Personality and Social Psychology Review Copyright © 2002 by

2002, Vol. 6, No. 1, 72–85 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Social Psychology: Who We Are and What We Do

Abraham Tesser and Jinn Jopp Bau
Institute for Behavioral Research
University of Georgia

The author index of the Handbook of Social Psychology (Gilbert, Fiske & Lindzey,
1998) and of Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Processes (Higgins & Krug-
lanski, 1996) served as the basis for identifying and describing some of the people
constructing social psychology in the 1990s. Over 10,000 names are mentioned, but
relatively few are mentioned several times. The 106 contributors who were mentioned
most frequently are identified and described. They are mostly men about 20 years be-
yond the PhD. The select set of institutions at which they work and from which they
obtained their degrees are also identified. Similarities among contributors were cal-
culated on the basis of the proximity of their mentions in the handbooks. An analysis
of those similarities yielded eight “contributor factors”: social cognition, attitudes,
motivated attribution, self, interpersonal influence, intergroup relations and stereo-
types, culture and evolution, and interpersonal relationships.

I have been fascinated with the subject matter and
theoretical thinking in social and personality psychol-
ogy since I began graduate school. Now, on the thresh-
old of a new millennium, it is the field of social psy-
chology as it currently stands that I attempt to
describe—because I am a psychologist, I focus on the
people that do social psychology. Who are they?
Where are they now and where do they come from?
What are the topics that drive their inquiry, explora-
tion, and analysis?
A current description of the field should be com-
prehensive, and there should be some defensible cri-
terion for including this and excluding that. A reflex
for many of us is to take a data-driven approach—that
is, to focus on something that can be counted and an-
alyzed. In this instance, a data-driven approach may
be no more valid than a qualitative narrative. How-
ever, it has the advantage of making many of us, my-
self included, more comfortable.
Where might we find something to count that would
give a good description of the field? One could collect
new data, perhaps a survey of the membership of the So-
ciety of Personality and Social Psychology. Respon-
dents could be asked to indicate their own research inter-
ests, the areas they consider to be most important, and
the people who they believe currently have the most in-
fluence in the field. The result of such a survey would be
instructive. However, such an approach is expensive,
subject to distortion by subject loss, and likely to reflect
mostly the current top-of-the-head thinking of the re-
spondent rather than a more thoughtful analysis.
Another reasonable solution would be to sample the
currently available textbooks. The table of contents for
many texts, however, are formulaic and may unduly re-
flect “tradition” in their coverage; in many instances
the coverage is more superficial than might be the case
in more sophisticated sources. Perhaps the ideal ap-
proach would be to sample the authors and content of
our best journals. This would be timely, and the content
would have the appropriate depth. Regrettably, how-
ever, such an approach would have required more re-
sources than I had for this particular project. I settled
on a compromise somewhere between the textbook ap-
proach and the journal approach. Much of what fol-
lows is based on analysis of the author index of two re-
cently published handbooks of social psychology:1
Handbook of Social Psychology2 (Gilbert et al., 1998)
and Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles
(Higgins & Kruglanski, 1996).
The fourth edition of the Handbook of Social Psy-
chology (GFL Handbook; Gilbert et al., 1998) was pub-

This article is based on Abraham Tesser’s presidential address to

the Society for Personality and Social Psychology at the American 1Regrettably, the most recent handbook of social psychology,

Psychological Association, August 2000. In keeping with that ad-
dress, most of the first-person references are in the singular. Jinn
Jopp Bau was responsible for the substantial data processing, partic-
ularly as reflected in the section on Similarities Among Contributors.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Abraham Tesser, Institute
The Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology (Hewstone &
Brewer, 2001) lacks a name index in one of its four volumes (Tesser
& Schwarz, 2001), and the analyses reported here could not be car-
ried out on these volumes.
2I am grateful to McGraw-Hill Publishers for providing an elec-

for Behavioral Research, Barrow Hall, University of Georgia, Ath- tronic version of these two indexes. Thanks also to Dan Gilbert for
ens, GA 30602. E-mail: atesser@arches.uga.edu facilitating this acquisition.

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 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
lished in 1998 by McGraw-Hill. It was edited by Daniel
T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey and
consists of 2 volumes and 37 chapters. The GFL Hand-
book, starting with the first edition in 1935, has been a
standard reference work in social psychology. It is in-
tended to cover the breadth of the field. I believe that the
McGraw-Hill volumes are highly successful in achiev-
ing their goals. The current edition, was, at the time of
this writing, the most timely and comprehensive single
collection for serious scholarship in social psychology
that was available (see footnote 1). Moreover, the au-
thors are recognized experts in each of their fields.
Any one work is likely to reflect, at least in part, idio-
syncrasies associated with the editors, specific authors,
and publishers. To derive a more general picture it is
probably prudent to have at least one other comprehen-
sive description of the field from which to draw. The
Higgins and Kruglanski (1996) handbook, Social Psy-
chology: Handbook of Basic Principles (HK Hand-
book) published by Guilford Press, appeared in 1996.
This single-volume handbook contains 28 chapters and
also attempts a comprehensive view of the field of social
psychology but from a different perspective. Instead of
an organization around areas of social psychology, this
volume is organized around basic principals and pro-
cesses. According to the authors’preface, other works of
this type focused on social psychological phenomena
and social issues. The HK Handbook “complements
these by searching for specific principles underlying
many different social-psychological phenomena rather
than focusing on the phenomena themselves” (Higgins
& Kruglanski, 1996, p. vii). Like the GFL Handbook,
the HK Handbook is a well-respected source work. It is
edited and written by some of the field’s best-known ex-
perts. Because the handbooks differ with respect to or-
ganization, editors, authors (to some extent), and pub-
lisher, what is common to both volumes should give us a
more general view of social psychology in the closing
decade of the second millennium than either volume
considered by itself.
Who Are We?
The first set of questions that I address concern the
people who are currently influential in the construction
of our discipline. It turns out that there are a lot more
people contributing to the discipline then I would have
guessed. In the GFL Handbook there are over 10,000
persons (10,020 to be exact) named in the index as be-
ing cited in the text3 at least once. However, the number
3These counts include mentions in the narrative of the chapters
only and not the specific bibliographic information to which the
mention refers. Thus, a single bibliographic entry might be men-
tioned multiple times in the same chapter and the author would get
credit for those multiple entries. I believe this approach partially sep-
arates the number of publications from the impact of the work.
of contributors falls quickly as we raise the number of
mentions. (Note that I use the word mentions as short-
hand for the number of pages on which a person is cited
at least once.) Thus, although there are almost 6,000
contributors cited on only one page of the text (5,959 to
be exact), there are fewer than 1,800 (1,760 exactly)
mentioned on two pages and substantially less than
half that number cited on three different pages. Indeed,
the 90th percentile for mentions is somewhere between
only four and five mentions over all 37 chapters of the
two-volume set.
This dramatic falloff in citations is nicely illustrated
in Figure 1, in which the number of investigators is
plotted against the number of text pages on which they
were cited in the GFL Handbook. In approximate num-
bers, 10,000 were mentioned on at least one page,
4,000 were mentioned on two or more pages, 2,000 on
three or more pages, and so on. So, there are a lot of us.
However, the number of us whose contributions are
broad enough or important enough to be mentioned in
multiple contexts quickly drops off.4
Who are the people that are making contributions
important enough to be mentioned in multiple con-
texts? To answer this question, we focused on those
contributors whose work is mentioned on 20 or more
pages in the two-volume GFL Handbook5 and 12 or
more pages in the single-volume HK Handbook. These
cutoffs are arbitrary, but they helped us develop a
workable sample (n = 154 in the GFL Handbook and n
= 194 in the HK Handbook). We then compared the
names on each list and generated a list of all the people
who are mentioned on both lists.
Are the same top people identified in both volumes?
The answer is yes, for the most part. Almost 70% (n =
106) of the 154 persons identified as being cited most
frequently on the GFL Handbook list are also among
the most cited in the HK Handbook.6 The agreement
goes beyond simply identifying the same people. Even
within this highly restricted sample (e.g., 106 out of
more than 10,000 in the GFL Handbook), there is good
agreement as to the rank ordering. The correlation be-
tween number of mentions in GFL and HK is .63.
Table 1 presents the names of the 25 most fre-
quently mentioned contributors (FMCs) across both
4There is a similar trend in the HK Handbook. However, because
we did not have the index in electronic form, we did not attempt to
prepare a detailed plot.
5Note that in the original index of the GFL Handbook, some ref-
erences to Brown, R. are actually references to Brown, R. J.; some of
the references to Snyder, M. L. are actually references to M. Snyder.
The table provides the corrected counts for Brown, R. J. and Snyder,
M. The references to Hatfield, E., Walster, E., and Walster, E. H.
were combined into the entry Walster-Hatfield, E. H.
6Note that 106 is only 55% of the 194 identified in the HK Hand-
book. However, because the lists are of different length, even if every
person on the shorter list were on the longer list the overlap would be
only 79%. Correcting for this ceiling by dividing 55% by 79% yields
the same overlap, 70%, reported in the text.
73
 TESSER & BAU

