European Bulletin of Social Psychology 32,2 (December 2020)

We hope that you are keeping well in these difficult times. We were very disappointed that we did not have the opportunity to get together at the General Meeting this year, but we will very much look forward to seeing you all in Krakow in 2023. There is an update on the General Meeting in this Winter edition of the Bulletin.

You will also hear from our new President Kai Jonas who took over from Kai Sassenberg in the Summer. The Bulletin also contains details of our EASP award winners and grants that have been recently awarded by the Association. You will also find the usual features about future meetings and calls for contributions to projects and journal special issues, including information about a new webpage on the history of social psychology. Reports of previously awarded grants are also present, and there is a feature on the most recent Summer School that was held at the University of Surrey. Finally, there is a list of new members who we warmly welcome to the Association, and we also warmly welcome Ola Shobowale as the new EASP Executive Officer.

We hope you enjoy reading this Bulletin and wish you a relaxing Winter break and a Happy New Year.

President's Corner

usually, when the tenure of the new President and the newly elected members of the Executive Committee starts we can look back at a great General Meeting in the summer, feel inspired by the research we have seen, the exchanges and discussions we had, and the friends we met. This year everything is different. Not only did we have to postpone and ultimately cancel the General Meeting, a move that was painful but necessary, but also the Executive Committee has been meeting virtually since April. The Corona virus pandemic is dictating a novel agenda for EASP, adding on to issues and topics that we already have been working on. The priorities have shifted. While I had a number of ideas how I wanted to fill in this presidency some of these ideas are for now on the backburner. What is paramount now is to steer EASP safely through the Corona times, and to continue serving and supporting European social psychologists. I feel lucky that the new Executive Committee shares this view and is supporting my endeavors. Together and with the support of you, the members of EASP, we can make it.

One of the most prevalent outcomes of the Vision workshop held late in 2019 was the “family character” of EASP, often rooted in early career positive experiences of our members at a summer school and refreshed regularly in meetings that accompany the academic careers of many of us. The open answers in our last survey set out to hear your voice regarding the General Meeting corroborated this notion. Clearly, it is a task for this Executive Committee to preserve this character during the times of Corona. This is anything but easy, just offering the umpteenth video conference is not the solution: Many of us are zoomed out.

At the same time my own experience (and colleagues that I consulted) showed that senior scientists suffer less from the new virtual. We do have our networks and can maintain them during the crisis. Missing out on a conference or two is nothing that harms our work. For junior scientists the picture is different. There are less conferences and virtual ones seem to create less visibility for one’s work. The informal opportunities to meet new colleagues during a conference or meeting have been wiped out and not replaced properly. Putting out informal feelers on the job market has become incredibly difficult, too. I am hopeful that newly formed research teams of the virtual summer school 2020 – that we supported with research grants to facilitate initial cooperation – are an example of a solution. But we need more. Given the cancellation of the General Meeting, the Executive Committee is going to announce a number of measures to try to fill the gaps in the coming months. We hope that those measures will get us through the crisis. At the same time, the COVID-19 grant scheme offered earlier this year was highly successful. We had many submissions, funded the most promising and high quality ones, and are very happy to see the first results coming in now.

The Corona pandemic is of course not everything. We have voted for new Standing Orders and while all have been approved by the members it would be foolish to gloss over the results. We recognize that the re-naming of the awards and subsequent activities were met with disagreement by a noteworthy minority. We do want to develop the way further how the history and memory of EASP is kept. Our new history page, soon to be integrated in the website, now a stand-alone at https://history.easp.eu/ is open to contributions and is a fabulous way to document individuals, different European and national research traditions and diverse foci. Furthermore, EASP is committed to promoting safe scientific environments and we will continue to do so. We still need to report the results of the #metoo survey and we hope that the discussion on how to safeguard our norms and standards continues. We are glad that the new Standing Orders provide us with clear procedures on how to deal with violations. We have created a new role in the Executive Committee, a Diversity Officer (currently filled in by Nurit Shnabel), to put our policies better into action and to translate was has been voiced in the past (e.g., with the diversity report) into tangible activities.

