be required to closely follow procedures from manuals?, can the complexity of what goes on in a therapy room be captured in research studies?, etc.).

One of the scholars quoted in the article is Drew Westen, a professor at Emory University. Drew was a clinical psychology graduate student in the 1980s at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. He has been a very prolific author over the years. Drew and I will occasionally run into each other at conferences and chat briefly.

If you're already a registered NY Times user, you can just click here to see the article that quotes Drew, for the time being at least. If you're not already registered, you can complete the free process by going to the Times' main page.

2004-08-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

Just a brief entry today, on some miscellaneous items...

First, a short time ago while looking through some piles in my office for unrelated purposes, I found a complete list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers for the period 1973-1992 (it was probably an enclosure with the invitation to the 1993 talk that presumably all program alumni received). As some of you may recall, my April 29 entry was devoted to the Katz-Newcomb Lecture. With the help of many people, I was able to compile a near-complete list of speakers from 1973-1997 (when, except for some ad hoc lectures, the series came to an end). But, there were still some gaps for the more distant years. The list I found has now allowed me to fill in all the speakers for the complete series. As an added "bonus," the list I found also included the 1973-1992 speakers' titles, so I have added these. Take a look at the updated list by going to the April archive.

August is a pretty quiet time in academia, as professors, students, and staff members prepare to start another school year. One major event that will be happening in August (the 13th-29th) is, of course, the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. UM has produced a list of current and former Wolverines who are participating. As a sign of how much 80s-era students such as myself have aged, our only Michigan contemporaries are going to Athens in coaching roles. Enjoy the Games!

2004-07-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a trip that I'm calling "Midwestern Tour '04." For about 10 days during the middle of July, I traveled through Cincinnati (to attend the Society for American Baseball Research or "SABR" convention), Chicago (to visit my sister and her family and also drop by the offices of some professors and researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston), and finally, Madison, Wisconsin (to attend the International Association for Relationship Research convention). Where academics and sports are involved, a large University of Michigan presence is virtually assured, and there indeed were Michigan connections throughout the trip.

Cincinnati Portion of the Trip

According to this ESPN.com document, there are six former UM baseball players currently in the major leagues. However, only two, Cincinnati's Barry Larkin and St. Louis's Mike Matheny, were 1980s Wolverines. Naturally, SABR schedules its meetings when the home team is in town, so I was able to attend a Reds game; they were playing the Cardinals, so I further got to see the two ex-Wolverines square off. Although baseball certainly lags Michigan's "marquee" sports (football, men's basketball, and ice hockey) in popularity, I enjoyed going out to UM's Ray Fisher Stadium to watch baseball during my grad school days. Michigan has a proud baseball history, having won the College World Series in 1953 (under Fisher) and 1962 (under Don Lund). Up through the 80s, the Wolverines were a perennial post-season team, until being put on probation. The program has not been the same since, but may be staging a resurgence under relatively new coach Rich Maloney.

While in Cincy, I also added another Pizzeria Uno to my list of ones I've dined at (see the February and March archives on the right-hand side of the page, midway down, for my previous Uno's-related writings).

The SABR conference was great fun. My activities ranged from watching a trivia contest (where I knew the answers to about five questions for every 100 asked, in contrast to the actual contestants who reeled off answers to one obscure question after another) to touring the grounds where Crosley Field, the beloved former home of the Reds, was located (there are no remnants of the park at the site today, just a variety of industrial businesses) and also a park in Blue Ash, Ohio that replicates some of the features of Crosley.

At the SABR book exhibit, I picked up the book A Mathematician at the Ballpark, by Ken Ross. On page 178, it cites my hot hand website on the statistical study of sports streakiness.

Chicago/Evanston Portion

Next it was on to Chicago. Like any major research university, Northwestern has both research centers and traditional academic departments (often, scholars at one type of unit will have a joint appointment at a unit of the other type). I knew (or knew of) a number of scholars at Northwestern, so I e-mailed ahead to see if people wouldn't mind having me stop by to chat about research and/or just visit. Within the psychology department, I met with Alice Eagly, a 1965 social psych Ph.D. from Michigan. I was also hoping to visit with David Uttal, a developmental psychologist who was a comtemporary of mine during grad school at UM in the 80s, but our timing didn't work out.

I also met with two people at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research. My first meeting was with Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, whom only after our meeting started did I learn was also a 1980s Michigan Ph.D (developmental psych, 1981). Her research is in the area of public policy as related to families and children, such as studying welfare reform. As seen in my lecture notes on adolescent sexuality, I've drawn upon Lindsay's research for many years in teaching my "Problems of Adolescence" course at Texas Tech (click here for the main syllabus). In our conversation, Lindsay cited her experience at Michigan with the Bush Program in Child Development and Social Policy as being particularly valuable. The other IPR researcher with whom I met was Greg Duncan. Before moving to Northwestern in 1995, Greg spent over 20 years at Michigan as a research scientist and professor, including a stint as director of UM's Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Although I had never met Greg during my time at Michigan, I knew of him. We had a nice wide-ranging discussion of research on adolescent and young adult drinking, public policy, and research methodology.

The Northwestern scholars with whom I wanted to meet, of course, were not limited to people with Michigan backgrounds. I also had a nice visit with Dan McAdams, who has a joint faculty appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy and the psychology department.

I want to thank my relative Bonnie (whose husband is a cousin of my mother), who works at IPR, for her hospitality during my visit. Also, of course, I want to thank my sister Lynn and her husband Jeff for hosting me. It was in the spring of 1986 that Lynn, then an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, came up to visit me in Ann Arbor; on that trip, she met Jeff, then an undergrad at Michigan, and the rest -- as they say -- is history.

Although Chicago is the home of the original Pizzeria Uno's -- both the first one at the corner of Wabash and Ohio and Pizzeria Due's, built about a block away to handle the Uno's overflow crowd -- I had already been to both before, so I didn't have any Uno's pizza in Chicago. Instead, I tried out another Windy City deep dish place, Lou Malnati's. It was good, in my opinion, but not quite up to Uno's.

Madison, Wisconsin Portion

Lastly, I arrived in Madison to present a poster at the IARR close-relationships conference on a study an undergraduate student, Teresa Lair, conducted under my supervision (click here to see both the paper and some pictures I took in Madison).

Naturally, I saw some former Michigan people:

Terri Orbuch, who was featured in a June write-up (see archives) about UM's Early Years of Marriage Project. A paper from the project (Orbuch, Veroff, Hassan, & Horrocks, 2002, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships) won the IARR Article Award at the conference.
Linda Acitelli, a University of Houston faculty member, with whom I overlapped during grad school at Michigan (she was in the personality psychology program, but there was extensive contact between the social and personality programs).
Kathy Carnelley, a lecturer at the University of Southampton in England, and Amber Story, a program director at the National Science Foundation, a pair of mid-1990s Michigan post docs. Kathy was also featured in my June write-up on the Michigan-UCLA connection.
Dan Perlman, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who told me he did some of his graduate work at Michigan in the 1960s.