Figure 1. Frequency of citations against number of investigators. Each data point represents the number of contributors (investigators)
who were mentioned at least some number of times. For example, in approximate numbers, 10,000 were mentioned on at least one page,
4,000 were mentioned on two or more pages, 2,000 on three or more pages, and so on.

handbooks. Because the handbooks differ in number of and the standardized number of mentions (N(z)in the
pages, chapters, and volumes, the mean and standard GFL, N(z) in the HK). The standardized number of
deviation in mention frequency should also differ. mentions is the z score derived separately for each
Therefore, Table 1 presents the raw number of men- handbook. The final rank order was based on the mean
tions in the handbooks (N in the GFL, N in the HK), z score obtained by averaging over the GFL and the HK
z scores. (The reliability of this combined ranking,
Table 1. Twenty-Five Most Frequently Mentioned based on the Spearman–Brown formula, is .77.) The
Contributors top-20 list holds few surprises. It includes Tory Hig-
GFL HK gins, Susan Fiske, John Bargh, Shelly Chaiken, Hal
Handbook Handbook Kelley, Alice Eagly, Shelley Taylor, Rich Petty, Ned
Jones, John Cacioppo, and other very well-known gi-
Contributors M N(z) N(z) N N(z) N
ants in the field.
Higgins, E. T. 3.33 1.52 75 5.13 141 Earlier I mentioned the possibility of doing the kind
Fiske, S. T. 3.30 4.10 130 2.50 85 of analyses presented here using textbooks or journals
Bargh, J. A. 2.79 1.85 82 3.72 111
Chaiken, S. 2.34 1.85 82 2.83 92
as the source of information. Gordon and Vicari (1992)
Kelley, H. H. 2.13 1.85 82 2.40 83 examined such sources in social psychology for the
Eagly, A. H. 1.94 2.32 92 1.56 65 1980s. In one of their analyses, they rank ordered the
Taylor, S. E. 1.89 1.85 82 1.93 73 104 most frequently cited contributors across eight
Petty, R. E. 1.77 1.94 84 1.60 66 leading textbooks of the period 1987 to 1990. In an-
Jones, E. E. 1.58 2.79 102 0.38 40
Cacioppo, J. T. 1.56 1.34 71 1.79 70 other, they rank ordered the top 100 contributors (in
Fazio, R. H. 1.02 1.19 68 0.85 50 terms of authorship, weighted for order of authorship
Nisbett, R. E. 0.95 1.66 78 0.24 37 in multiple author pieces) across three of our most
Gilbert, D. T. 0.88 1.38 72 0.38 40 prestigious journals for the period 1980 to 1989: Jour-
Schwarz, N. 0.84 0.12 45 1.56 65
nal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of
Brewer, M. B. 0.83 1.76 80 –0.09 30
Markus, H. R. 0.81 1.19 68 0.43 41 Experimental Social Psychology, and Personality and
Ross, L. 0.74 0.91 62 0.57 44 Social Psychology Bulletin.
Festinger, L. 0.74 1.05 65 0.43 41 A comparison of the present FMCs with the lists
Zajonc, R. B. 0.69 1.29 70 0.10 34 published by Gordon and Vicari (1992) may be of in-
Zanna, M. P. 0.65 1.10 66 0.19 36
terest. An overlap between this list and their lists pro-
Kruglanski, A. W. 0.63 –0.54 31 1.79 70
Snyder, M. 0.51 0.91 62 0.10 34 vides further validity for our data. An overlap implies
Berscheid, E. 0.51 1.05 65 –0.04 31 that there is at least some temporal stability in the lead-
Smith, E. R. 0.48 0.77 59 0.19 36 ers of the field. It also goes beyond the overlap between
Kahneman, D. 0.39 0.35 50 0.43 41 the GFL and HK Handbooks noted earlier. The earlier
Note: GFL = Gilbert, Fiske, and Lindzey (1998); HK = Higgins and analysis implies some generality across handbooks.
Kruglanski (1996). An overlap between our data and the Gordon and

