Announcing SPSP's Senior Career Contribution Award Winners

Congratulations to SPSPs Senior Career Contribution Award Winners. The Senior Career Contribution Awards recognize sustained contributions across long and productive careers. SPSP will be honoring these award recipients at the awards ceremony during SPSPs Annual Convention in New Orleans.

Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award

The Application of Personality and Social Psychology award honors an individual with applied discoveries and advances to the understanding and improvement of important practical problems.

Roxane Cohen Silver

Professor Silver is a world leader in understanding how people cope with stressful events and the ways in which they do (or do not) recover from their psychological aftermath. Her studies have addressed responses to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2010 Chilean earthquake, and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, among other tragic events. Her research sheds light on the role of media coverage, community values, and personal resilience, and she has shared her work in consultation with government agencies and international non-profit organizations. By showing the ways in which personality and social psychology can be useful in dealing with some of the pressing issues of our time, Professor Silver is hereby presented the 2019 Award for Achievements in the Application of Personality and Social Psychology.

The Jack Block Award

The Block Award is SPSP's senior career award for research accomplishment in personality psychology. It was named for Jack Block, who was known for his analytic and theoretical sophistication and depth, as well as for his broad interests.

Brent Roberts

Professor Roberts has had a profound influence on the field of personality psychology, stemming from his ground-breaking work on conscientiousness and other basic traits, and their association with important life outcomes. He has also made key contributions to the understanding of the continuity and development of personality over the life course, and the prospects for personality change. He has been an influential leader in the movement to re-appraise and improve the reliability of psychological research through more open and rigorous methods. For all of these contributions and for his central leadership role in the field, Professor Roberts is deserving of the 2019 Jack Block Award for Achievements in Personality Psychology.

The Donald T. Campbell Award

The Campbell Award is a senior career award which recognizes distinguished scholarly achievement and sustained excellence in research in social psychology.

Thomas Gilovich

Professor Gilovich is a world leader in the judgement and decision-making community. Many of his findings have become classics in the field, including the hot hand fallacy, the "black uniform" effect, the biasing effect of second-hand information, a temporal asymmetry in the experience of regret, counterfactual thinking among Olympic medalists, the illusion of transparency, the spotlight effect, and the hedonic superiority of experiences compared to material possessions. His research has also contributed to the understanding of how biased evaluations encourage gambling, how construal creates the false consensus effect, how studying economics impairs cooperation, how the anchoring and adjustment heuristic operates in everyday judgment, how perspective-taking works, and explaining why people are reluctant to tempt fate. For his distinguished scholarly achievement and sustained excellence in research, Professor Gilovich is deserving of the 2019 Campbell Award for Achievements in Social Psychology.

Career Contribution Award

The Career Contribution Award is a senior career award that honors a scholar who has made major theoretical and/or empirical contributions to social psychology and/or personality psychology or to bridging these areas together.

Patricia Devine

Professor Devine's ground-breaking work on the social cognitive and motivational bases of prejudice has shaped the field for 30 years. Her research on implicit biases has inspired new approaches to prejudice reduction interventions that seek to modify automatic associations and enhance control. This work has included investigations of how attitudes impact behaviors,
motivations underlying efforts to respond without prejudice, and neuroscience models and methods to delineate basic mechanisms of control. For her profound and enduring theoretical and empirical contributions across a long and productive career, Professor Devine is deserving of the 2019 Career Contribution Award.

Distinguished Scholar Award

The Distinguished Scholar Award is a senior career award that recognizes the broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in personality and social psychology.

Shalom Schwartz

Professor Schwartz has had a deep and lasting theoretical and empirical impact on the understanding of human values and their relationship to individuals' broad, trans-situational motivational goals. The Schwartz Values Inventory has been widely used in both national and cross-cultural contexts. He has also made key contributions in the understanding of the development and consequences of religious beliefs, political attitudes, intergroup relations, and consumer behavior. By showing how human values and orientations can be measured and influenced by culture over a long and prosperous career, Professor Schwartz is deserving of the 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award.

Methodological Innovator Award

The Methodological Innovator Award is a senior career award that recognizes an individual who has made a significant or sustained contribution to innovative methods in social and personality psychology across his or her career.

Niall Bolger

Professor Bolger has made significant contributions to the understanding of change and variability, and to the methods we can use to study change and variability in human behavior as it unfolds naturally in everyday life. In his words, his methods help to truly capture "life as it is lived." He has pioneered the use of intensive longitudinal methods, studying social support processes as they occur in response to real-life stressors. He has made major contributions to the methods used to accurately measure mediation. Dr. Bolger has inspired many researchers to incorporate multilevel modeling into their research, and has, most broadly, encouraged the field to use statistical and methodological tools to think more theoretically about within-person change, in addition to between-person differences. Dr. Bolger's recent work challenges psychologists to tackle the heterogeneity of reactions to causal manipulation in experiments. He and his colleagues demonstrate how researchers can benefit from examining variation rather than ignoring it by simply averaging responses within conditions. This new work offers a radical new perspective on experimental work in psychology, and has the potential to transform experimental work in the same way that Dr. Bolger's work has transformed longitudinal work. Dr. Bolger's methods have been beneficially adopted to study a broad range of psychological topics, including close relationships, stress, happiness, emotional well-being, and health.