In addition to the people, however, the town of Madison itself evoked a strong connection in my mind to Ann Arbor. The similarities are numerous:

In both towns, the major street in the campus area is called State St. (which is the case in some additional Big Ten cities as well).
Both towns have extremely liberal political climates. In Dane County, Wisconsin (which includes Madison), Gore and Nader combined in the 2000 presidential election to take two-thirds of the vote. In Washtenaw County, Michigan (which includes Ann Arbor), Gore and Nader combined for slightly less than two-thirds. I don't claim to know the demographics of these counties that well, but it's potentially the case that the campus areas per se were even more highly Democratic, with rural outlying areas diluting the county-level percentages.
A couple of businesses that I thought to be unique to Ann Arbor were also in Madison, namely Steve & Barry's t-shirts (which, I've discovered on their website, has quite a few locations) and the Dahlmann Campus Inn hotel (Ann Arbor link, Madison link).
Both, of course, feature traditional, college-town barber shops. In Ann Arbor, I always went to the State St. Barber Shop during my graduate student days and I make it a point to go there every time I get back to town. Bill, the State St. barber, was featured in the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood, and to my knowledge, Bill is still there. Upon arrival in my hotel room in Madison, I looked over the Madison magazine that was displayed in the room. I noticed an article about a man named Don Fine, who owns the College Barber Shop on State St. near the University of Wisconsin campus and has been cutting hair there for 51 years. I went in the next morning, grabbed a seat in the waiting area, and hoped to get Don for my haircut. There were about five barbers cutting at the time, but by the luck of the draw, I got Don. He was extremely friendly. As the article notes, his chair is "the first in the shop's line of eight and the one in the prime spot in front of the picture window." I noticed how Don would personally say good-bye to each departing customer, so my guess is that he picked the location of his chair to enable him to do so most efficiently. (While on the subject of barber shops, I want to acknowledge the Collegiate Barber Shop in Lubbock, where I usually go.)

There are also obvious differences between Madison and Ann Arbor:

Madison has the two lakes (Monona and Mendota) on either side of the isthmus containing the state capitol building and campus (in fact, there's a town newspaper called The Isthmus). The Wisconsin Memorial Union on campus has a beautiful terrace behind the building overlooking Lake Mendota; there are tables set up so people can dine out by the lake, as well as a stage for evening musical performances (see the set of pictures I took, which I referenced above). Ann Arbor has nearby water as well, including places to go canoeing (as I recall, Chris Crandall was a very skilled rower during our Michigan grad school days), but not as prominently as in Madison.
Madison is a state capitol, Ann Arbor is not.
Ann Arbor has a Borders book store in the campus area (in fact, Ann Arbor was where Borders originated), whereas the Madison Borders appeared to be away from the campus.

I went to the Pizzeria Uno's in Madison twice on this recent trip. I had been to this Uno's before, but it was over 15 years ago (when visiting my relative -- again through a cousin of my mother's -- Jill Soloway, a UW student at the time and now a writer for HBO's "Six Feet Under"). Also, not surprisingly given Wisconsin's motto of "America's Dairy Land," I ate more ice cream on this recent trip than I usually do. The Daily Scoop in the student union, where ice cream made in the Babcock Hall Dairy Plant is sold, is a can't miss.

As you can see, I was quite taken with Madison. Even a maize-and-blue guy such as myself has to admit that Madison is just as nice a town as Ann Arbor (OK, there I admitted it).

In closing this segment about the Madison component of my trip, I would like to congratulate Linda Roberts, a UW-Madison faculty member and former colleague of mine from our days at the Research Institute on Addictions in Buffalo, New York, on an excellent job of co-hosting the IARR conference.

2004-07-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Supreme Court recently completed its term for the year. As most of you are probably aware, the major cases involved the rights of prisoners detained as part of the War on Terror.

One of the cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, involved an American citizen named Yaser Hamdi, whom the U.S. government was holding as an "enemy combatant." Two issues were at stake: whether Hamdi could be detained (perhaps indefinitely) without being charged with any crime, and whether he had the right to challenge his detention in court (and with assistance of counsel).

The Court's decision was what might be considered a "compromise verdict." The detentions themselves were permissible (having received the proper Congressional authorization), but the detainee had the right to a day in court to challenge the detention.

As noted in an excellent summary of the case by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism:

"Amicus briefs [were] filed by former prisoners of war, experts on the law of war, and Fred Korematsu on behalf of Hamdi."

As with all entries on this website, there must be a University of Michigan '80s connection, and that connection is Fred Korematsu. Korematsu, as many of you know, brought an unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge 60 years ago to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I had the pleasure of seeing Korematsu speak at the UM law school about the history and legal issues of his case. It was probably in 1988 or '89. I've found two documents on the web that allude to Korematsu speaking at UM. Based on contextual clues, the first document could very well be describing the same lecture I saw, whereas the second one appears to describe a later visit by Koretmatsu. There's obviously no reason why Korematsu couldn't have spoken at Michigan on multiple occasions.

As I will attempt to detail in future entries, the University of Michigan gets a lot of prominent scholars, politicians, and historical figures to speak on campus. The "intellectual nourishment" level is high.

2004-07-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

If asked, most researchers would probably say they had one (or a few) favorite project(s) among the research studies they had conducted over their careers. Some projects may stand out in one's mind as being more fun to work on than were others, or it may be the reaction of the field to a published product that stands out.

My personal list of favorite projects would have to include the heat-aggression in baseball study I conducted with Rick Larrick and Steve Fein. The official scientific reference for this study is:

Reifman, A. S., Larrick, R. P., & Fein, S. (1991). Temper and temperature on the diamond: The heat-aggression relationship in major league baseball. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 580-585.

I do not teach social psychology (even though my Ph.D. is in social psych, my faculty appointment is in human development and family studies at Texas Tech University). Still, I am fortunate enough to be able to give an annual lecture on the heat-aggression in baseball study to the undergraduate social psych class of my TTU colleague Darcy Reich. Last week I gave this guest lecture for the third straight year, each time during Darcy's summer session class (what better time of year to speak about heat and aggression?).

Rick, Steve, and I came up with the idea for such a study during the summer of 1987 (the end of my third year at Michigan and Rick and Steve's first). Based on a landmark Michigan-based article by Dick Nisbett and Tim Wilson (Psychological Review, 1977), I try to be very cautious about claiming an impetus for my thought processes. Having said that, I would say there were three events that led Rick, Steve, and me to conduct the heat-aggression in baseball study:

*It was a very hot summer for us in Ann Arbor.

*An article by Craig Anderson, a prolific heat-aggression researcher, came out in the June 1987 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on temperature and crime rates.

*Major League Baseball was dealing with a "beanball war" that season, as exemplified by the July 20, 1987 cover of Sports Illustrated. (After you click on the preceding word "cover," be sure to scroll down far enough when the page comes up.)

I remember that Rick, Steve, and I went for pizza one evening at a place on Maynard whose name I can't remember, to discuss our plans for the study. In conducting the study, each of us spent long hours in the UM libraries, going over microfilm rolls of major newspapers to look at randomly selected baseball box scores (for the hit-by-pitch data, our measure of aggression) and corresponding weather pages (to record the high temperature in the home city the day of the game). Nowadays, box scores are readily available on the web, with weather conditions at the game included in the box score.

To make a long story short, we conducted the initial parts of the study in 1987, presented our results as a poster at the 1988 convention of the American Psychological Association, then published our final results in PSPB in 1991, as noted above (we had to do some additional analyses for the journal version). Beyond some initial media coverage of the study in 1988 and my annual guest lecture at Texas Tech, the study has continued to live on in a number of ways:

*Citation by Dean Keith Simonton in a 2003 Annual Review of Psychology chapter on "Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of Historical Data."

*Citation by Anderson in several articles and chapters (click here for his list of recent publications).

*Citation by Eric Sundstrom, Paul Bell, and colleagues in a 1996 Annual Review of Psychology chapter on "Environmental Psychology 1989-1994."

*Continued citation in several social psychology textbooks.

*Inclusion of the study in several social psych professors' online syllabi and lecture notes (a search at Google, with the keyword set "reifman" "larrick" "fein" -- keeping the quotation marks -- currently yields 35 hits).

*A reprinting of our journal article in the book Psychology is Social.