74
 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS

Vicari data would imply that this list is not due to Table 2. All Frequently Mentioned Contributors
something special about handbooks but that they re- GFL HK
flect the field more generally. Handbook Handbook
Analyses reveal both temporal stability in the list
Contributors M N(z) N(z) N N(z) N
and generality across sources of data. The overlap
among the present FMCs and the most frequently text- Abelson, R. P. –0.13 0.16 46 –0.42 23
book cited authors for the late 1980s is over 50%: 53 of Ajzen, I. –0.39 –0.59 30 –0.19 28
Allport, G. W. –0.22 0.07 44 –0.51 21
the 104 contributors identified as most frequently cited
Asch, S. E. –0.36 0.12 45 –0.84 14
in textbooks are also among our FMCs. Further, the Banaji, M. R. –0.72 –0.49 32 –0.94 12
FMCs identified by the earlier textbooks are higher on Bandura, A. –0.53 –0.73 27 –0.33 25
the FMC list (M = .29) than the FMCs not so identified Bargh, J. A. 2.79 1.85 82 3.72 111
(M = –.29). There is also some overlap between our Baumeister, R. F. 0.36 0.91 62 –0.19 28
Bem, D. J. –0.72 –0.54 31 –0.89 13
FMCs and the list of most frequent contributors to the
Berscheid, E. 0.51 1.05 65 –0.04 31
three major journals in the 1980s. A third of the 100 Bond, M. H. –0.97 –1.06 20 –0.89 13
most frequent contributors in the 1980s is on our list of Brehm, J. W. –1.00 –1.06 20 –0.94 12
FMCs. Also, FMCs identified as being a heavy con- Brewer, M. B. 0.83 1.76 80 –0.09 30
tributor to the journals in the 1980s have higher stan- Brown, J. D. –0.81 –0.96 22 –0.66 18
Brown, R. J. –0.11 0.54 54 –0.75 16
dard scores (M = .31) than FMCs that are not so identi-
Bruner, J. S. 0.04 –0.45 33 0.52 43
fied (M = –.14). It is interesting to note that our Buss, D. M. –0.15 0.12 45 –0.42 23
handbook data are more closely related to the text- Cacioppo, J. T. 1.56 1.34 71 1.79 70
books citations list than it is to publication of journal Cantor, N. E. –0.64 –0.96 22 –0.33 25
articles list. Interpreting such a difference is very diffi- Carlston, D. E. –0.53 –0.77 26 –0.28 26
Carver, C. S. –0.34 –0.82 25 0.14 35
cult. There are differences in time of publication, in-
Chaiken, S. 2.34 1.85 82 2.83 92
tended audience, emphasis on history, and so forth, as Cialdini, R. B. –0.22 0.35 50 –0.80 15
well as source. However, it is tempting to speculate that Clark, M. S. –0.81 –1.01 21 –0.61 19
gatekeepers of organized representations of the field— Cooper, J. –0.60 –0.87 24 –0.33 25
that is, handbook and textbook writers—may be pay- Crocker, J. –0.22 0.12 45 –0.56 20
Darley, J. M. –0.29 –0.26 37 –0.33 25
ing more attention to and agreeing on the “importance”
Davis, K. E. –0.88 –0.96 22 –0.80 15
or interest value of primary publications rather than the Deaux, K. –0.62 –0.31 36 –0.94 12
simple presence (frequency) of publications. Deutsch, M. –0.29 –0.45 33 –0.14 29
As a tribute to what all of these FMCs have done for Devine, P. G. 0.13 0.30 49 –0.04 31
the field, the complete list of all 106 names is presented Eagly, A. H. 1.94 2.32 92 1.56 65
Ekman, P. –0.62 –0.40 34 –0.84 14
in Table 2. They are in alphabetical order so you can
Fazio, R. H. 1.02 1.19 68 0.85 50
easily see if the person who inspired you most is on the Festinger, L. 0.74 1.05 65 0.43 41
list—or, perhaps more likely, so you can see if your Fishbein, M. –0.57 –0.73 27 –0.42 23
own name, your major professor’s name, or your grad- Fiske, S. T. 3.30 4.10 130 2.50 85
uate school rival’s name is on the list. Gilbert, D. T. 0.88 1.38 72 0.38 40
Greenberg, J. –0.53 –0.68 28 –0.37 24
Greenwald, A. G. –0.50 –0.21 38 –0.80 15
Hamilton, D. L. –0.50 –0.68 28 –0.33 25
Self-Serving Bias? An Aside Hastie, R. –0.22 –0.31 36 –0.14 29
Heider, F. –0.27 –0.21 38 –0.33 25
You will notice that a number of people well placed Higgins, E. T. 3.33 1.52 75 5.13 141
Hilton, J. L. –0.76 –1.06 20 –0.47 22
on the list are also GFL or HK Handbook editors and
Hixon, J. G. –0.90 –0.87 24 –0.94 12
chapter authors. The frequent appearance of these Hogg, M. A. –0.41 –0.68 28 –0.14 29
names may be due to bias. For example, it could be due James, W. –0.67 –1.06 20 –0.28 26
to an author’s greater familiarity with his or her own Janis, I. –0.86 –0.96 22 –0.75 16
work, or it could be a simple self-serving bias (i.e., we Jones, E. E. 1.58 2.79 102 0.38 40
Kahneman, D. 0.39 0.35 50 0.43 41
mention our own work because we are convinced of its
Kelley, H. H. 2.13 1.85 82 2.40 83
importance). On the other hand, clearly the editors Kenny, D. A. –0.15 0.40 51 –0.70 17
would invite the most accomplished from among us to Kitayama, S. 0.04 0.49 53 –0.42 23
write these chapters. Moreover, the authors’ own work Kruglanski, A. W. 0.63 –0.54 31 1.79 70
would fall most squarely in the area that they were re- Kunda, Z. –0.64 –1.06 20 –0.23 27
Levine, J. M. –0.32 –0.21 38 –0.42 23
viewing. Before engaging any of these explanations,
Lewin, K. –0.10 0.02 43 –0.23 27
however, it would be useful to first see if authors were Mackie, D. M. –0.15 –0.21 38 –0.09 30
actually mentioned “too frequently.” Markus, H. R. 0.81 1.19 68 0.43 41
If, overall, the authors of one handbook are sampling
the same field as the authors of the other handbook, then (continued)

