Observer > 2002 > February
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152002Volume 15, Issue2February 2002

Presidential Column

John Darley
John Darley
Princeton University
APS President 2001 - 2002
All columns

In this Issue:
Psychology Should Be in Dialogue with Bioethics

About the Observer

The Observer is the online magazine of the Association for Psychological Science and covers matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology. The magazine reports on issues of interest to psychologist scientists worldwide and disseminates information about the activities, policies, and scientific values of APS.

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    Disasters like Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut draw massive media coverage, trauma interventions, and financial donations to victims. But psychological research shows the efforts don’t always yield the intended benefits.

Up Front

  • Western Kentucky University

    Steven J. Haggbloom, Head Department of Psychology 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY 42101 270-745-4427; [email protected] http://edtech.tph.wku.edu/~psych/ Western Kentucky University is the largest comprehensive university in Kentucky with a combined undergraduate and graduate student enrollment of approximately 16,000 students. Western offers more than 75 undergraduate degree programs and about 40 graduate degree programs. The campus is situated on a hill overlooking the city of Bowling Green and has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful in the nation. The Psychology Department at Western is housed administratively within the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences. Psychology is the second largest undergraduate major at Western, with approximately 425 students, and is the largest full-time graduate program. The 32 full-time and 6 regular part-time and adjunct faculty support an M.A. program with options in clinical, experimental, industrial/organizational, and general psychology, an Ed.S. in school psychology, and a comprehensive undergraduate program offering a selection of 35 different courses.

  • Psychology Should Be in Dialogue with Bioethics

    The argument of many of these columns to date is that psychological science needs to figure more in worlds of public policy formulation. But I have found myself, a psychologist whose career has been concerned with experiment and theory, strikingly confused about things to say that would help shape public policy. I assume I am not alone in this predicament. One thing I do know: We need concrete examples of how we enter the policy-making process more than we need general exhortations to do so. That is, we need examples that make clear the barriers involved and the transformations we would have to put our knowledge through to have impact on policy. And, we need stories from people who have successfully breached those barriers. To get such a story, I contacted one of my most adventurous former students. His interesting account follows. As President of The Hastings Center, Tom Murray heads the premier institute that carries out analyses of ethical issues in a way that bridges the gap between "what is" and "what is possible," how we think about issues, and more "philosophical" ethical concerns.

Practice

  • Western Kentucky University

    Steven J. Haggbloom, Head Department of Psychology 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY 42101 270-745-4427; [email protected] http://edtech.tph.wku.edu/~psych/ Western Kentucky University is the largest comprehensive university in Kentucky with a combined undergraduate and graduate student enrollment of approximately 16,000 students. Western offers more than 75 undergraduate degree programs and about 40 graduate degree programs. The campus is situated on a hill overlooking the city of Bowling Green and has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful in the nation. The Psychology Department at Western is housed administratively within the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences. Psychology is the second largest undergraduate major at Western, with approximately 425 students, and is the largest full-time graduate program.

First Person

  • Graduate Students from an Undergraduate Perspective

    Graduate students are a strange species. They have characteristics of both undergraduates and of their faculty counterparts. They are still students, but not really: they often take student loans, they stay up late and get up (somewhat) early, and they can subsist on pizza alone for days at a time. However, they are part of the "real" world, unlike undergraduates who can still use the excuse, "But I'm just a poor college student." Give one a teaching assistantship and he or she will become as bull-headed as the most grizzled professor you've ever had. As a senior undergraduate, I've had my share of interactions with graduate students. If you know a graduate student, you already know what I mean. If you are a graduate student, you may beg to differ, but believe me, you're weird. That being said, I have to insist that interacting with a graduate student in an intended field of study has to be one of the most valuable experiences for an undergraduate, especially one planning on going to graduate school. I know this because I have done it, and I've been doing it since I was a freshman.