*Application by Tom Timmerman of our idea that hit-by-pitch instances measure aggression, to a different context, namely the question of whether black batters were more likely to get hit by a pitch than their white counterparts, as part of the climate of prejudice just after the integration of Major League Baseball.

*And last but not least, publication of a letter of mine in the July 27, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine, in response to an article in the June 15, 1998 issue on hit batters that omitted our research.

My bottom line is that, if a topic such as baseball that has interest to many people can get students excited about doing research, then that may be the heat-aggression study's main contribution.

2004-06-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Just a brief entry today. As most of you are probably aware, the controversial movie Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore is bringing in huge box-office sales around the country.

As with anything on this website, there's a link between Michael Moore and the mid-80s Michigan scene. I would estimate that within just the first few weeks of my September 1984 arrival in Ann Arbor to begin graduate school, I started picking up an alternative political newsmagazine called the Michigan Voice. The editor of this publication was none other than Mr. Moore.

As any viewer of Moore's first film, Roger and Me, knows, Moore is from Flint, Michigan, not Ann Arbor. As noted in the biography linked to Moore's name above, he worked for what was then the Flint Voice, which expanded into a statewide version.

I even remember the cover story of the first issue of Michigan Voice that I ever read, again from 1984. It took to task U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who remains in office today and has long been one of the most liberal members of the body, for some alleged retrenchments in Levin's liberalism. The headline, a play on a song title by the artist formerly (and currently) known as Prince, was "When Doves Die."

2004-06-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I received the Spring 2004 issue of Relationship Research News, the newsletter of the International Association for Relationship Research. Within the newsletter was a review of the book Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories. The book was written by Diane Holmberg (a Michigan social psych Ph.D.), Terri Orbuch (a research scientist at UM's Institute for Social Research and a professor at Oakland University in suburban Detroit), and Joe Veroff (Professor Emeritus at UM in social psychology).

The book presents qualitative data (i.e., "narratives" or "stories") from the Early Years of Marriage (EYM) project, begun in 1986 by Veroff, ISR Research Scientist Shirley Hatchett, and the late UM Professor Elizabeth "Libby" Douvan. A number of social psych grad students from the mid-1980s such as Susan Crohan, Ann Ruvolo, and Lynne Sutherland also worked on the project. Orbuch came on a little later in a leadership role. (Note that the above link to the EYM project is from Radcliffe's Murray Center, where some of the EYM data are now archived.)

In preparing this entry, I thought I should do a little homework, so I contacted some people on (or close to) the project to see how things were going. I also read the following article, which provides an excellent overview of the EYM project:

Orbuch, T.L., & Veroff, J. (2002). A programmatic review: Building a two-way bridge between social psychology and the study of the early years of marriage. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19, 549-568.

Participating couples have been interviewed every few years (the title of the book derives from its use of interviews at three occasions). The EYM study has gathered quantitative (closed-ended) data as well as qualitative, but as noted above, the book focused on the latter. Based on the References section of the aforementioned article and some computer searching I did, I would estimate that at least 20 scholarly publications have emerged from the project.

Joe and Libby, always sweet, gentle, and friendly, collaborated extensively in their teaching as well as research. During the Winter 1985 term, I took Joe and Libby's graduate course on socialization (yes, I still have the syllabus and my notes).

In addition to the EYM project, Joe and Libby also collaborated on earlier national surveys on Americans' social participation, as described in the following book:

Veroff, J., Douvan, E., & Kulka, R.. (1981) The inner American: A self-portrait from 1957 To 1976. New York, NY: Basic Books.

This research has been cited in such prominent books as Bowling Alone (by Robert Putnam) and The Tending Instinct (by Shelley Taylor).

Joe also has a long history in studying various social motives (e.g., achievement, power). Monica Biernat, who later switched to research on stereotyping, published an article in 1989 in the Journal of Personality on achievement motives and values, which resulted from her working with Joe.

Joe seems to be doing well at this time. The last time I saw him was in 2002 at a reception during Pat Gurin's retirement celebration (the subject of my June 14, 2004 entry). One of Joe's EYM collaborators, who also notes that "we just finished collecting data in Year 16 of the couples' marriages," informs us that:

"Joe is fine and wonderful. He continues to be active in research activities on the Early Years of Marriage Project. He continues to be a co-PI on the project."

One of Joe's relatives adds:

"He is doing well and I think he enjoys the ongoing connectivity and work on this project. My sense is that he also enjoys the collaborative writing. That said, he is also doing a lot of other kinds of writing for pleasure (fiction, poetry) and savors the slow pace of life in a Michigan small town."

And through the continuing vitality of the EYM project, the legacy of Joe, Libby, and their collaborators lives on...

2004-06-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

As people may have noticed from reading some of my postings at this website, I frequently reminisce about events in the 1980s through linkages to developments of today involving the same individuals.

In yet another example of this trend, I took note a while back of the fact that singer/songwriter David Byrne was appearing in concert at UM's Power Center for the Performing Arts this week on June 15 (see review of the concert).

Back in the early years of my grad school experience at Michigan (around 1984 and '85), Byrne's band at the time, the Talking Heads, was among the more popular groups among my fellow social psych graduate students (based on frequency of stereo play at student parties). According to Byrne's online bio,the Talking Heads were active from 1976-1988 (see this excellent Talking Heads fan page).

According to the VH1 Rock Stars Encyclopedia, in October of 1983 (about a year before I arrived at UM), the "Talking Heads' Burning Down The House hits US #9, their biggest hit single to date" (p. 984). Other songs by the group that I remember include Take Me To the River (which I learned from the Encyclopedia was a cover of an Al Green tune), Life During Wartime (This Ain't No Party... This Ain't No Disco... This Ain't No Foolin' Around) and Once In A Lifetime.

Byrne and his bandmates in the Talking Heads were all-around artists, having first met at the Rhode Island School of Design. Byrne has worked in film scoring, winning an Oscar (Best Score) for The Last Emperor, and also in ballet and opera.

A solo artist for the last many years, Byrne appeared to show as much eclecticism as ever in his recent Ann Arbor performance with a string ensemble and a Brazilian sound.

2004-06-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Exactly two years ago to this day, a retirement celebration was held for Professor Patricia Gurin on the UM campus. I (along with a large number of other former students) had the pleasure of working with Pat, and I was equally pleased to attend the retirement festivities. I will discuss three areas in this write-up: the retirement celebration itself, Pat's work in recent years in the area of campus diversity, and the research I and a fellow student, Gretchen Lopez, worked on with Pat.

The Retirement Celebration

A couple of springs ago, I received a letter from Pat dated March 7, 2002, inviting former students of hers to come back to Ann Arbor the weekend of June 14-16, 2002 for both a formal UM Psychology Department event to mark her retirement and other informal gatherings (e.g., a dinner and a brunch).

The letter was very moving, referring to the retirement/reunion weekend as an opportunity "for me to appreciate what is the most important legacy of my years at Michigan. That legacy is you!"

Now, it doesn't take much to get me to go back to Ann Arbor, and I jumped at the chance to attend Pat's events.

The first day, Friday, June 14, consisted of a full day's set of addresses and panel presentations on the many facets of Pat's career at UM (teacher, researcher, mentor, administrator).

Hazel Markus, a Michigan Ph.D. and for many years a professor at UM before moving to Stanford, began the festivities. Hazel's splashy PowerPoint presentation basically covered Pat's life history.

Nancy Cantor, a former Michigan provost and chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at the time of Pat's retirement, also gave an eloquent address (see my February 20, 2004 entry for an update on Nancy). Nancy recalled her days as provost, working with Pat when Pat was serving as interim dean of UM's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). Mainly, though, Nancy focused on Pat's research on campus diversity and the exacting standards to which Pat was subjecting her own research, because the research could come into play in the legal challenges to UM's affirmative action policies (which culminated at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, about which more later).

