Book contents
- Pillars of Social Psychology
- Pillars of Social Psychology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introducing the Pillars of Social Psychology
- 2 Seven Decades in Social Psychology
- 3 A Career Emerging from an Unnecessary Analysis
- 4 Once a Social Psychologist, Always a Social Psychologist
- 5 Abe and Leon and Me
- 6 My Contributions to Social Psychology Over Many Decades
- 7 Influences and Dissonances
- 8 From Ideomotor Theory to the IAT in Just 35 Years
- 9 Curiosity
- 10 The Emergence and Evolution of Social Realities
- 11 The Good Old Days
- 12 “What Ever Happened to that Blond Girl?”
- 13 A Quest for Social Psychology That Spans the Psychological and the Social
- 14 Reasoning
- 15 Chance and Choice
- 16 Looking Back on a Charmed Career
- 17 My Train Ride to Social Psychology
- 18 The Making and Remaking of a Cross-Cultural Psychologist in Six Acts
- 19 A Professional Past of Arranging to Be Compelled
- 20 A Social Psychological and Personality Approach to Human Motivation
- 21 Wandering into Psychology and Law
- 22 My Meandering Journey into Social Psychology
- 23 A Career in Ten Episodes
- 24 Getting Lucky
- 25 Mindsets
- 26 Social Psychology and Me
- 27 My Life as a Social Psychologist
- 28 You Can’t Be a Self by Yourself
- 29 Getting to Here from There
- 30 A Relational Life
- 31 Planning Is Overrated
- 32 Symptoms, Secrets, Writing, and Words
- 33 How Chance Encounters Can Foster a Career
- 34 A Multi-Decade Journey between the Lab and the Real World
- 35 A Long and Winding Road
- 36 Tales of a Devoted but Disillusioned Party Crasher
- 37 Social Cognition, Always the Great Beyond
- 38 The Accidental Social Psychologist
- 39 The Power of Firmly Held Beliefs
- 40 My Career in Social Psychology
- 41 Chasing Self-Esteem
- 42 The Basement Tapes
- 43 Evolutionary Social Psychology
- 44 One Man’s Search for (the Assignment of) Meaning
- 45 Meetings with Remarkable Men: A Fortunate Journey in Social Psychology
- 46 Dear Vera, Chuck, and Dave
- 47 Always Buy the Handbook of Social Psychology (1968) at a Railway Station in India
- 48 Empowering People to Break the Prejudice Habit
- 49 Seeking the Middle Way
- 50 The Pillars, Their Stories, Retrospectives, and Signals Loud and Clear
- Index
- References
19 - A Professional Past of Arranging to Be Compelled
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2022
- Pillars of Social Psychology
- Pillars of Social Psychology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introducing the Pillars of Social Psychology
- 2 Seven Decades in Social Psychology
- 3 A Career Emerging from an Unnecessary Analysis
- 4 Once a Social Psychologist, Always a Social Psychologist
- 5 Abe and Leon and Me
- 6 My Contributions to Social Psychology Over Many Decades
- 7 Influences and Dissonances
- 8 From Ideomotor Theory to the IAT in Just 35 Years
- 9 Curiosity
- 10 The Emergence and Evolution of Social Realities
- 11 The Good Old Days
- 12 “What Ever Happened to that Blond Girl?”
- 13 A Quest for Social Psychology That Spans the Psychological and the Social
- 14 Reasoning
- 15 Chance and Choice
- 16 Looking Back on a Charmed Career
- 17 My Train Ride to Social Psychology
- 18 The Making and Remaking of a Cross-Cultural Psychologist in Six Acts
- 19 A Professional Past of Arranging to Be Compelled
- 20 A Social Psychological and Personality Approach to Human Motivation
- 21 Wandering into Psychology and Law
- 22 My Meandering Journey into Social Psychology
- 23 A Career in Ten Episodes
- 24 Getting Lucky
- 25 Mindsets
- 26 Social Psychology and Me
- 27 My Life as a Social Psychologist
- 28 You Can’t Be a Self by Yourself
- 29 Getting to Here from There
- 30 A Relational Life
- 31 Planning Is Overrated
- 32 Symptoms, Secrets, Writing, and Words
- 33 How Chance Encounters Can Foster a Career
- 34 A Multi-Decade Journey between the Lab and the Real World
- 35 A Long and Winding Road
- 36 Tales of a Devoted but Disillusioned Party Crasher
- 37 Social Cognition, Always the Great Beyond
- 38 The Accidental Social Psychologist
- 39 The Power of Firmly Held Beliefs
- 40 My Career in Social Psychology
- 41 Chasing Self-Esteem
- 42 The Basement Tapes
- 43 Evolutionary Social Psychology
- 44 One Man’s Search for (the Assignment of) Meaning
- 45 Meetings with Remarkable Men: A Fortunate Journey in Social Psychology
- 46 Dear Vera, Chuck, and Dave
- 47 Always Buy the Handbook of Social Psychology (1968) at a Railway Station in India
- 48 Empowering People to Break the Prejudice Habit
- 49 Seeking the Middle Way
- 50 The Pillars, Their Stories, Retrospectives, and Signals Loud and Clear
- Index
- References
Summary
My first publication was in the journal Science (which allows me to joke that my publication history has been downhill from there); oddly, for someone in my position, the article didn’t involve social influence or social psychology or even human behavior. It concerned ethology, and it emerged from an observation I’d made in an undergraduate laboratory class in which we were recording the conditioned responding of earthworms to electric shock. Things weren’t proceeding well with the earthworm I was trying to condition; so I secured a second worm, putting it into the same small box where the first had been repeatedly buzzed and had secreted a creamy precipitate from its skin. Soon, I became the shocked party, as I witnessed my new subject begin trying frantically to escape up the walls. After getting the same reaction from a third and fourth worm, I called over the lab instructor to watch. Wide-eyed, he said, “I think we’ve found an alarm pheromone (a chemical signal certain animals send out to alert conspecifics to danger) that hasn’t been recorded before.” With a pair of his graduate students, we explored the reliability and functionality of the phenomenon, after which we successfully submitted a report to Science.
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- Information
- Pillars of Social PsychologyStories and Retrospectives, pp. 161 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022