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 TESSER & BAU

Table 2. (Continued) ased, we would expect number of mentions in one

GFL HK handbook to be predicted by number of mentions in the
Handbook Handbook second handbook, and authors’status should make little
difference. Suppose authors are objective but are people
Contributors M N(z) N(z) N N(z) N
who have made particularly noteworthy contributions.
Martin, L. L. –0.10 –1.01 21 0.80 49 Author status would have a positive impact on mentions.
McGuire, W. J. –0.46 –0.31 36 –0.61 19 However, if that impact is objective, then it should be re-
Messick, D. M. –0.79 –1.06 20 –0.51 21
flected in both handbooks—that is, being an author
Miller, D. T. –0.06 –0.45 33 0.33 39
Mills, J. –0.97 –1.06 20 –0.89 13 should have a similar positive weight regardless of
Mischel, W. –0.22 –0.77 26 0.33 39 whether he or she is an author for the GFL or HK Hand-
Moreland, R. L. –0.67 –0.54 31 –0.80 15 book. In sum, if mentions are objective, then author sta-
Nisbett, R. E. 0.95 1.66 78 0.24 37 tus should have no impact—or author status should have
Petty, R. E. 1.77 1.94 84 1.60 66
a similar impact—regardless of handbook. If, however,
Pittman, T. S. –0.65 –0.40 34 –0.89 13
Pratto, F. –0.95 –1.06 20 –0.84 14 authors are self-serving, then being an author in the cri-
Pruitt, D. G. –0.41 –0.45 33 –0.37 24 terion handbook should have a more positive impact on
Pyszczynski, T. A. –0.76 –1.06 20 –0.47 22 number of mentions than being an author in the predic-
Reis, H. T. –0.39 –0.26 37 –0.51 21 tor handbook.
Rholes, W. S. –0.55 –1.06 20 –0.04 31
The resulting equations for predicting mentions in
Ross, L. 0.74 0.91 62 0.57 44
Ross, M. –0.43 –0.73 27 –0.14 29 both handbooks were similar. The R2 for predicting
Ruble, D. N. –0.17 –0.21 38 –0.14 29 number of mentions in HK is .57, p < .001. The most
Schachter, S. –0.15 0.26 48 –0.56 20 reliable predictor of number of mentions in the HK
Scheier, M. F. –0.55 –0.96 22 –0.14 29 Handbook is the number of mentions in GFL Hand-
Schwarz, N. 0.84 0.12 45 1.56 65
book, B = .77, t(102) = 10.06, p < .001. Being an author
Sherman, S. J. –0.57 –0.96 22 –0.19 28
Singer, J. E. –0.79 –0.96 22 –0.61 19 in the HK Handbook also has a huge impact on number
Smith, E. R. 0.48 0.77 59 0.19 36 of mentions in the HK Handbook. Authors are men-
Snyder, M 0.51 0.91 62 0.10 34 tioned much more frequently than nonauthors, B =
Srull, T. K. –0.06 –0.68 28 0.57 44 17.76, t(102) = 5.28, p < .001. If authors are mentioned
Stangor, C. –0.62 –0.82 25 –0.42 23
more frequently because they are particularly notewor-
Steele, C. M. –0.43 0.07 44 –0.94 12
Strack, F. –0.24 –0.92 23 0.43 41 thy, then author status in the GFL Handbook should
Swann, W. B., Jr. –0.27 –0.31 36 –0.23 27 similarly impact number of mentions in the HK Hand-
Tajfel, H. –0.18 –0.02 42 –0.33 25 book. Author status in the GFL Handbook does have a
Taylor, S. E. 1.89 1.85 82 1.93 73 sizeable impact on mentions in the HK Handbook, but
Tesser, A. 0.13 0.12 45 0.14 35
it is opposite in sign, B = –16.70, t(102) = –4.74, p <
Tetlock, P. E. –0.06 0.26 48 –0.37 24
Thibaut, J. W. 0.08 –0.16 39 0.33 39 .001. There are four classes of author status. FMCs
Triandis, H. C. –0.67 –0.40 34 –0.94 12 who are authors in HK but not in GFL are mentioned
Turner, J. C. –0.01 –0.16 39 0.14 35 17.76 times more often than would be expected based
Tversky, A. 0.32 0.40 51 0.24 37 on the number of mentions in GFL. FMCs who are au-
Wegener, D. T. –0.27 –0.16 39 –0.37 24
thors in HK (add 17.76 mentions) and also authors in
Wegner, D. M. 0.15 0.30 49 0.00 32
Wicklund, R. A. –0.95 –0.96 22 –0.94 12 GFL (subtract 16.70) come out close to what would be
Wilson, T. D. –0.62 –0.31 36 –0.94 12 predicted by the number of mentions in GFL. How-
Wood, W. –0.69 –0.73 27 –0.66 18 ever, if there is a self-serving bias, then the number of
Wyer, R. S., Jr. –0.10 –0.12 40 –0.09 30 mentions in GFL is already inflated by authors in GFL.
Zajonc, R. B. 0.69 1.29 70 0.10 34
The subtracted mentions are simply a correction for
Zanna, M. P. 0.65 1.10 66 0.19 36
that inflation. Similarly, contributors who are not au-
Note: GFL = Gilbert, Fiske, and Lindzey (1998); HK = Higgins and thors in HK but are authors in GFL appear to be under-
Kruglanski (1996). mentioned by 16.70 in HK. Again, we may simply be
subtracting out the number of self-serving mentions in
GFL. Finally, number of mentions in HK for FMCs
the number of mentions in one handbook should be pro- who are authors in neither volume are simply predict-
portional to the number of mentions in the second hand- able from the number of mentions in GFL. We interpret
book regardless of status as an author. Therefore, we re- this pattern as being consistent with a self-serving bias.
gressed the number of mentions for each FMC in one The pattern for predicting number of mentions in
handbook on three predictors: (a) the number of men- GFL is very similar: R2 = .64, p < .01; the coefficient
tions in the other handbook, (b) author status in the crite- for predicting number of mentions in GFL from HK is
rion handbook (coded author = 1, nonauthor = 0), and (c) B = .65, t(102) = 10.06, p < .001; the coefficient for
author status in the predictor handbook (coded author = predicting mentions in GFL from being an author in
1, nonauthor = 0). Again, if mentions frequency is unbi- GFL is B = 22.75, t(102) = 8.25; p < .001; the coeffi-

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 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
cient for predicting mentions in GFL from being an au-
thor in HK is negative, B = –11.40, t(102) = –3.47, p <
.001. As noted previously, the pattern of coefficients
associated with author status seems consistent with a
self-serving bias interpretation.
Characteristics of the FMCs
Now that we have an idea of who are among the
most influential social psychologists of the 1990s, do
we know anything else about them? Yes, we do. I
looked up each of the FMCs in the American Psycho-
logical Association (APA) directory (2000 APA Mem-
bership Register, 2000) and the American Psychologi-
cal Society directory (Membership Directory of the
American Psychological Society, 1998), checked the
Internet, wrote directly to a few colleagues, and used
my own knowledge to fill in some of the information
about each of these people.
Gender
The FMCs are mostly male, about 83%. Only 18 of
the 106 FMCs are female. Clearly the number of women
in the sample is not representative of our discipline. Ac-
cording to the 1997 APA Directory Survey (APA Re-
search Office, n.d.), with new member updates for 1998,
Division 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy) of the APA is 65% male. Overall, there is propor-
tionally twice the number of women in the division as a
whole as there are among the FMCs. More interesting,
however, is the gender breakdown by status in the divi-
sion. As can be seen in Figure 2, almost 50% of the mem-
bers at the Associate level are women. This drops to 21%
at the Fellow level, a figure that is only 4% higher than
the proportion in our elite sample.
Figure 2. Gender distribution in APA’s Division 8 by member-
ship status and in the current set of FMCs. (Source of Division 8
data is an APA Research Office document titled “1997 APA Di-
rectory Survey, with new member updates for 1998,” n.d.)
The gender difference has no easy explanation. In-
deed, many of us in social psychology are engaged in
showing how such differences can emerge even if there
are no differences in ability or productivity. Part of it, at
least, may be a simple cohort effect. Indeed, the aver-
age degree date (see the following) for male FMCs is
more than a decade later than it is for women, 1965 ver-
sus 1978, respectively. To look at it another way, there
are no women among the quartile of FMCs with the
oldest degrees, four in the next quartile, seven in the
next, and seven in the quartile containing FMCs with
the most recent degrees. We see in the next section that
the most productive among us have been around for a
while. Thus, although the gender difference may re-
flect bias, it also may simply reflect the demographics
of the field for the period in which the work was done.
It is noteworthy that the female FMCs, as few as
there are, are on average more influential than the men.
The mean number of standard mentions (averaged over
HK and GFL Handbooks) is .34 for women versus –.07
for men. Because of the huge skew in the mentions
data, however, the median of the standard mentions
(averaged over HK and GFL Handbooks) may be a
more appropriate index of central tendency. Here, too,
the women do a bit better than the men with respective
medians of –.16 versus –.27.
Age of Degree
How long have our FMCs been at it? One piece of
information posted for each contributor is the year in
which his or her PhD was awarded. This distribution of
these years is shown in Figure 3 (N = 106).
There are several observations to make about this
distribution. First, there is some, but not very much, fo-
cus on our history. There is very little acknowledge-
ment of our classical roots in philosophy; rather, we
tend to cite modern contributors to social psychology.
The person with the oldest degree to appear on this list
is William James, who received his MD degree in
1869. He is followed in time by Kurt Lewin (1916),
Figure 3. Frequency distribution of year of highest degree for
group of FMCs. Note that the year 1930 represents the year 1930
and all of the previous years.
77
 TESSER & BAU
Fritz Heider (1920), Gordon Allport (1922), and Solo-
mon Asch (1932); with those five names, we are al-
ready into the 1940s.
Figure 3 shows a steady decrease in the number of
persons frequently mentioned as their degree gets
more than 20 years from the handbook publication
dates. Indeed, 88% of this group of contributors were
alive when the handbooks were published. This em-
phasis on the work of contemporary scientists proba-
bly reflects a number of things. The discipline has
been growing, and there were simply fewer social
psychologists around in the olden days (i.e.,
pre-1977); or, it could reflect the emphasis on newer,
often more sophisticated research findings (Reis &
Stiller, 1992); or it could reflect the lack of a “stan-
dard paradigm” with well-developed historical roots.
Therefore, we are not particularly driven by historical
tradition as reflected in the work of a pantheon of
early giants. Perhaps this is a good thing for a scien-
tific discipline with an empirical base.
On the other hand, it does take some time to build a
career. Figure 3 clearly shows a drop in the number of
FMCs with degrees more than 20 years old, but it also
shows a drop in the number of contributors with de-
grees less than 20 years old. Ninety percent of the sam-
ple received their degree in 1950 or more recently.
Only 15% of the sample received their doctoral degree
more recently than 1985, and 15% received their de-
gree in 1954 or earlier. So 70% of our frequent contri-
butors received their degree in a 35-year window. Half
of our frequent contributors received their degree in an
18-year window between 1961 and 1978. The hand-
books were published in 1996 and 1998. The contribu-
tions of FMCs are acknowledged 20 to 37 years after
the degree. In round numbers, it takes an average of 20
to 35 years of productivity to be recognized as particu-
larly influential in our field, and that recognition ap-
pears to continue for about 20 to 30 years.
A comparison between Division 8 Fellows (APA
Research Office, n.d.) and our HK and GFL Handbook
FMCs may be of interest. As can be seen in Figure 4,
the FMCs are a bit younger than the Fellows: Using
1997, the average publication date of the handbooks, as
the standard, about 46% of the FMCs had their degree
less than 25 years compared to about 25% of the Fel-
lows; that is, almost 75% of the Fellows have had their
degrees for more than 25 years and only about 54% of
the Fellows have had their degrees for more than 25
years—and that includes the FMCs who are deceased.
There is one obvious potential explanation for why
our elite FMC sample is younger than our respected
Fellows. Once Fellow status is achieved, it is held for
life. Persons may continue to be Fellows even after
they are actively producing scholarship. By contrast, a
particular work does not continue to be cited unless the
work is seminal and the topic remains lively. Citations
depend on their timeliness and relevance to question at
78
Figure 4. Comparison of the age of the degrees of APA Division
8 Fellows and the FMCs. Note that age of degree is computed
from 1997, the year between the publication of the GFL (1998)
and the HK (1996) Handbooks.
hand, regardless of the investigator’s previous achieve-
ments. Fellow status depends critically on a corpus of
work that may take many years to accumulate.
Even for the FMCs, however, it is unusual to have
one’s work recognized by frequent citations very early
in one’s career—that is, within the first 15 years.
Therefore, I would like to recognize the eight most re-
cent graduates in this category by mentioning their
names in the order of their degree date: Duane
Wegener, 1994; J. G. Hixon, 1991; Felicia Pratto,
1988; Shinobu Kitayama, 1987; and the wonderful
class of 1986—Mahzarin Banaji, Trish Devine,
Jonathon Brown, and Chuck Stangor.
Current Affiliations
Where do our FMCs work? I was able to determine
the location for 99% (n = 105) of these people for the
time that the handbooks came out (1996–1998), or in
the case of the deceased contributors, where they last
worked. It seems as if there are highly visible and pro-
ductive people almost everywhere. Nevertheless, there
are some institutions that are home to a disproportion-
ate number of our FMCs. These places will come as no
surprise to most of you.
As can be seen in Table 3, they include the usual
suspects: Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, Columbia,
New York University, Ohio State, and Yale. The pres-
ence of the University of Waterloo in the top half of the
list reminds us that social psychology is international
and that influences outside of the United States are be-
coming more important. Indeed, I think the handbooks
provide only a hint of the increasing importance of
those influences in the most recent developments in
our science.
Figure 5 plots the cumulative percentage of FMCs
against the institutions rank ordered for the number of
FMCs they employ. This figure helps to show the dis-
proportionate number of home institutions to number
of scholars. First, all 105 FMCs are employed by only
 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS

Table 3. Affiliations of Frequent Contributors FMCs are well respected and desirable, so they have
Affiliation N choices as to where they will be. Clearly there are
many factors that affect such choices. They may
Princeton University 6 choose to be among other FMCs, but geographical
Stanford University 6
University of Michigan 5
preferences, salaries, resources, institutional prestige,
Columbia University 4 and so forth also certainly play a role.
New York University 4
The Ohio State University 4
Yale University 4
Degree Institutions
Harvard University 3
Purdue University 3 Our FMCs tend to work at the same institutions. Did
University of Connecticut 3
they also go to the same schools? Table 4 lists the insti-
University of Illinois 3
University of Maryland 3 tutions granting PhDs to the largest number of frequent
University of Waterloo 3 contributors. (Data was available on 105 FMCs.) Not
Carnegie-Mellon University 2 surprisingly, the degree-granting institutions are much
Indiana University 2 the same as the institutions at which these scholars
Northwestern University 2
work. Again, also tucked in among the familiar, presti-
Texas A & M 2
University of California, Santa Barbara 2 gious U.S. universities, there is a hint of the increasing
University of Georgia 2 internationalization of the discipline. We can see the
University of Kansas 2 influence of Henri Tajfel with the presence of the Uni-
University of Massachusetts 2 versity of Bristol on the list. The University of
University of Minnesota 2
Mannheim in Germany is also on the list. Again, how-
University of Pittsburgh 2
University of Texas 2 ever, on the whole the present data may underrepresent
University of Virginia 2 non-U.S. social psychology.
University of California, Los Angeles 2 Perhaps what is most striking when looking at the
Institutions with a Single FMC 28 distribution of the institutions at which our FMCs
Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor. earned their PhD is its skew. We saw this kind of
skew when we looked at current affiliations; however,
the inequality among degree-granting institutions is
54 institutions. Moreover, these 54 institutions are not even greater. It takes 54 institutions to describe where
equal among themselves. An even distribution of the FMCs work (see Figure 5); it takes only 34 insti-
scholars to institutions would generate a straight line. tutions to describe where they received their degree.
As can be seen in Figure 5, there is a decided bend in Three schools—Michigan, Harvard, and Yale—ac-
the curve indicating disproportionality. Indeed, the top count for almost 30% of the PhDs of our FMCs. If
4 institutions are home to more than 20% of the FMCs; we include Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Ohio
the top 10 institutions employ 40% of the FMCs. Our State, and University of California, Los Angeles, we

Figure 5. Cumulative percentage of frequent contributors plotted against rank-ordered institutions of employment. The institution em-
ploying the largest number of affiliated FMCs is ranked 1.

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 TESSER & BAU

Table 4. Degree Granting Institutions of Frequent there is an even greater concentration of talent at rela-
Contributors tively few institutions. Moreover, the concentration is
Institution N clearly greater at the degree-granting institutions than
at the current affiliations.
University of Michigan 12
There are a number of possible explanations for the
Harvard University 9
Ohio State University 7 greater concentration of talent at the degree-granting
Princeton University 7 institutions. Perhaps one’s initial training has a greater
Yale University 6 impact on productivity than one’s immediate col-
Columbia University 5 leagues. Having been trained at a great institution al-
Stanford University 4
lows one to be productive anywhere. Another possibil-
University of Illinois 4
University Minnesota 4 ity is that students turn over more quickly than do
University of Texas, Austin 4 faculty, so there is simply a greater throughput of stu-
University of California, Los Angeles 4 dents than faculty in the most prestigious universities.
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 3 Even at a place like the University of Michigan, where
New York University 3
the number of social psychologists is large, the number
University of Bristol 3
University of Iowa 3 of faculty does not come close to the number of PhDs
University of North Carolina 3 they have produced in the last 50 or 60 years. Perhaps
Duke University 2 the lesser skew among current affiliation institutions
Northwestern University 2 than among degree-granting institutions reflects the
University of California, Berkeley 2
relative youthfulness of the discipline. Perhaps as more
University of Kansas 2
University of Mannheim 2 centers of excellence become prominent around the
University of Massachusetts 2 world, there will be a more even distribution in the
Single Mentions 12 places where productive scientists get their degree.