Among the panel presentations, one focused on Pat as a mentor, with former graduate students (carefully selected to represent different eras) conveying their experiences. The representative of my era was Kerth O'Brien, who has been on the faculty at Portland (Oregon, as opposed to Maine) State University since receiving her Ph.D. in 1987.

Kerth talked about coming away from meetings with Pat where they had worked on Kerth's dissertation feeling "intellectually rolfed." For those of you not familiar with rolfing, according to a website on the subject, the technique involves deep-tissue massage that "aims to realign the body by using intense pressure and stroking to stretch shortened and tightened fascia back into shape." (As an aside, this past year I advised a student at Texas Tech, Andrea McCourt, on her dissertation; I told her about the "intellectual rolfing" reference, and she seemed to think it fit my advising style, too!)

After all the talks on Friday, a reception was held at UM's Museum of Art. The reception provided further opportunity to catch up with current UM faculty members and fellow alumni. Earlier in the day, I had learned that by amazing coincidence, another conference was going on simultaneously at UM on the developmental psychology of the transition to adulthood, which happens to be one of my main research areas. Thanks to John Schulenberg, who let me sit in, I was able to take in some of the "transition" conference in between some of Pat's sessions.

At the transition conference, I saw University of Minnesota sociologist Jeylan Mortimer, a Michigan Ph.D. whom I knew to have a connection to Pat (and, as it turned out, Pat's husband Gerry). I invited Jeylan to stop by the reception to see Pat and Gerry, which she did. Meanwhile, before the reception, I had told Pat to expect a "mystery guest" at the reception, which was Jeylan.

Saturday night, Pat and Gerry gathered with her former students at a local restaurant for dinner. One of the attendees was Dottie Walker, the administrative secretary for the social psych program when many of us were in graduate school. I have some electronic pictures from the dinner (taken by Lisa Brown) and other events of Pat's weekend. If anyone wants a copy, you can e-mail me (see my faculty website in the "Links" section in the upper right-hand part of the page).

Pat's Research on Campus Diversity

As most readers of this website would likely be aware, the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policies were challenged in two companion cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and were decided in June, 2003: Gratz v. Bollinger, involving LSA undergraduate admissions, and Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the Law School. (Bollinger is Lee Bollinger, the UM President at time the policies were implemented and now the president of Columbia University.) The Law School's admissions policy was upheld and the undergraduate one overturned; however, UM was able to craft a new undergraduate policy based on the Law School's.

An expert report by Pat, deriving from her research, was part of the materials of the cases. The following are excerpts from the report ("Empirical Results" section):

An important question to examine first is whether structural diversity -- the degree to which students of color are represented in the student body of a college -- shapes classroom diversity and opportunities to interact with diverse peers. It is through these diversity experiences that growth and development occur among college students. To test this hypothesis, I use data from the national CIRP data base...

Structural diversity had significant positive effects on classroom diversity and interactional diversity among all students. Attending a diverse college also resulted in more diverse friends, neighbors, and work associates nine years after college entry. This is strong evidence that structural diversity creates conditions that lead students to experience diversity in ways that would not occur in a more homogeneous student body.

Pat and colleagues have published some of this research in the Harvard Educational Review and the Journal of Social Issues. Further, as I recently learned via an ad for the University of Michigan Press in the Spring 2004 LSA Magazine, Pat has a new book out entitled Defending Diversity, co-authored with Jeffrey Lehman (former UM Law School dean and now president of Cornell University) and Earl Lewis (former dean of UM's Rackham Graduate School and recently named provost of Emory University).

Gretchen's and My Research with Pat

Like the aformentioned research on diversity, the studies that fellow student Gretchen Lopez and I worked on with Pat involved social issues and individuals' experiences in social contexts. In the end, we got a couple of conference papers out of our work. One of them, entitled "Attributional Complexity and Political Thinking," by Lopez, Reifman, and Gurin, was presented at the 1988 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is Gretchen's hometown, and I later lived in Buffalo when I had a position at the Research Institute on Addictions (1991-1997).

I still have the EPA program containing the abstract:

The hypothesis that cognitive complexity is reflected in political thinking was examined using questionnaires administered to 63 undergraduates. The questionnaires measured (a) individual differences in cognitive complexity of causal attributions, and (b) political beliefs about gender, race, and class disparities. As predicted, subjects with complex external attributional styles were more likely to identify societal discrimination, as opposed to personal motivation, as the cause of group disparities. The role of cognitive styles in political socialization is discussed.

2004-06-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Just a brief entry on the current National Basketball Association (NBA) finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Detroit Pistons.

Not only do the two cities parallel my personal road from undergraduate college at UCLA to graduate school at Michigan. It's also the case that during my last two years of graduate school, 1987-88 and 1988-89, the Lakers and Pistons met both years for the NBA championship. The Lakers won the first of these match-ups, and the Pistons the second. In fact, the NBA website has created retrospectives on both the 1987-88 and 1988-89 finals.

Then, as now, the Lakers were led by high-profile "celebrity" players (Magic and Kareem, then, and Shaq and Kobe, now). Likewise, then as now, the Pistons were known for their "blue collar," physical play under the basket (Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, then, Ben Wallace, now). The Pistons of yesteryear also featured Isiah Thomas.

In the years before making the finals, the Pistons had to battle through the Larry Bird-led Boston Celtics. In similar fashion, once the Pistons established themselves as the top team in the NBA's Eastern Conference, they had to fend off the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls, which they did, but only for a while.

I went to a game in March of 1987 at the Pontiac Silverdome (probably best known as the former home of football's Detroit Lions, but also the former home of the Pistons) in which Jordan scored 61 points against Detroit. Frankly, from seats up high in a football stadium, the players on the basketball court looked like 10 tiny insects.

Overall, during my years at Michigan, the baseball Tigers probably had the biggest following of the Detroit sports teams among the people I hung out with. They were consistent contenders and even won a World Series during this time, a topic I plan to address in the fall as the 20-year anniversary of the Tigers' 1984 world championship rolls around. The Pistons and Red Wings (hockey) would get some attention when they were doing well in the play-offs, whereas the Lions were consistently bad and got little attention.

2004-06-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Each individual who goes into academia usually has the opportunity to establish affiliations with multiple universities. First, one must receive the Bachelor's degree, then a Ph.D. (sometimes with a Master's along the way, with the Master's and Ph.D. usually from the same university, but not always). Many new Ph.D.'s then take on a post-doctoral fellowship to gain additional training and research publications. Next, after the Ph.D. or post doc, often comes a faculty position at a university (although many Ph.D.'s also end up at research institutes, outside of a university system). Finally, over the course of a career, one may teach at multiple universities.

I received my Bachelor's degree in psychology at UCLA in 1984, then went on to Michigan for my Master's (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in social psychology.

Either toward the end of my time at UCLA or early in my Michigan days, it became clear that a large number of social psychologists had affiliations with both Michigan and UCLA in some combination. The late Hal Gerard, for one, was one of my advisors at UCLA and had received his Ph.D. at Michigan. The Michigan-UCLA connection is the theme of today's entry. [In a June 11 e-mail, Wayne Osgood has now coined the term "Bru-verines," a combination of UCLA Bruins and Michigan Wolverines.]

In preparing this entry, I gleaned some very useful information from Bert Raven, via an exchange of e-mails. Bert was one of the first social psychologists to establish ties to Michigan and UCLA. Bert received his Ph.D. in 1953 from Michigan. According to Bert's faculty webpage, "He has been a member of the faculty of the Psychology Department at UCLA since 1956, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, recalled and still active in research and instruction."

