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142001Volume 14, Issue7September 2001

Presidential Column

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

In this Issue:
Our Archival Stance Can Be Costly

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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Up Front

  • University of Missouri-Columbia

    The University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) was founded in 1839 as the first land grant state university west of the Mississippi River. One of four campuses of the University of Missouri system, MU is a member of the American Association of Universities and is classified as a Research One institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Students at MU have the use of Ellis Library and its nine branches, which make up the largest research library in the state. Taken together, they give access to 2.6 million bound volumes, 4.9 million microform titles, and over 17,000 current periodicals. The Educational and Counseling Psychology Department, which is housed in the University's College of Education, offers graduate degree programs in the applied behavioral sciences. The department currently has 24 full-time tenure track faculty members, 13 non tenure track faculty, and 21 full time staff on grants. Faculty are actively involved in professional associations, are on editorial boards, and have achieved recognition for their research, scholarly writings, and advancement of psychology.

  • Our Archival Stance Can Be Costly

    John Darley APS President In last month's column [Observer, July/August, 2001], I suggested that psychology, in contrast to many adjacent sciences, is characterized by a methodological preference for experimentation, because experimentation, uniquely, is a way of establishing causality. This methodological preference is driven by our meta-theoretical commitment to tracing out the workings of causal processes and our discovery that ordinary observational thinking does a rather poor job of establishing the causal ordering of events. Because we psychologists are so aware of the confusions and false inferences that people are led to in their everyday thinking, we have required demonstrations of causation that avoid these confusions and false inferences. Experiments, notoriously, are effortful, time-consuming, and costly to do.

Practice

  • University of Missouri-Columbia

    The University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) was founded in 1839 as the first land grant state university west of the Mississippi River. One of four campuses of the University of Missouri system, MU is a member of the American Association of Universities and is classified as a Research One institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Students at MU have the use of Ellis Library and its nine branches, which make up the largest research library in the state. Taken together, they give access to 2.6 million bound volumes, 4.9 million microform titles, and over 17,000 current periodicals. The Educational and Counseling Psychology Department, which is housed in the University's College of Education, offers graduate degree programs in the applied behavioral sciences.

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  • Where Was it Published?

    Some time ago, I was part of a selection-committee meeting regarding a potential hire. When the discussion turned to a particular article by the candidate, a member of the committee asked, "Where was it published?" Nothing wrong with that question - except I had the feeling that the individual had not read the article and possibly had no intention of doing so. Knowing where the article was published was somehow supposed to serve as a proxy for reading and evaluating it. If this were an isolated incident, it would be no big deal. But over the course of a career, more or less the same question has come up again and again, repeated in various surface-structural forms.

  • Reviewing for Risk: What’s the Evidence That It Works?

    The authors consider the effectiveness of the process for reviewing research proposals in terms of risk to human subjects, as it has evolved in psychological research in North America. They raise a fundamental question: Is there any evidence that these reviews are effective at reducing risk to the public? In Part I, they define the situation and identify some irrelevant measures of effectiveness. In Part II, which will be published in the October 2001 Observer, they discuss approaches and benefits to answering this question.

  • Code Overload: Doing a Number on Memory

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  • Darley Takes Helm as President

    You don't have to be from Princeton to be President of APS, but apparently it helps. APS is pleased to welcome this year's roster of distinguished leaders. Our new President is Princeton's John M. Darley, who succeeds Robert A. Bjork. Darley's colleague from Princeton, Susan Fiske, replaces Darley as President-Elect. New Board Members are Susan Mineka, Northwestern University, and Charles (Randy) Gallistel, currently at Rutgers University on leave from UCLA. Mineka and Gallistel succeed outgoing Board Members Robert Levenson and Henry L. Roediger, III. Darley, an APS Fellow and Charter Member, is a social psychologist who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1965.

  • New Publications Chair Heads Search for Journal Editor

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  • Regulatory Changes Affecting IRBs and Researchers

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  • Research Supports Distributed Model of Central Executive in Working Memory

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