  • Undergraduates from a Graduate Student Perspective

    We know we're weird. Graduate school is one time in life that it is acceptable, almost expected, that one is weird. Guess what? So are undergraduates. Actually, as a subspecies, work-study students are the least weird of the undergraduates. Your work-study position is usually a well-defined job, and you are task-oriented in the way jobs require; graduate students tend to skip from one thing to another, and go from completely unfocused to really, really focused in the blink of an eye. As a graduate student, I have hired and worked with many work-study students. Some have been awful (not invited back the next semester), some have been good, and some have been excellent. We graduate students depend on work-study students a great deal more than you may realize. You are an extremely valuable resource. But that makes it sound as if you are robots, carrying out routine tasks. We realize that you are working in the lab for experience, and we try to give it to you. One approach is to give you a great deal of experience on one task. Another approach is to gradually increase the responsibilities of work-study students as your unique skills become apparent.

More From This Issue

  • Privacy Protection or Poor Policy? Some things you may not know about the ESEA

    For the first three quarters of 2001, only two pieces of legislation received much attention on Capitol Hill. The first was the president's budget - no surprise there. The second was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), called "Leave No Child Behind." This was to be the centerpiece of the administration's domestic policy agenda, and news about the development and progress of this legislation made headlines. Both the House and Senate passed their respective versions of the bill before the August recess, and the stage was set for the differences to be hammered out in a conference committee.

  • Y2K+1: Support for NIH Remains Strong Despite Legislative Turmoil

    2001 was a year to look forward to: No more Y2K problems. No more hanging chads. No more special prosecutors. Just a nice, simple year in which everything could get back to normal. Unfortunately, "normal" and "2001" will never be mentioned in the same sentence again. None of us will ever forget 2001, and we all hope for a safer and healthier 2002. FY 02 Budgets of Selected NIH Institutes FY 01* FY 02* % increase NIMH 1,106.5 1,248.6 12.8 NIDA 780.8 888.1 13.7 NIAAA 340.5 384.2 12.8 NIA 786.3 893.4 13.6 NICHD 978.7 1,113.6 13.7 NCI 3,737.2 4,190.4 12.1 * in millions Under all but the most unusual circumstances, Congress revolves around the budget process. Period.

  • Warsaw School Emphasizes Better Living Through Social Psychology

    Few in the United States know it, but a quiet revolution took place in Warsaw, Poland, on September 23, 2001. On the front lines were 200 men and women, mostly twentysomethings, bearing freshly-minted Master's degrees in social psychology. Their mission: to improve Polish society through social psychology. The occasion was the first commencement exercises of the Warsaw School of Advanced Social Psychology, a private institution in which students enroll after high school, and from which they graduate five years later.

  • NSF Launches Initiative in Cognitive Neuroscience

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a new initiative in the area of cognitive neuroscience. NSF is seeking highly innovative, interdisciplinary proposals aimed at advancing the understanding of how the brain supports thought, perception, action, social process, and other aspects of behavior. NSF is encouraging research into how such processes develop and change in the brain through time. The last decade has seen cognitive neuroscience emerge as an influential discipline, growing out of an interaction between cognitive sciences, neurology, neuroscience, and other fields.

  • Behavioral Science Drafted to Fight Terrorism

    Not surprisingly, the recent changes in the world have enormous implications for science. Many in the scientific community are calling for increased federal spending on new technologies and theories that will better equip our society and the world to cope with terrorism and the current state of fear. This is difficult to accomplish, however, when the federal government needs to divert so much money to defense and security. Will science be pitted against defense, or will science actually benefit from the nation's new priority on security?

  • Divided Attention: OBSSR’s Chief Named Acting Director of NIAAA

    The highest ranking behavioral science official at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now also an acting institute director. Sounds ripe for a case study in divided attention and individual capacity for multitasking. Soon after the start of the new year, Raynard S. Kington, currently serving as director of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), also assumed the helm as acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), a research institute with a budget of $384 million in FY 02. Approximately one third of NIAAA's budget goes to psychologists, who also make up one-third of the institute's almost 800 principal investigators.