After I publicized my "Michigan 80s" website on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology e-mail discussion list, I heard from a number of UM alums, including Bert. After I mentioned my idea of one day doing an entry on the Michigan-UCLA connection, Bert e-mailed the following comments:

"It would be interesting to see your article on the Michigan/UCLA connection, which began first with migration of UM people to UCLA, and later with more movement in the opposite direction. To my knowledge, the first UM PhD to come to UCLA was Zan Sperber. I came shortly thereafter."

Below, I have compiled a list of everyone I can think of in social psychology (or related fields) who has passed through both Michigan and UCLA (please notify me with any additions). I do not know if Michigan-UCLA is the most common two-school combination among people in social psychology, but it would certainly have to be up there.

In thinking about why such a pervasive Michigan-UCLA connection would exist, the first reason that comes to my mind is that both social psychology programs are very large. UCLA currently has roughly 15 faculty in social psychology. Michigan's social psych faculty is probably about the same size, although on the current directory, fewer than 15 faculty are pictured, yet many more than 15 are listed in the roster (which includes people in related fields).

Having a large faculty would also be correlated with large enrollments at both the graduate and undergraduate level. This creates opportunities for an undergraduate at one of the schools to go to graduate school at the other, or a Ph.D. recipient at one to get a post doc or faculty position at the other.

In fact, Michigan and UCLA probably are among the nation's most active universities in providing post-doctoral training. UCLA's health psychology post-doctoral program alone has hosted at least two people with earlier degrees from Michigan. Various post-doctoral programs at UM's Institute for Social Research and in other units have hosted a number of young scholars over the years.

Other possible reasons for the connection? Other than the weather in winter, I think Michigan and UCLA have a lot of the same feel, both being cosmopolitan, large, state universities, with prominent athletic programs, and lots of other cultural activities going on. And, oh yes, both schools' colors are similar, maize and blue for Michigan, and blue and gold for UCLA!

The list of Michigan-UCLA scholars [including June 10 and 11 updates] follows (with web links where available):

UCLA undergraduate-UM graduate student

Bonnie Barber (developmental psych)
Paula Pietromonaco
Alan Reifman
Elissa Wurf

UCLA undergraduate-UM post doc/research scientist

Kathy Carnelley
Pete Ditto
Wayne Osgood

UCLA undergraduate-UM faculty member

Rich Gonzalez

UM undergraduate-UCLA graduate student

Pam Feldman

UM undergraduate-UCLA post doc/research scientist

Jennifer Lerner

UCLA graduate student-UM post doc/research scientist

Grant Marshall (clinical/personality/health)

UCLA graduate student-UM faculty member

Jacquelynne Eccles (developmental psych)
Vincent Hutchings (political science)
Donald Kinder (social psych Ph.D., political science faculty)
Nicholas Valentino (political science and communication studies)
Monique Ward (developmental psych)

UM graduate student-UCLA post doc/research scientist

Darrin Lehman
Roberta Mancuso
Lynne Sutherland

UM graduate student-UCLA faculty member

Elizabeth Bjork (cognitive psych)
Lawrence Bobo (sociology, now at Harvard)
Karin Elliott Brown (social work, now at Cal State L.A.)
Patricia Cheng (cognitive psych)
Andrew Fuligni (developmental psych)
Hal Gerard (deceased)
Oscar Grusky (sociology)
Julia Henly (social work/public policy, now at University of Chicago)
Tim Ketelaar (now at New Mexico State)
John Liebeskind (physiological psych, deceased)
Jerome Rabow (sociology)
Bert Raven
Bernie Weiner

Faculty at both UCLA and UM

Robert Bjork (cognitive psych)
Keith Holyoak (cognitive psych)
Neil Malamuth (communication studies)

Some readers might be thinking that subfields of psychology outside of social psych may be worth mentioning, as individuals in the other subfields would at least be colleagues in the same departments with social psychologists. The listing of sociologists and political scientists may strike some as a little far afield. However, as Bert Raven noted in a follow-up e-mail to my initial posting of the Michigan-UCLA list:

"As you may know, the [Michigan] social psychology PhD program accepted both psychology and sociology undergraduates as graduate students, then tried to make us into hybrids who could fit equally in departments of sociology and psychology."

Also, David Sears e-mailed me, noting the "very active political psychology group at UCLA, [that] has contributed to some connections with Michigan."

Thanks to the following individuals for providing additional names beyond the ones I initially listed: Kathy Carnelley, Matthew Hogben, Keith Holyoak, Bert Raven, and David Sears.

2004-05-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I must report the passing of Ziva Kunda, a 1985 Michigan Ph.D. recipient and for the last many years a professor at the University of Waterloo. I just learned of this sad development by reading the Society for Personality and Social Psychology newsletter Dialogue.

Ziva and I overlapped only one year in the social psychology program, so I did not know her as well as did others. I remember attending her wedding, probably some time in the summer of '85. I think it is a sign of her generosity and inclusiveness that she would have wanted to share the experience of her wedding with a wide variety of people in the Michigan program, even those with whom she might not have had as much contact. In the years following graduation, we would chat briefly every few years at conferences. Even during that one year of overlap during grad school, it was clear to me that Ziva was headed for greatness in the field, which her subsequent achievements strongly confirmed.

Her husband, Paul Thagard, has created a web memorial to Ziva. Beneath the picture of Ziva are several links, including remarks from her family and colleagues.

2004-05-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

As a thriving college town, Ann Arbor would probably have enough variety and frequency of live musical performances to satisfy virtually anyone's tastes. From the mainly folk music at The Ark, to the classically oriented University Musical Society, to the rock/R&B available in various clubs around town, to even watching UM marching band practice at Elbel Field (named after Louis Elbel who, as an undergraduate, wrote "The Victors" fight song), the breadth of local music seems impressive.

I would like to focus the present entry on a style of music that, outside of large metropolitan areas, is relatively difficult to access: jazz. It is hard for me to imagine many other towns of 100,000 population that would have as rich a portfolio of jazz offerings as Ann Arbor (although I'm sure it helps Ann Arbor to be near the large metropolitan Detroit area).

In my five years at UM (1984-1989), I was able to see a number of prominent jazz artists live. My own tastes in jazz are somewhere in between the pop-oriented style of "smooth jazz" and traditional "straight ahead" jazz. I like improvisation, but also melody. I don't like what I consider the overly watered-down music of, for example, a Kenny G (who some critic accused of engaging in "safe sax").

With the above characterization in mind, the artists I saw in Ann Arbor (listed below) should come as no surprise. As can be seen from the web links associated with these artists, most are still going strong today.

One group I saw twice in Ann Arbor is Spyro Gyra, once in Hill Auditorium and once in the Power Center. The group, named after the algae, spirogira, sometimes sounds a little too pop-oriented to me, but they've never crossed the line, in my judgment.

Two other concerts I saw in Hill featured popular jazz guitarists. One was with the Pat Metheny Group, and another was with Earl Klugh (I actually saw Klugh during a 1982 visit to Ann Arbor before I actually was going to school at UM; Klugh was also scheduled to play on campus in 1986, but cancelled).

Metheny, through his use of guitar synthesizers and accompaniment by band mates from around the world (who are each usually talented on multiple instruments), manages to create a sound that is both unique (as in "that's the Pat Metheny sound") and different (even different passages within the same song can sound very disparate). I hope that makes sense.

A couple of years after seeing the Pat Metheny Group, I saw a group headlined by Lyle Mays, the keyboardist of the Metheny group and a frequent co-composer with Pat, play at (as I recall) the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater. As best as I can recall, Mays was accompanied on drums by Peter Erskine, and on bass by Marc Johnson.

