Frances Cherry

Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine

The current issue of Theory & Psychology is devoted to Stanley Milgram and his contribution to the study of obedience. It presents a decidedly critical evaluation of these well-known experiments that challenges their relevance to our understanding of events such as the Holocaust. It builds on recent investigations of the Milgram archive at Yale. The discipline’s adulation of the obedience research overlooks several critical factors: the palpable trauma experienced by many participants, and the stark skepticism of the deceptive cover-story experienced by many others, Milgram’s misrepresentation of the way in which the prods were undertaken to ensure standardization, and his failure to de-brief the vast majority of participants. There is also the cherry-picking of findings. The project was whitewashed in the film, Obedience, prepared by Milgram to popularize his conclusions. The articles contributed for this issue offer a more realistic assessment of Milgram’s contribution to knowledge.

Test Performance and Social Comparison Choices of High School Men and Women.

The present research was designed to investigate whether anticipated publicity of performance would adversely affect the performance of high school girls to a greater extent than high school boys. If ambivalence about success is intensified for girls towards the end of high school, they would be expected to do better when test results were anticipated to be private rather than public. These results were confirmed only for girls of average ability. Average-ability girls also chose same-sex comparisons and showed less interest in comparison with standard setters. Performance data and social comparison choices suggest that the pattern of achievement for average-ability girls may be well established by sixth grade. Further clarification of the period when incompatibilities arise between the female role and academic achievement is required.

Making It Count: Discrimination Auditing and the Activist Scholar Tradition

Discrimination auditing can usefully be viewed as part of a tradition of social science activist scholarship since World War II. This perspective suggests that the single-minded pursuit of methodological rigor, especially when reflected in exclusive reliance on documents-based audits, often sacrifices other characteristics historically associated with auditing’s unique contributions to societal and scientific advancement. This chapter advocates and illustrates a balanced research agenda in which the most rigorous auditing studies are paralleled by others more directly in the activist scholar tradition. The hallmarks of that tradition are: in-person testers, the lived experience of discrimination, researcher-community partnerships, and goals beyond academic ones.

SPSSI and Activist Science

Steinitz & Mishler’s (2001) critique of the welfare reform issue of the Journal of Social Issues (Zuckerman & Kalil, 2001) comes at an important moment in SPSSI’s life as the organization prepares to move to Washington in late summer. The move will raise new challenges for the organization in the way it approaches research, policy formation, and advocacy. SPSSI’s past and present concerns with these relationships are useful to this on-line discussion, and I would like to respond both in my role as SPSSI’s current historian/archivist and as a social psychologist involved in teaching social psychology and researching its history. First, as a teacher of social and community psychology, I think it is important to differentiate the Journal of Social Issues from SPSSI itself. The journal’s editor is selected by a search committee appointed by SPSSI’s president. The committee reviews possibilities and makes a recommendation to the full council, which votes on the recommendation. The editor then has considerable autonomy over the content of the issues. I have found several issues that are more reflective of the solidarity model for which Steinitz and Mishler argue. Most recently, in my community and social psychology courses, I have used the Wittig and Bettencourt (1996) issue, “Social Psychological Perspectives on Grassroots Organizing,” as well as Brydon-Miller and Tolman’s (1997) issue, “Transforming Psychology: Interpretive and Participatory Research Methods.” Hopefully, the Georgia Qualitatitive Inquiry Group sees the Journal of Social Issues as a possible outlet for publication of its work, despite whatever it takes to be SPSSI’s position on advocacy. In that regard, it might be useful to look at the positions that SPSSI has in fact taken in the past. Martha Mednick (1984) has outlined these up to the early 1980s, noting that indeed, SPSSI has been taking fewer politically oriented positions over

I. The Convergence of Power, History and Memory in the Work of Erika Apfelbaum

I am delighted to have the opportunity to explore my connections to Erika Apfelbaum’s writings, particularly those on the centrality of power, history and memory. Throughout her work this triumvirate is key to her understanding of social processes and the discipline of social psychology itself. I met Erika Apfelbaum in October 1977, just prior to the colloquium she was to give to the Department of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa. She was no stranger to the department as she had been one of the key participants in an earlier 1974 conference on the ‘crisis’ in social psychology, hosted at Carleton by my col league, Lloyd Strickland (Strickland et al., 1976). In her colloquium she further elaborated many of the ideas that were continuing to emerge in her writings of the 1970s (Apfelbaum, 1979; Apfelbaum and Lubek, 1976). Here was someone who was articulating clearly so much of what was on my mind and I wanted to be around her energy and lucidity. Consequently, I headed to Apfelbaum’s Paris Labo for a sabbatical in 1981–2. I was not alone. At the Monday seminar she conducted, I was introduced to others who wanted to create a social psychology that did not reduce collective social power to individual or interpersonal dimensions, yet still linked up to these dimensions. Apfelbaum focused us on the ‘contre -pouvoir’ of minority groups as they face the power of the state and its vested interests in all aspects of life, experienced through its institutions and practices. Apfelbaum’s understanding of power, particularly as it plays out in the dynamics between groups, was highly influential in my development as a social psychologist. In her seminar, Apfelbaum helped each of us develop our ideas about ‘domination struggles’

The experiences of Canadian women in trades and technology

Abstract This paper reports on several aspects of a large-scale survey and interview study of Canadian women in trades and technology. The research involved 923 women either employed or in training in trades and technology occupations. The Canadian experience is examined in light of past research on women in nontraditional job choices, and strategies to facilitate the entry of women into nontraditional occupations are described.