SPSP President's Report
Diane Mackie
University of California, Santa Barbara
For the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2017 has been all about strategic planning. After the society's first 40 years, the personality and social psychologists whom SPSP represents took a serious look at who we are, who we want to be, and how we can best support our vision for the future. As president of SPSP for 2017, I was eager to help drive this process forward.
The strategic planning initiative was launched by then-president of SPSP, Wendy Wood, in 2016. With an organizational structure that had evolved by need, and financial footing that reflected the concerns of involved members, SPSP needed to reinvent itself to advance personality and social psychology in a very different scientific, academic, political, fiscal, and international context than the one in which the organization was originally founded.
We took an "inside out, outside in" approach to the exercise. On the "inside out" (Board of Directors-to-members) front, Wendy appointed a strategic task force, lead by Rich Petty. Its membership, like the membership of SPSP, was broad: Eli Finkel, Susan Fiske, David Funder, Wendy Gardner, India Johnson, David Neal, Victoria Plant, Wendy Wood, and Michael Zarate. SPSP Executive Director Chad Rummel secured the donated services of consultants from APA Division 13 (Society of Consulting Psychology) to keep us on track (you can imagine!), and in a series of three day-long face-to-face meetings and endless electronic follow-ups, the task force drafted a consensually supported mission, values, and goals and objectives statement (the MVGO statement) for the society.
Then came the "outside in," members-to-Board of Directors, part. The draft MVGO statement was sent out to you, the SPSP membership, for comment. No surprise – we got comments. You chose to be part of the process by making more than 600 comments, telling us what you cared about (and didn't), where you thought our efforts should be refocused, and what priorities you had for the Society's future. In the light of all that feedback, the taskforce revised the statement to represent what most of the many and varied SPSP stakeholders agreed about. They then turned to an even more challenging task: assessing SPSP's current organizational structure, membership, programs, activities, and endowments for alignment with what our members said you cared about. The task force made a series of recommendations, all of which were adopted at the August 2017 SPSP Board of Directors meeting.
SPSP now has an official mission statement that defines what our purpose is and who we are: The mission of SPSP is to advance the science, teaching, and application of personality and social psychology. SPSP members aspire to understand individuals in their social contexts for the benefit of all people.
Our goals and objectives make the mission more concrete. Our highest priority is to promote the innovation, rigor, transparency, and integrity of scientific research in personality (individuals and their differences) and social psychology (in their social contexts) and to provide forums (like conventions, meetings, and publications) where that can occur, as well as support for (in the form of grants) and recognition of (awards) the production, teaching, and application of such research.
From the prominence of teaching and application in our mission statement to the goal of promoting varied career opportunities, much more in evidence is our awareness of, support for, and reliance on, personality and social psychology being carried out in contexts other than an academic research lab. We also recognize beyond our commitment to the training and mentoring of next generation of personality and social psychologists, the need for continuing professional education and development of all our members as new techniques, practices, and opportunities open up in the discipline.
SPSP continues to base its pursuit of innovation and rigor in personality and social psychology on the diversity of people and ideas in the discipline. Our MVGO statement highlights not only our commitment to increasing diversity of people and ideas but also our firm belief that constructive scientific discourse requires an inclusive and respectful climate. It also reflects our desire – and need – to be an internationally broader organization, welcoming and supporting personality and social psychologists working in countries and cultures around the globe.
We also take seriously our responsibility to increase the public and scientific impact of the field to benefit individuals and societies. As your comments showed, our members are most excited about our potential to increase the scientific literacy of the public, as well as to provide data-driven assessments of policies, practices, and purported interventions at the individual, group, and societal level.
To read SPSP's complete Mission, Values, Goals, and Objectives, click here.
We've also put our membership structure as well as our money where our mouth is. The structure of the Board of Directors has been officially changed so that the six Members-at-Large (MAL) elected to the Board (two every year) represent our values. Two of the positions will oversee science portfolios, including programs (like the annual SPSP convention) and publications. The four remaining MALs will focus on activities and concerns with education (including programming for undergraduate, graduate student, and full members), application (such as personality and social psychology conducted in public sector and private industry environments), advocacy and outreach (reaching and educating the policy makers and the public), and community and diversity (to promote diverse people and perspectives in the pursuit of research, teaching, and application excellence). Committees and task forces will be re-aligned under these overarching value-driven positions, and current and future requests for funding, campaigns for fund raising and endowment, and the development of new programming and activities, will all be considered in terms of how they advance SPSP's core mission and values.
Already we are seeing the value of these changes. One of the goals reflected in our new organizational structure is advocacy and outreach. The violence in Charlottesville reminded us once again of the relevance of SPSP members' research findings to this and other similar events and issues, and of our responsibility to disseminate them in ways that are accessible to both individuals and policy makers. Our new Member-at-Large for outreach and advocacy immediately worked with staff to propose regional communications training for writing Op-Ed articles. Funds have already been allocated to a new initiative to provide training in this area, and response has been overwhelming.
SPSP's VMGO statement is both internal and external. It was developed by you and other members like you, and reflects who we think we are. But it is also our public face, a public commitment to try to reach the goals we have set ourselves. Above all it makes clear our belief in the benefit of personality and social psychology, rigorously pursed in a multitude of countries, cultures, and contexts, to humankind. We've started making some of the changes required to fulfill our mission and reach our goals, but more change is needed. Please continue to make sure your voices are heard and even more importantly, please offer your services to the society as we go forward. And in ten years or so, we need to do it all again, to make sure we as an organization continue to nurture vital, creative, rigorous, applicable, and relevant personality and social psychology and the personality and social psychologists who produce, teach, and apply it.
Looking forward to seeing you all in Atlanta in March 2018!