Klugh, on the other hand, plays only the acoutic guitar, with his trademark rich melodies. Though probably most identified with jazz, Klugh would also fit in well, for example, on a stage with country music guitarist Chet Atkins.

I can recall going to three other jazz concerts at the Power Center. One was with saxophonist Michael Brecker, then starting out on a solo career after years with groups such as Steps Ahead. One of the members of Brecker's band that night was fiery guitarist Mike Stern.

I also was able to see two legendary jazz trumpeters, now deceased, at the Power Center, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie (in separate concerts). Gillespie, famous for his bent trumpet and puffed cheeks, was accompanied by a big band. Davis, well into his pop-funk phase, lived up to his reputation for aloofness. As one example, he never introduced the members of his band.

A few years after that concert, Miles Davis walked into a Santa Monica, California restaurant with a group of men, as my family and I were dining there during one of my school breaks. When I got back to Ann Arbor, I told Claude Steele, a jazz buff and former UM professor (now at Stanford), about seeing Davis. I think Claude was impressed.

As implied above, guitar is probably my favorite jazz instrument. At The Ark, I saw a young, up-and-coming electric guitarist named Kevin Eubanks (later to become the Tonight Show bandleader). In his early career, Eubanks went back and forth between pop-oriented tunes (including some cover versions) and some serious, fairly complex jazz standards. The night I saw him, I recall, he stuck to the latter.

I also saw guitarist John Scofield, with his jazz/bluesy sound, at a club called the Blind Pig (if you get a pop-up about installing special language characteristics to be able to read the Blind Pig's website, you can just hit "Cancel" and still see the page). Earlier in his career, Scofield had been a member of the Miles Davis band. (On the subject of Miles Davis, I cannot resist repeating a line from comedian Steven Wright, who wondered if in Europe, the famous jazz trumpeter was known as "Kilometers Davis.")

Ann Arbor has a jazz club called the Bird of Paradise. The only performance I recall seeing there was that of Emily Remler, a young guitarist who died only a few years later. Many jazz guitarists' styles have some similarity to the great Wes Montgomery, including perhaps to some degree Metheny and Eubanks. Remler probably came the closest, however, with one of her albums entitled "East to Wes."

I also enjoyed seeing the Brazilian trio Azymuth at the Michigan Theater. As with the aforementioned Lyle Mays performance, a piano-bass-drums trio (a traditional rhythm section) is a different sound from a group led by a guitar or saxophone. I find, however, that the interplay between the musicians is heightened in such an arrangement.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that in no way was the jazz talent limited to touring, out-of-town performers. Jon Krosnick, who overlapped with me for one year in the graduate program (1984-85) and who has gone on to become one of the most prominent scholars of political attitudes (within the hybrid field of political psychology) at Ohio State University, is an accomplished jazz drummer. Jon was part of a group called the Lunar Glee Club during his Ann Arbor days and in more recent years, has been a member of the group Charged Particles (Jon is the one on the left in the picture that will come up).

I don't know if that many people were as "jazzed" about this aspect of the Ann Arbor music scene as I certainly was, but I consider this to be one of the more important cultural components of my UM days.

2004-05-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, a case emanating out of Topeka, Kansas. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the case, the social psychology program at the University of Kansas will be hosting a conference May 13-14 entitled Fifty Years after Brown v. Board of Education: Social Psychological Research Applied to the Problems of Racism and Discrimination. The Brown v. Board conference will then spill over into the annual Social Psychologists Around the Midwest (SPAM) meeting May 14-16, also at KU.

As one might infer from the inclusion of this item on this board, the KU events will have a strong Michigan flavor. Among the KU social psychology faculty members hosting the events are Monica Biernat and Chris Crandall, two 1980s Michigan Ph.D. recipients. Further, among the speakers at the Brown event are current Michigan psychology professors Patricia Gurin (Emerita) and Rob Sellers, both of whom also received their Ph.D.'s at UM (clickable web links for Monica, Chris, Rob, and a large number of other 80s-era Ph.D. alumni are available in my January and February 2004 postings; see right-hand side of page midway down for links to the archives).

Rob returned to UM several years ago in the personality psych program after an initial stint on the faculty at the University of Virginia (the reason I mention this is that my younger brother Steve, a sociology major, took a course from Rob at UVa).

I plan to do a more extensive entry in the coming weeks marking the two-year anniversary of Pat's retirement celebration in Ann Arbor.

2004-04-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Every April during the 25 years from 1973-1997, something everyone in the UM social psychology community could look forward to was the annual Katz-Newcomb Lecture. Named in honor of the eminent social psychologists Daniel Katz (1903-1998) and Theodore Newcomb (1903-1984), the lecture always brought a distinguished figure to Ann Arbor. Social psychology is of course a subdiscipline in both psychology and sociology, and the organizing of the event and discipline of the speakers appear to have been divided relatively equally over the years between psychology and sociology.

(Just as a side note, this website has concentrated on social psychology in UM's psychology department, as that's where I received my training. To get a feel for sociological social psychology, interested readers may wish to look at the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, which is published by the American Sociological Association, or at a 1977 article by UM sociologist James House entitled "The three faces of social psychology," Sociometry, volume 40, pp. 161-177.)

UM's Bentley Historical Library has received the papers of both Katz and Newcomb, and in conjunction, has prepared elaborate biographical sketches of each (Katz, Newcomb). In the interest of space, I'll leave it to people to read these biographies and see all that Katz and Newcomb accomplished. As you read along, you'll be reminded of social psychological classics, such as Katz and Braley's landmark research on stereotypes and Newcomb's study of political attitudes at Bennington College. (In the biographies, you'll notice some fairly large gaps of white space between paragraphs; the documents do not necessarily end at such gaps, so be sure to read to the very bottom!) Another reading I would recommend is the following book, with a posthumous authorship by Newcomb:

Alwin, D.F., Cohen, R.L., and Newcomb, T.M. (1991). Political attitudes over the life span: The Bennington women after fifty years. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

During my years in the graduate program (1984-85 to 1988-89) at least, the Katz-Newcomb was always more than just a lecture. The main talk would take place on a Friday late afternoon. Afterwards, there would usually be a party or a large group of people would go out to dinner. No questions would be taken after the speaker's lecture. Rather, one would have to attend a Saturday morning brunch/seminar to be able to participate in discussion with the speaker. Thus, the Katz-Newcomb filled up a major part of a weekend.

To varying degrees, alumni of the two (psychology and sociology) programs would come back to attend the Katz-Newcomb. The only one I came back for was the 1997 edition, the 25th in the series. By that time (as best I could tell), I was the only out-of-town alumnus in attendance. (I try to get back to Ann Arbor once every year or two, but usually in the summer.)

As already alluded to, after existing as an annual lecture for 25 years (1973-1997), the Katz-Newcomb Lecture now is more of an ad hoc event. Here is one web link to a more recent instantiation of the Katz-Newcomb.

To cap off this retrospective on the Katz-Newcomb, I have attempted to include as comprehensive a list of speakers as possible for the years 1973-1997 (below). Based on my own memories, information I've been able to locate on the web, and the helpful recollections of participants in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) electronic discussion group (listed by name at the bottom), I've constructed a partial list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers. Clearly, some additional work is needed to finish the list, but I wanted to get this entry up in a timely fashion. I will continue to refine the list. Any information that would help fill in the gaps or correct any errors would be greatly appreciated.

[Update, August 5, 2004: While going through some piles in my office, I just found a complete list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers -- and titles -- covering 1973-1992. I have updated the list below, accordingly. The document I found is probably an enclosure with the invitation I -- and probably all program alumni -- received for the 1993 talk.]

1973 Ivan Steiner, Whatever happened to the group in social psychology?
1974 Henri Tajfel, When do we want to be different? And from social mobility to social movements.
1975 Harold Kelley, Action and perception: An attribution analysis of social interaction.
1976 Herbert Simon, Why cognitive psychology is social psychology, and vice versa.
1977 Erving Goffman, The lecture.
1978 Dorwin Cartwright, Contemporary social psychology in historical perspective.
1979 Amos Tversky, On the psychology of possible worlds, and Daniel Kahneman, Decision-making: Rationality and psychophysics.
1980 Roger Brown, Natural categories and basic objects in the domain of persons.
1981 Phil Converse, Generalization and the social psychology of "other worlds."
1982 Shelley Taylor, The cognitive management of life-threatening illness: Dynamics of psychological homeostasis.
1983 Jerome Bruner, The pragmatics of language and the language of pragmatics.
1984 Judith Rodin, The era of the women's revolution: Why have weight obsessions escalated?
1985 Ralph Turner, Self in society: Who am I really?
1986 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Dilemmas and paradoxes in organizational change.
1987 David Sears, Group interest: A symbolic politics perspective.
1988 Edward E. (Ned) Jones, Attributional anomalies during social interaction: Some consequences of perceiving while acting.
1989 William Gamson, Media discourse and political thinking.
1990 Walter Mischel, Searching for personality: Toward a conditional analysis of dispositions.
1991 Kristin Luker, The social construction of human crises: The case of teenage pregnancy.
1992 Bob Zajonc, Cognition, communication and consciousness.
1993 Karl E. Weick
1994 Jane Allyn Piliavin
1995 Susan T. Fiske
1996 Lawrence Bobo
1997 Herb Kelman

I would like to thank the following people for offering their recollections: Chris Crandall, Phoebe Ellsworth, Donelson Forsyth, Markus Kemmelmeier, Arthur Miller, Chuck Miller, Kerth O'Brien, Howard Schuman, and Elissa Wurf.

2004-04-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

Just a relatively brief entry this week. One of my aims in creating this website is to inspire alumni of other social psychology graduate programs to create retrospective websites on their programs. It seemed likely that there would already be other historical sites on the web devoted to various psychology departments and/or programs therein. Up to this point, however, I had not really done much searching in this area.

As often seems to happen, it's when searching for something else totally unrelated that one finds an item of interest. That's how I recently came across the Historical Archives of the Department of Psychology at Florida State University.

These archives include a large number of different write-ups, focusing on the different eras, programs, department chairs, other prominent people, and even the buildings that have housed the department. Among the essays is a history of social psychology at FSU, written by Jack Brigham.

To follow up on this discovery, I went to the Google search engine and typed the following in the seach field: "history" "psychology department". Over 77,000 hits came up. In looking at the first few screens of hits, however, it seemed that in most cases, when a given department provided a history, it consisted of a single, relatively brief page on the entire department, unlike Florida State's approach of providing essays on multiple facets of its department.

I'm sure there are other psychology departments and/or social psychology programs out there that have extensive historical websites. If anyone knows of any, please e-mail the links to me (via my faculty webpage, which is among the links in the upper right portion of this page).

2004-04-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

This semester, I am teaching a graduate course on structural equation modeling (SEM), an advanced statistical application. This is my third time teaching the course at Texas Tech University and my fourth time overall, as I taught it in 1996 at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York), while I was a researcher at the Research Institute on Addictions.

In developing my lectures, I draw heavily from notes I took myself while taking SEM at Michigan in the Winter 1988 semester from Frank Andrews and Laura Klem. I also took multivariate analysis from Frank and Laura in Fall 1985. I save a lot of stuff, so I have syllabi, notebooks, an extensive set of handouts, and my graded assignments from these two courses.

The classes met twice a week. The way Frank and Laura co-taught their courses was that Frank would lecture one day on the substantive aspects of the relevant statistical technique, and then Laura would teach us how to implement the technique on the computer.

Frank was the clearest, most enthusiastic lecturer one would ever want to hear. In addition to the lecture itself, Frank would hand out extensive bibliographies on the topic, as well as sheets with examples of the technique that had been worked out.

I can't help but think that teaching computer applications of statistical programs must have been so much harder and more time-consuming in the 80s than is currently the case. Back then, data sets were stored on magnetic tape and implementing the commands just to access the data you wanted to work on was a not insubstantial task. Further, we would have to hand type our statistical commands, which usually were quite cryptic. In more recent years, students, faculty members, and other data analysts have had access to much more user-friendly programs that give you an actual spread sheet of your data right on your screen and allow you to select commands from menus. Also, data sets can be transmitted via the Internet and stored/carried on disk.

Despite the seemingly more cumbersome nature of computer data analyses 15-20 years ago compared to now, Laura managed to pull it off. Further, she would use her encyclopedic knowledge of the statistical/data analytic literature in grading our papers. On one paper I just pulled out, for example, she directed me to "See Kenny page 143..."

Frank Andrews died in 1992. To honor Frank, the UM's Survey Research Center created a fellowship to help people attend the Summer Institute. A brief summary of Frank's career is available at this link.

Laura Klem is still around at UM, as seen in this webpage, as a Senior Research Associate with the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research. In fact, she will be teaching a short course on applied structural equation modeling this upcoming May 17 - 20, 2004.

The aforementioned course announcement website notes that, "Enrollees will receive substantial handouts." I couldn't imagine it any other way!

2004-04-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Michigan's men's basketball team last night won the championship of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), essentially a consolation bracket for teams that did not get into the more prestigious National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament.

In doing so, the Wolverines repeated their NIT championship of 20 years earlier. Some of you may be wondering what is the significance of this to Michigan social psychology. The answer is that on the very evening the Wolverines defeated Notre Dame to win the 1984 NIT title, I had just arrived in Ann Arbor to visit UM as a potential graduate school. I thus watched the game on television from an Ann Arbor hotel room.

Accompanied by my mother and brother, I used my spring break from UCLA to visit four midwestern (Big Ten) universities to help me decide where to pursue graduate studies in social psychology. Although I grew up in L.A., my family has strong midwestern roots, as my mother's side of the family is from Chicago (I was actually born in the Windy City, but didn't live there very long). All the schools I visited had strong social psychology programs, and these just seemed like they'd be interesting places to go to school.

The first school I visited was Northwestern. One of the faculty there at the time, whom I met, was Geoff Fong, a recent Michigan social psych Ph. D. (a link to Geoff's current facullty webpage at the University of Waterloo is included in one of my earlier postings).

Next, we went to Indiana University in Bloomington. One of the faculty members I met there was Jim Sherman, who is still at IU. Jim is also a Michigan Ph.D. (1967). I was beginning to see a trend. I figured that if Michigan Ph.D. recipients were getting faculty positions at these nice universities, UM might be the best place to go. (I had also visited one school on the West Coast, UC Santa Barbara, and one of the professors I met there, Chuck McClintock, was also a Michigan Ph.D.)

Michigan was third on the itinerary, and we ended the trip at Ohio State. I liked all four schools I visited on the midwestern tour, but then and now Michigan seemed to be the best choice for me.

I still run into Geoff Fong and Jim Sherman at various conferences. Jim and I have really renewed our acquaintance in recent years, as he co-organized an informal sports statistics/decision-making conference in 2003 in Scottsdale, Arizona, timed to coincide with spring-training, naturally. I was fortunate enough to be invited, based presumably on the attention my hot hand website (which involves statistical analyses of sports streaks) had gotten.