Similarities Among Contributors

have accounted for the degrees of over half (55%) of
the group of FMCs!
Perhaps the relative inequality can be seen most
clearly in Figure 6. The straight line is simply a point of
comparison. It describes what would happen if all in-
stitutions were equal and each institution employed
two current FMC affiliates, or granted degrees to two
FMCs, or both. This line already implies some concen-
tration of talent in that there are many more de-
gree-granting institutions than 53. The steep increase
(relative to the straight line) of both the current affilia-
tion curve and the degree institution curve indicate that
Figure 6. Cumulative percentage of frequent contributors plot-
ted against institution rank ordered for (a) number of degrees
granted to FMCs (institution granting degrees to the largest
number of FMCs is ranked 1) and (b) number of FMCs em-
ployed by institution (institution employing the largest number
of FMCs is ranked 1). The “equal distribution” line is a hypo-
thetical baseline that assumes that each institution has two
FMCs associated with it.
Each of the people in this sample has made a unique
contribution to social psychology. However, there may
be similar patterns of contributions, and it may be in-
structive to see groups of people who have a similar
thread in their work. Again, I turned to the author index
of the handbooks to address this set of questions. I rea-
soned simply that if two contributors were discussed in
the same context, then their work is more similar to one
another than if they were discussed in separate con-
texts. On the basis of this reasoning, I constructed an
index of similarity for all pairs of contributors.
Within each handbook, each mention of each con-
tributor was compared to every other mention for every
other person in the sample. If the two mentions were in
the same chapter, then 1 similarity point was issued; if
they were within two pages of one another, a 2nd point
was given; within one page, a 3rd point; and if on the
same page,7 a 4th point. All other mention locations re-
ceived no points. The points for a single mention of
Contributor X were summed over all the mentions of
Contributor Y. The maximum similarity between Con-
tributor X and Contributor Y for a single mention of
Contributor X was set to 4 points.8 The overall similar-
7Reference pages were omitted for this analysis.
8Theoretically, and in practice, the number of points for a single
mention between one contributor and another can exceed 4. For exam-
ple, for a single mention for Contributor X, Contributor Y might have
one mention on the same page (4 points) and another mention on the
next page (3 points), yielding a total of 7 points. As noted in the text,
point balances of more than 4 for any single mention were set to 4.

80
 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
ity of Contributor X to Contributor Y is the similarity of
X to Y averaged over all mentions of X.
This index of similarity is crude, but it has some fea-
tures worth noting. First, a high similarity score can re-
flect several mentions in the same broad “ballpark,” or
a single closely related mention, or some combination
of these. Second, combining information at the single
mention level is nonlinear; there is a maximum similar-
ity. Finally, because the similarity of X to Y is averaged
over the number of mentions of X, and the similarity of
Y to X is averaged over the number of mentions of Y, the
similarity of Contributor X to Contributor Y is not nec-
essarily equivalent to the similarity of Y to X. Accord-
ing to Tversky (1977), this kind of asymmetry may
more realistically capture the psychology of similarity
perception than symmetrical similarities.
We found that the GFL Handbook and the HK
Handbook identified a highly overlapping set of
FMCs. Do these handbooks also identify the same
structure among the FMCs? Each FMC has a similar-
ity to each of the other 105 FMCs in the GFL Hand-
book and in the HK Handbook. If the structure in the
two handbooks is similar, then the pattern of similari-
ties of each FMC to all the others should be similar in
each of the handbooks. To assess this, for each of the
106 FMCs we computed a correlation between the
similarity scores in the GFL Handbook with the simi-
larity scores in the HK Handbook across the 105
other FMCs. The resulting correlations suggest that
the two handbooks do structure the FMCs in a similar
way. All 106 correlations are positive and signifi-
cantly different from zero, p < .02. The median corre-
lation is .60. Because both handbooks seem to struc-
ture the FMCs in a similar way, for the sake of
simplicity we simply averaged the 106 × 106 similar-
ity matrix across handbooks.
Extracting the Structure
Among Contributors
There are many ways to analyze this 106 × 106 sim-
ilarity matrix to extract commonalities among the
FMCs. Most of these techniques boil down to two ap-
proaches: One set of techniques groups contributors
into qualitatively different clusters of people; the other
finds contributor dimensions and computes weights or
“loadings” for each person on each dimension.
A problem with the clustering approach is that one
tends to interpret everyone in a group as equally repre-
sentative of what is common to the group. However, as
the group increases in size, some people become more
peripheral than others. On the other side of the coin,
once a person is placed into one group it becomes diffi-
cult to see his or her connections with other groups. A
dimensional or factor approach allows for persons to
have affinities to more than one commonality among
the contributors; that is, an individual can have high
loadings on more than one factor. On the other hand, a
contributor may be unique with little in common with
others. Such an individual would have small, or near
zero, loadings on all of the factors. Knowledge of the
particular people with high loadings on the same factor
then serves as the basis for interpretation.
We decided to extract contributor dimensions using
a factor analytic approach. This approach typically
starts with a symmetrical correlation matrix. Recall
that our matrix consists of similarity points, not corre-
lations; and, it is asymmetrical, not symmetrical (i.e.,
the similarity of FMC X to FMC Y is not necessarily the
same as the similarity of FMC Y to FMC X). We con-
verted the similarity matrix to a symmetrical correla-
tion matrix as follows. As noted previously, each FMC
has a similarity score to every other FMC. We simply
correlated these vectors for every pair of FMCs. (Simi-
larities involving the two FMCs whose vectors were
being correlated were omitted, i.e., vectors were 104
elements, not 106 elements, long.) This resulted in a
106 × 106 correlation matrix in which each of the cor-
relations reflects the extent to which the two FMCs are
alike in their similarity to every other FMC.
The results of an initial analysis of this matrix sug-
gested that we rotate eight factors. We selected an
eight-factor solution for several reasons: An examina-
tion of the scree plot showed some flattening after the
eighth factor; the eigenvalue for the eighth component
was greater than 2.3, and the ninth component was well
below 2.0; and a solution with eight factors seems par-
simonious enough to be interpretable and large enough
to be inclusive. Reducing the number of factors ap-
peared to merge distinctive lines of research, and in-
cluding more factors seemed to stretch interpretability.
Therefore we report an analysis in which eight factors
were extracted and subjected to a varimax (orthogonal)
rotation. Together, these eight factors accounted for
84% of the variance in the correlation matrix.
Contributor Factors
The first rotated factor, at 56%, easily accounts for
the lion’s share of the explained variance in FMC simi-
larity. Indeed, it accounts for more then four and a half
times the variance of its nearest competitor. I am sure
that you did not need convincing, but the 1990s is clearly
a decade of social psychology that belongs to Social
Cognition. There are many FMCs with substantial load-
ings on this factor. Table 5 lists the 20 FMCs with the
highest loading on this factor. The presence of names
like Don Carlston, Tom Srull, Eliot Smith, William
Rholes, Bob Wyer, Dave Hamilton, John Bargh, Tory
Higgins, Lenny Martin, and Jerry Bruner make the iden-
tity of this factor as Social Cognition fairly easy.
It is worth pointing out that this appears to be a uni-
directional factor. The loadings range from very high
positive numbers to numbers around zero. Table 5 in-
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 TESSER & BAU