Last but not least, major organizational and structural changes are currently going on. Sibylle Classen is retiring after 30 years of service to the association. Oladipupo Shobowale is taking over – he is introducing himself in a portrait in this Bulletin – and we have to move the office and financial infrastructures. On top of that the Dutch taxation regulations for associations like ours have changed, and those need to be managed at the same time. This endeavor will take up some time and I would kindly ask you to be patient with us if not everything is working as you have been used to immediately.

For me, since 1999 when I attended my first General Meeting and in 2000 the summer school, EASP has always been my academic family. I can fully resonate with this characteristic of families: providing a safe haven, a nurturing ground, and in terms of extended families a source of networking. EASP has room to develop its strong characteristic further: We have started to collaborate with other associations, think of the joint award with EAPP, and we believe that there is potential for further collaborations. I have participated in the presidential activities of EURAM with novel potentials arising for working together. In a Europe that is both growing together and falling apart, learned societies like EASP can contribute to the cohesion of science, no matter what national governments are deciding. With Brexit negotiations still open, EASP sees a commitment to keep our UK colleagues integrated. Depending on the outcomes of Brexit negotiations, we may have to adjust and develop our collaboration and support for our UK members as well. Brexit will also impact our funding. All publishers that we work with and that to a large degree finance the activities of EASP via the royalties of the journals are located in the UK. Contracts are in Pound Sterling – we are subject to exchange rate fluctuation – and depending on the outcomes of the Brexit negotiations we may have renegotiate our contracts as well. Related to the royalty based funding it is important to note that decreases in publisher revenue due to Open Access contracts directly affect us as well. So far, growth in other markets (e.g., Asia) has buffered a decline in royalties, but we need to monitor this closely and adapt our expenditure accordingly, or revisit the topic of alternative funding.

I am happy that the recent Research Knowledge Transfer scheme meetings were fruitful. We do now have a growing LGBTQI+ interest group, and the meeting on up-to-date research methods (open, transparent and collaborative) in Bordeaux was successful, too. Together with our pre-registration journal activities at EJSP and CRSP, I believe that EASP documents that we are still at the forefront of developing science structures further.

I hope that these lines have given you an update about the current pressing issues and more long term agenda of the current Executive Committee. We will continue with our policy to reach out to you more often and to include the membership-at-large more into our decision making. Of course, feel free to contact me or any other member of the Executive Committee with your concerns, feedback and suggestions anytime.

For now, I want to wish you a healthy end of the year, and I hope you find time to relax a bit during the upcoming Holiday season!

News of the next General Meeting

The next General Meeting will be held 2023 in Krakow. We are very thankful that the local organizers are willing to invest their time and effort again, and we are hopeful that 2023 will turn out to be a great onsite meeting. 2023 will hopefully give all vaccination efforts enough time to show their effects and allow travel to resume safely.

EASP General Meeting 2021 update

Appointment of new EASP Executive Officer

The Executive Committee is pleased to announce the appointment of Ola Shobowale as the new EASP Executive Officer. He will be taking over from Sibylle Classen, who is retiring at the end of 2020. His responsibilities include the day-to-day management of EASP administration and projects.

Ola is a certified project manager and trained as a medical doctor with interest in mental health (behavioral neuroscience degree) and significant clinical and international health experience in infectious diseases (United Nations – WHO). He is currently engaged in a PhD trajectory.

Invitation to contribute to new History Website

We have started to put together a website on the history of European social psychology: https://history.easp.eu.

There is some really useful content and resources there already, but this website is very much in its early stages. We would like to expand the website to cover the history of social psychology in Europe as broadly as we possibly can. Specifically, we invite everyone to consider writing contributions about ideas, theories, schools, or people in European social psychology. We are also interested in thoughts and streams that had a national or regional impact, but that have never or not yet been extensively discussed internationally.

Please take a look at the website and get in touch if you would be willing to make a contribution. You can send these to our Media Manager, Tina at media@easp.eu.