For whatever reason, even growing up on the West Coast, I've had a fascination with the Big Ten for as long as I can remember (perhaps because the Pacific Ten and Big Ten winners always met in the Rose Bowl). Those of you who want to get more of a flavor for the towns, campuses, and traditions of the Big Ten (pre-Penn State) would probably enjoy the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood (available pretty cheaply over the Internet).

2004-03-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

The March 2004 Ann Arbor Observer magazine had an interesting story on what had become of the town's music/record/CD stores over the last four decades. I used to pick up the Observer regularly when I lived in Ann Arbor and then when I moved away in 1989, I signed up for a subscription that I've maintained to this day.

According to the article, Ann Arbor was at one time "the Midwest's mecca for recorded music buyers."

Apparently referring to various points in the span of time from the 1960s through the 1990s, the article notes:

"On Liberty Street there were the Liberty Music Shop, Borders Books and Music, Schoolkids' Records, and SKR Classical. Around the corner on State Street were Discount Records and Harmony House. Across campus on South University, there was Tower Records. At their peak, those seven stores alone took up almost 40,000 square feet of prime retail space and took in approximately $15 million annually."

Now, however:

"For the past couple of years, Borders has been the only store of the original seven still standing, and its music department is a joke among collectors..."

Schoolkids has survived also, but in a different location (below Bivouac on State Street) and with a new name, Schoolkids in Exile.

The article also notes that two venerable used-record stores, Wazoo and PJ's, have remained. (I remember meeting PJ.) There's also another used-record store called Encore Recordings.

Why the huge decline? As the article notes, the combination of online purchasing of CDs and downloading of music cut into the stores' business.

I bought a decent amount of music (cassette tapes) during my UM years, but was never a huge purchaser. My reaction to the changing nature of the recorded music industry would be as follows. Ann Arbor is a great walking town and being able to engage in window-shopping or actual shopping is part of the atmosphere. To the extent that music stores seem to be disappearing from this scene, then a portion of the town's history and social fabric will have been lost.

2004-03-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in Baltimore. I added another Pizzeria Uno to my national dining list (see earlier posting on my favorite Ann Arbor restaurants) and also took the tour at the Baltimore Orioles' baseball park at Camden Yards.

As I've alluded to previously in connection with the overlap between the social and personality psychology programs at Michigan and the joint psychology-social work programs, boundaries between intellectually kindred programs tend to be very permeable. This is also the case, to some extent, for the social and developmental psychology programs, with extensive research in social development.

I personally was a late comer to the social-developmental intersection, in fact not until my postdoctoral work at the Research Institute on Addictions in Buffalo from 1991-1997. It was there that I applied my social psychology training to the study of adolescent and young-adult drinking and really began incorporating literatures in adolescent development and family studies into my research. The first SRA conference I attended was in 1996, and this research track propelled me to a faculty position in Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University.

Back when I was in grad school at Michigan from 1984-1989, I related to the developmental psychology students pretty much exclusively on a social/collegial basis. Now when we see each other, we talk about common research interests.

Jacque (pronounced Jackie) Eccles, who has spent most of her 30-year faculty career at Michigan, continues to lead an extensive program of studies involving numerous graduate students and postdocs under the rubric of the Gender & Achievement Research Program (GARP). Not only that, but Jacque served this past biennium as the President of SRA.

I ran into several current and former GARP researchers at the conference. The first person I always look for at SRA is Bonnie Barber, with whom I was friends not only during graduate school at Michigan, but also as undergraduates at UCLA (the Michigan-UCLA connection, of which Jacque Eccles is also a part, is a topic on which I plan to do a future entry). Bonnie has been at the University of Arizona for the last several years, and also remains an "affiliate" to GARP according to the aformentioned GARP web link. I also saw Jan Jacobs, now a Vice-Provost at Penn State and also a GARP affiliate.

Other GARP researchers and affiliates I saw (including some I met for the first time) included Oksana Malanchuk (who overlapped with me in the social psych grad program), Katie Jodl, Steve Peck, Robert Roeser, Mina Vida (web links for these individuals are available at the GARP site), and Pamela Frome.

I also had a chance to visit briefly with Christy Miller Buchanan, who was in the same course with me on socialization at UM (taught by Joe Veroff and Libby Douvan). Among Christy's numerous publications, she authored the following major one with Jacque Eccles that I use as lecture material in my Problems of Adolescence course at Texas Tech:

Buchanan, C. M., Eccles, J. S., & Becker, J. B. (1992). Are adolescents the victims of raging hormones?: Evidence for activational effects of hormones on moods and behavior at adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 62-107.

Another contemporary of mine from grad school days I saw was Liz Mazur. We entered the same year, so presumably took first-year proseminar and stats together.

Also, I saw two leading researchers who study longitudinal change in adolescent problem behaviors, Wayne Osgood (another UCLA-Michigan person), who was a Research Scientist in the UM's Institute for Social Research on Marty Gold's delinquency project in the 1980s and is now at Penn State, and John Schulenberg, who since 1991 has been with UM's Monitoring the Future study of high school drug use.

Lastly, to close out this maize-and-blue weekend, I met an interesting person sitting in the very next seat to me on the flight from Baltimore to Dallas-Ft. Worth (a leading connecting hub). He looked to be reading some academic-type papers, so I asked him if he indeed was an academic. The gentleman, named James Adams, turned out to be a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Michigan Ph.D. at that! He noted that he had taken a group behavior class from social psychologist Gene Burnstein while at UM.

2004-03-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

Today's Thursday, so I thought I'd tell everyone about the "Michigan Thursday" tradition I started shortly after arriving as a faculty member at Texas Tech University in the fall of 1997.

As early as my Texas Tech job interview in February of '97, I was told by some of the faculty members in the department (Human Development and Family Studies) that faculty and staff members throughout the campus were requested to wear the school colors of red and black on Fridays. As someone who has always had a lot of school spirit, I have adhered to the "Red and Black Fridays" dress code at probably a 99.99% rate during my seven years (thus far) at Texas Tech. Not only that; I sometimes nag new faculty members about wearing red and black on Fridays (in a friendly kind of way).

I don't know why, but early on it somehow occurred to me that I could start my own tradition of wearing maize and blue University of Michigan clothing on Thursdays, hence "Michigan Thursday." Probably the most fun aspect of Michigan Thursday is the reaction of students in my undergraduate classes, whom I inform about my tradition right at the beginning of the semester. The students seem to get a kick out of it, and I've even had a couple of students join in with me in wearing Michigan items (e.g., shirt, cap) on Thursdays. One of my departmental faculty colleagues told me once that her father had attended UM Law School. While up in Ann Arbor a few years ago, I bought my colleague a "Michigan Law" T-shirt for her birthday, and she's worn it a few times on Thursdays.

Upon learning of the tradition, people ask me if I have a "UCLA Wednesday" in honor of my undergraduate alma mater. I don't (it would mean having a majority -- three-fifths -- of my weekday clothing decisions governed by rules and I don't want to cross that line). I do, however, frequently wear UCLA clothing on an ad hoc basis.

Talking about school spirit, an article about a teaching activity I organized with colleagues from 20 colleges and universities around the nation on measuring school spirit has just come out. With a primary focus on how to define and measure a conceptual variable (in this case, school spirit), we had students in our research and statistics classes go around our respective campuses counting the number of students wearing school garb, displaying school decals on their cars, etc. The reference is shown below or you can contact me to receive a faxed copy (see right-hand side of page for web link to me, which contains an e-mail link).

School Spirit Study Group (A. Reifman, organizer). (2004). Measuring school spirit: A national teaching exercise. Teaching of Psychology, 31, 18-21.