Table 5. FMC Factor 1: Social Cognition Table 6. FMC Factor 2: Attitudes

Contributor Factor Loading Contributor Factor Loading

Carlston, D. E. .92 Wood, W. .93

Srull, T. K. .92 Janis, I. .93
Smith, E. R. .92 McGuire, W. J. .92
Rholes, W. S. .89 Petty, R. E. .90
Wyer, R. S., Jr. .85 Eagly, A. H. .90
Hamilton, D. L. .81 Wegener, D. T. .89
Bargh, J. A. .81 Chaiken, S. .88
Higgins, E. T. .81 Cacioppo, J. T. .86
Martin, L. L. .80 Fishbein, M. .77
Bruner, J. S. .78 Ajzen, I. .74
Strack, F. .76 Mackie, D. M. .71
Schwarz, N. .76 Zanna, M. P. .68
Hastie, R. .76 Bem, D. J. .67
Sherman, S. J. .76 Greenwald, A. G. .67
Stangor, C. .76 Cialdini, R. B. .66
Devine, P. G. .73 Fazio, R. H. .66
Fiske, S. T. .71 Tesser, A. .65
Banaji, M. R. .71 Cooper, J. .65
Pratto, F. .69 Festinger, L. .64
Gilbert, D. T. .69 Kruglanski, A. W. .57
Pruitt, D. G. –.12 Reis, H. T. –.07
Deutsch, M. –.15 Bond, M. H. –.10

Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor. Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor.

cludes the two individuals with the lowest (most nega- Snyder, Swann, Darley, and Hilton. There is even a
tive) loading on this factor to illustrate the point. I make Princeton connection: Darley, Kunda, Hilton, Swann,
note of it because unidirectionality in these factors ap- Miller, and Jones. Table 7 lists the 20 highest loading
pears to be the usual case and it makes sense. For ex- FMCs and a couple of low-loading FMCs.
ample, one may do social cognition research and that Factor 4 accounted for 8% of the explained variance
would be reflected in a positive loading; or, one may do (see Table 8). The people who lead this factor are Mike
work that is largely independent of social cognition Scheier, Chuck Carver, Walter Mischel, Bob Wick-
and that would result in a low loading on the factor. It is lund, Albert Bandura, Dan Wegner, Roy Baumeister,
difficult, however, to even conceptualize what it means Nancy Cantor, Jack Brehm, and William James. It is
to make contributions that are so antithetical to the so-
cial cognition area so as to result in a substantial nega- Table 7. FMC Factor 3: Motivated Attribution
tive loading on the factor.
The second factor accounted for approximately Contributor Factor Loading
12% of the explained variance. Table 6 shows the 20 Darley, J. M. .77
top loading and the 3 lowest loading FMCs. This fac- Greenberg, J. .75
tor, like Factor 1, appears easy to identify. The FMCs Pyszczynski, T. A. .74
Kunda, Z. .73
who lead the list have all made substantial and highly
Hilton, J. L. .72
visible contributions to the attitudes area. They include Swann, W. B., Jr. .70
Wendy Wood, Irv Janis, Bill McGuire, Rich Petty, Al- Miller, D. T. .65
ice Eagly, Duane Wegener, Shelley Chaiken, John Snyder, M. .63
Cacioppo, Marty Fishbein, and Icek Ajzen. Jones, E. E. .59
Ross, M. .58
Factor 3 accounted for 9% of the explained vari-
Crocker, J. .57
ance. I have named it Motivated Attribution, but the Pittman, T. S. .57
commonality among the highest loading contributors Heider, F. .56
is not as clear to me as it was for Factors 1 and 2. Kruglanski, A. W. .56
Names like Jones, Miller, Darley, and Hilton have clear Nisbett, R. E. .55
Taylor, S. E. .50
connections to attribution theory; people like Ross, Ross, L. .48
Kunda, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg have clearly ad- Davis, K. E. .47
dressed motivational issues in attribution—as has Tetlock, P. E. .46
nearly everyone else on the list. There are at least a Tversky, A. .45
couple of other themes as well: Several of the FMCs Moreland, R. L. –.14
Ekman, P. –.16
have reported research on self-confirmation and inter-
personal aspects of attribution theory—for example, Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor.

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 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS

not difficult to recognize this as a factor having to do Table 9. FMC Factor 5: Interpersonal Influence
with research on the self. Contributor Factor Loading
The fifth factor accounted for 5% of the explained
variance and is host to people like Dean Pruitt, John Pruitt, D. G. .88
Thibaut, J. W. .88
Thibaut, Morton Deutsch, David Messick, John Le- Deutsch, M. .87
vine, Dick Mooreland, Hal Kelley, Jud Mills, Solomon Messick, D. M. .84
Asch, and Bob Cialdini. It looks like we have gone Levine, J. M. .78
from the intrapersonal focus associated with social Moreland, R. L. .78
cognition, attitudes, attribution, and self to a concern Kelley, H. H. .76
Mills, J. .54
with the interpersonal. I have named this factor Inter- Asch, S. E. .52
personal Influence, but the presence of people like Cialdini, R. B. .49
Berscheid, Clark, and Mills also gives the factor a hint Festinger, L. .49
of relationship research. Table 9 lists the 20 highest Lewin, K. .48
loading FMCs on this factor. Ross, L. .47
Clark, M. S. .47
The sixth factor also accounted for 5% of the ex- Kenny, D. A. .45
plained variance (see Table 10). This factor appears to Hogg, M. A. .44
go a step up on the scale from intrapersonal and inter- Berscheid, E. .40
personal to intergroup relations. I think that the label Nisbett, R. E. .39
Intergroup Relations and Stereotypes captures much of Miller, D. T. .38
Turner, J. C. .36
what is common to the work of the highest loading Pratto, F. –.11
people on this dimension. Some of these people are Banaji, M. R. –.16
Henri Tajfel, John Turner, Michael Hogg, Kay Deaux,
Rupert Brown, Marilynn Brewer, Jenny Crocker, Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor.
Mahzarin Banaji, Claude Steele, and Dick Mooreland.
Table 10 presents the names of all the FMC with load- versality. The cultural approach focuses on plasticity
ings above .30. In the case of this factor only, there are of cognition and belief; the evolutionary approach fo-
FMCs with negative loadings greater than .2. Their cuses on our common biological origins. I am basing
names and loadings are in the table, but no interpreta- my interpretation of the factor on the first six names on
tion is offered. the list. Thus, Kitayama, Bond, Triandis, and Markus
It seems unlikely to me that the Factor 7 would have are strongly associated with cultural psychology and
emerged only 10 years ago. It accounts for only 3% of Ekman and Buss with universals in behavior. However,
the explained variance, and it appears to reflect the other themes can be gleaned from this list of contribu-
field’s great interest in questions of psychological uni- tors. For example, there is a strong emotion thread with

Table 8. FMC Factor 4: Self Table 10. FMC Factor 6: Intergroup Relations and
Stereotypes
Contributor Factor Loading
Contributor Factor Loading
Scheier, M. F. .92
Carver, C. S. .90 Tajfel, H. .84
Mischel, W. .82 Turner, J. C. .83
Wicklund, R. A. .80 Hogg, M. A. .79
Bandura, A. .78 Deaux, K. .79
Wegner, D. M. .72 Brown, R. J. .78
Baumeister, R. F. .69 Brewer, M. B. .61
Cantor, N. E. .69 Crocker, J. .53
Brehm, J. W. .68 Banaji, M. R. .46
James, W. .54 Steele, C. M. .41
Brown, J. D. .53 Moreland, R. L. .36
Tesser, A. .40 Levine, J. M. .36
Steele, C. M. .39 Stangor, C. .35
Bem, D. J. .37 Allport, G. W. .34
Swann, W. B., Jr. .36 Bond, M. H. .33
Taylor, S. E. .34 Mackie, D. M. .31
Pyszczynski, T. A. .34 Messick, D. M. .30
Ruble, D. N. .32 Kahneman, D. –.20
Greenberg, J. .31 Brehm, J. W. –.22
Pittman, T. S. .30 Tversky, A. –.24
Moreland, R. L. –.08 Schachter, S. –.32
Levine, J. M. –.09 Singer, J. E. –.34

Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor. Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor.