Upcoming Events and Announcements

Call for papers on Audiovisual Media, Diversity and Inclusion

Call for Special Issue on Psychology and COVID19

Psychologica Belgica, the journal of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences; Submission deadline: December 31st, 2020

Social Psychology Days 2021

15th-16th April in Helsinki, Finland or Online; Submission deadline: December 31st, 2020 (working group papers); February 2nd, 2021 (individual papers)

Call for Papers for Special Issue on "Privilege Lost"

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (GPIR) Extended submission deadline: January 15th, 2021

Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards

Call for Papers: Less than human: What people who are dehumanized think, feel and do

Group Processes and Intergroup Relations (GPIR); Submission deadline: May 1st, 2021

Call for Commentaries in Special Issue: The Debate on the Unconscious in Lie Detection

Call for Collaborators on a Scale Development Project

2019 EJSP Early Career Best Manuscript Award Winner

EASP Award Winners (2020)

EASP Early-Career Award

EASP Mid-Career Award

EASP Theory-Innovation Award

EASP Award for Outstanding Service to the Field

EASP Lifetime-Achievement Award

EAPP / EASP Award for Outstanding contribution to European Personality and Social Psychology

Grant and Meeting Reports

Please be aware that new deadlines for all but pre-registered grant applications are now in effect. The new deadlines for Travel, Seedcorn, Collaborative Research and RKTS (Research Knowledge Transfer Scheme) grants are February 28th, June 30th and October 31st. This change was necessary to ensure better financial flexibility for the current year, but also for better comparability of applications. Thank you for your understanding.

Report on EASP Summer School 2020

Online, Aug. 24th, 2020 - Sept. 4th, 2020; Organised by University of Surrey, UK

EASP Extra Grant Report: Everyday kindness in times of COVID-19

by Olga Białobrzeska, Justyna Bąba, Sylwia Bedyńska, Aleksandra Cisłak, Magdalena Formanowicz¹; Małgorzata Gocłowska²; Aleksandra Cichocka³;

EASP Seedcorn Grant Report by Inna Ksenofontov, Alexandra Fleischmann, Rotem Kahalon, & Boglárka Nyúl

Post Summer School Report; Project: "Brilliance as deviance: Gender-role incongruity as another barrier to women’s success in academic fields"

EASP Seedcorn Grant Report by Tomás A. Palma

University of Lisbon, Portugal; Project: Investigating the Contribution of Stereotypic Beliefs to the Own-Race Bias in Face Recognition

EASP Seedcorn Grant Report by Konrad Bocian, Lazaros Gonidis, & Jim AC Everett

Project: Human and nonhuman agents as a source of social pressure for judgements of moral character

Travel Grant Report by Martijn Blikmans

University of Groningen; Research visit to the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, USA

Travel Grant Report by Daniel Toribio-Flórez

Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Germany; Research visit to the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab, Brown University and 2020 SPSP Convention, USA

Member Publications

Heartwarming: How Our Inner Thermostat Made Us Human

by Hans Rocha IJzerman; W. W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1-324-00252-9

New Members of the Association

The following applications for membership were approved by the Executive Committee in November 2020. Each of the applicants will become a member of the EASP in the category indicated below. Names of members providing letters of support are in the third line of the entry:

Full Membership

Postgraduate Membership

Grant Awards

Executive Committee

Małgorzata Kossowska (Meetings Officer), malgorzata.kossowska@uj.edu.pl
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Ingardena 6, PL‑30‑060 Krakow, Poland

Roland Imhoff (Journals Officer), roland.imhoff@uni-mainz.de
Social and Legal Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Binger Straßer 14-16, 55122 Mainz, Germany

Nina Hansen (Treasurer), e.h.gordijn@rug.nl
Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, NL‑9712 TS Groningen, Netherlands

Nurit Shnabel (Diversity Officer), shnabeln@tauex.tau.ac.il
The School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel

Karen Douglas (Secretary and Membership Officer), k.douglas@kent.ac.uk
School of Psychology, University of Kent, Cantebury, Kent CT2 7NP, United Kingdom

Monica Rubini (Grants and Membership Officer), monica.rubini@unibo.it
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, I‑40126 Bologna, Italy

Kai Jonas (President), kai.jonas@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Work and Social Psychology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40, NL‑6229 ER Maastricht, Netherlands

Sibylle Classen (Executive Officer), sibylle@easp.eu
P.O. Box 420 143, D‑48068 Muenster, Germany

Oladipupo Shobowale (Executive Officer), office@easp.eu
Universiteitssingel 40, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands