William Dean Crano is the Stuart Oskamp Distinguished Professor of Psychology in the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. A social psychologist, Crano received his MS and PhD degrees from Northwestern University, where Donald T. Campbell was his advisor and mentor. Dr. Crano has served on the faculties…

This article will begin by examining the extent to which R. S. Peters merited the charge of analytic philosopher. His background in social psychology allowed him to become more pragmatic and grounded in social conventions and ordinary language than the analytic philosophers associated with empiricism, and his gradual shift from requiring internal…

In keeping with the special issue theme of "Remembering the Future," this article provides a selective review of research on how memory for social information (i.e., social category representation) influences future processing and behavior. Specifically, the authors focus on how categorization and stereotyping affect how we perceive others and…

Cultural-historical activity theory--with historical roots in dialectical materialism and the social psychology to which it has given rise--has experienced exponential growth in its acceptance by scholars interested in understanding knowing and learning writ large. In education, this theory has constituted something like a well kept secret that is…

In this article, the author will focus on Seymour's article titled, "And What is the Public Interest?" (Sarason, 1986). To the author, the core of the article is as follows: "And what is the public interest? At its phenomenological root it is a picture of a triad: the individual, the society, and the bases on which they give meaning to each other.…

We (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010) reviewed a growing body of research demonstrating metaphors' far-reaching influence on social information processing. In their commentary, IJzerman and Koole (2011) claimed that we devoted insufficient attention to the origin of metaphors, and they reviewed research showing that bodily, social, and cultural…

Evaluators frequently make use of indirect measures of participant learning or skill mastery, with participants either being asked if they have learned material or mastered a skill or being asked to indicate how confident they are that they know the material or can perform the task in question. Unfortunately, myriad research in social psychology…

The author has been asked to discuss the relevance, or lack of relevance, for "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies" (Sarason, 1972) for community psychology today. She appreciates this assignment, as one of the first books she read in graduate school was "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies." After that, she was exposed…

It is both an honor and fitting that the "Journal of Community Psychology" presents to the discipline a series of papers included within a symposium entitled "Seymour Sarason in Memorial: Prospects for Community and Social Change" at the Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action on June 18th, 2011, in Chicago Illinois. These papers…

Comments on the original article "Rethinking intractable conflict: The perspective of dynamical systems," by R. R. Vallacher, P. T. Coleman, A. Nowak, and L. Bui-Wrzosinska. Vallacher et al presented an intriguing description of dynamical systems theory as applied to the understanding of intractable conflicts ranging from the intrapsychic to the…

Seymour was a renaissance man: widely read in not only psychology but also anthropology, sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, and most especially history. Seymour taught the author the value of being historically informed, which has been an invaluable tool ever since. Seymour had a way of conceptualizing and reformulating whatever…

This is a response to the Nowell and Boyd (2010) article printed in this journal titled: Viewing Community as Responsibility as Well as Resource: Deconstructing the Theoretical Roots of Psychological Sense of Community. In that article, they argued that the McMillan theory of Sense of Community is a simplistic, needs-based theory that excludes…

As indicated by Deaux and Burke (this volume), sociology and psychology have shared a tradition of discourse allowing social psychologists to build upon each other's ideas. A conversation between social identity theory and identity theory was initiated fifteen years ago and addressed the similarities and differences between these theories. This…

Drawing upon the thought of Eric Fromm, this paper argues that efforts to understand and counter behaviour that causes difficulties in education should begin in a critical and reflective engagement with both the conditions of human freedom and the character of educational institutions and society as a whole. Fromm's critique of dominating ideas…

Comments on the original article, "Rethinking the concept of acculturation: Implications for theory and research," by S. J. Schwartz, J. B. Unger, B. L. Zamboanga, and J. Szapocznik. Schwartz et al are to be commended for their attempts "to propose an expanded, multidimensional model of acculturation and of the demographic and contextual forces…