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 TESSER & BAU

names like Ekman, James, Schacter, Singer, and Table 12. FMC Factor 8: Interpersonal Relationships
Zajonc. All FMCs with loading of .3 or higher are Contributor Factor Loading
listed in Table 11.
The final factor accounted for 3% of the common Reis, H. T. .82
Clark, M. S. .75
variance. Like Factor 5, this appears to be concerned Berscheid, E. .71
with interpersonal relationships. The emphasis here, Mills, J. .63
however, seems to be on relationships rather than influ- Kenny, D. A. .47
ence. Thus, the highest loading FMCs are Harry Reis, Ekman, P. .47
Peggy Clark, Ellen Berscheid, and Jud Mills. David Buss, D. M. .43
Singer, J. E. .41
Buss contributes to the relationship literature from an Schachter, S. .37
evolutionary perspective and also has a substantial load- Swann, W. B., Jr. .31
ing on this factor. Also, like Factor 7, there is a dose of Kelley, H. H. .31
emotion research in this factor with Ekman, Schacter, Pittman, T. S. .31
and Singer having noteworthy loadings. Table 12 lists Snyder, M. .30
Ajzen, I. –.18
the FMCs with loadings greater than .30. Fishbein, M. –.19

Something for Everyone? Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor.

Earlier I suggested that a dimensional or factor ap-

proach might be more easily interpreted because
some individuals may not fit well or easily into any ple (25%) whose work seems well represented by two of
group and others might feel equally at home in multi- these factors: For example, Banaji loads on social cogni-
ple areas. To see if this was the case in these factor tion and on intergroup relations and stereotypes,
data, I classified each contributor as having an affin- Kruglanski loads on attitudes and motivated cognition,
ity for one factor, no factors, or more than one factor. and Ekman loads on culture and evolution and on inter-
This was accomplished by simply counting the num- personal relationships. None of the FMCs have loadings
ber of factors on which the individual had loadings of of greater than .44 on three or more factors.
.45 or greater.
As expected, most of the contributors (71%) tend to Research Area and Research
specialize in one of the factors we captured. A small mi- Prominence
nority of FMCs (5%), however, have no loadings ex-
The factor loadings are calculated on the basis of the
ceeding .45 on any factor. Their contributions may be in
interpersonal similarities. From a statistical point of
areas that are not well represented by the factors—such
view, they need not bear any relation to research promi-
as developmental social psychology, Diane Ruble’s ma-
nence as reflected in the number of mentions in the
jor area—or their contributions may be seminal in so
handbooks. On the other hand, some areas may be
many areas that they can’t be pinned down, like
“hotter” or more generative than others. To explore this
Schachter and Singer. Finally, there are a group of peo-
issue, I correlated factor loadings on each of the person
factors with the mean standardized number of men-
Table 11. FMC Factor 7: Culture and Evolution
tions in the handbooks.
Contributor Factor Loading There are a couple of small but, perhaps notable cor-
Kitayama, S. .86 relations between factor scores and number of mentions
Bond, M. H. .84 in the handbooks. Persons with higher loadings on Fac-
Triandis, H. C. .81 tor 1 (Social Cognition) and on Factor 2 (Attitudes)
Markus, H. R. .78 seem to have been mentioned a bit more frequently (r =
Ekman, P. .54
Buss, D. M. .44
.24 and .23,9 respectively). One explanation for these
Lewin, K. .43 correlations is the prominence of the factors in the field.
Davis, K. E. .39 That is, these factors account for the largest proportion
James, W. .37 of the shared variance. Also, these areas tend to be asso-
Nisbett, R. E. .36 ciated with a large number of medium range, specific
Asch, S. E. .36
Schachter, S. .33
theories that may be easily transported to other areas.
Ross, L. .31 Perhaps these modest correlations reflect this kind of
Singer, J. E. .31 theoretical lending and borrowing.
Bruner, J. S. .30
Zajonc, R. B. .30
9Significance tests associated with inferential statistics are not
Mills, J. –.09
Hilton, J. L. –.11 used in this context because we are not focusing on a random sample
from some population but on the population itself of major contribu-
Note: FMC = frequently mentioned contributor. tors to the handbooks.

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 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
Summary of Similarity
The affinities of the heavy contributors to the disci-
pline appear to make sense. The factors are relatively
easy to interpret, and they seem, to me at least, to do a
good job of capturing much of what is common to what
social psychologists do. They span the intrapersonal
and the interpersonal. They show our classic concern
with attitudes and our love affair with social cognition
and social influence. We see our recent and very popu-
lar interest in stereotypes and ingroup–outgroup phe-
nomena. There is also a relatively clear factor reflect-
ing our needed, broadening focus on the issues of
biology (evolution) and culture.
Clearly these factors are not totally comprehensive.
There is no “aggression” or “altruism” factor. There are
other specific domains that might have emerged. Never-
theless, the factors that emerged do paint a broad-brush
picture of what social psychology was like in the last de-
cade of the 20th century and who was doing what.
Conclusion
To know a scientific discipline is, at least in part, to
know something about the people who are constructing
that discipline. I have attempted to provide you with a
snapshot, a picture of the people constructing social
psychology on the cusp of the 21st century. The per-
sons who have been identified will come as no surprise
to active scholars in the area. Not present are many
people whose work I admire and who I would vote to
have on such a list. I will not mention specific names
because I am sure to make some egregious omission.
However, there are at least two general categories that
appear underrepresented. As I see the field of scholars
at the moment, I am convinced that this data under-
represents the scholarship of women and of persons
outside the United States, particularly Western Europe
and Australia.
The factors that describe how we organize ourselves
also will not be a total surprise to active scholars in the
discipline. Whether this is an accurate description of
the field at this moment is an open question. The factor
structure has more familiarity than we would expect if
the discipline was changing and the factor structure re-
flected the cutting edges of those changes. The disci-
pline is changing, but there is a lag in what is reflected
in the handbooks. However, I am not sure how, pre-
cisely, to characterize those changes other than to men-
tion the obvious trend in psychology as a whole toward
a greater emphasis on neuroscience approaches.
This description is static and has a built-in lag. A
scientific discipline, like a living organism, changes
continuously. Social psychology is no exception. In-
deed, there is already a new handbook. Nevertheless, I
found it interesting to learn more about who was con-
structing the discipline in the 1990s and how they were
organized. I hope you did as well.
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