Campbell Award

2018 - Eliot R. Smith

Eliot R. Smith, Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, has made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of social psychology on an astounding number of fronts across four decades. His theoretical innovations and seminal empirical work has had a dramatic and lasting impact on theory and research in attribution, person perception, the self, social identity, group processes, intergroup processes, social influence, inequality, attitudes and attitude processing, stereotyping and prejudice, and emotion – almost every substantive area of research development within social psychology. Several of his tour-de-force reviews and analyses have been cited more than 1000 times. On the methodological front, Eliot has been a sustained voice for both rigor and innovation, while helping usher network analysis and agent based modeling into the field. The respect that the discipline has for his creativity, acumen, and wisdom is reflected in his appointment as editor of both our premier theoretical (PSPR) and our premier empirical journal (JPSP), and his election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eliot is known as a generous collaborator and a wise mentor, an integrator of American and European perspectives, and was a key developer of one of our exemplary training programs – the Summer Institute for Social Psychology. In recognition of this record of distinguished scholarly achievement, sustained excellence in research, and influential service, across a long and productive career Eliot Smith is awarded the 2018 Donald T. Campbell Award.

2017 - Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is among social psychology’s most creative theoreticians and experimentalists who has also “given away” social psychology in the form of TED talks, a video series This Emotional Life watched by millions, and a bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness. In the 1980’s, the fundamental attribution error was said to be “the most robust effect in all of social psychology.” But why did it happen? Gilbert’s suggestion that the mind generates unconscious inferences that are then consciously corrected contributed to the influence of “dual systems” models in psychology. In an intellectual tour de force, Gilbert applied this idea with Spinozan roots to show that the mind is a believing organ that must actively work to disbelieve; he was likely unaware of the deep current significance of his idea as the world grapples with how to separate true beliefs from false ones. In the late 1990s, Gilbert (with Timothy Wilson), set out to answer a deceptively simple question: can people predict their own reactions to future events? Their work on affective forecasting, showing that people systematically mispredict their hedonic reactions and cost themselves happiness, has produced a large body of publications in major journals, with thousands of citations, and impact on fields as far flung as law, finance, and medicine. In recognition of these accomplishments, Daniel Gilbert is awarded the 2017 Donald T. Campbell Award.

2016 - Mahzarin R. Banaji

Mahzarin R. Banaji has changed the way psychologists and the public at large think about the nature of stereotyping. With decades of research on unconscious cognition, particularly as it influences attitudes toward members of outgroups, she has increased our understanding of the automatic nature of prejudice. Early in her career, she and her colleagues developed the Implicit Association Test, which has been used by thousands of researchers throughout the world to assess implicit stereotypes. Banaji and her collaborators have also investigated many important facets of stereotyping and prejudice, including their neurological correlates, origins in childhood, and roots in system justification. She has also explored the implications of her research for issues of individual responsibility and social justice. In 2015 she and Tony Greenwald published, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (Delacorte, 2013), which, in the words of one reviewer, promises to “to change the way you think about yourself.” Banaji taught at Yale University from 1986 to 2002, where she was the Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. Since then she has been the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. She also served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard from 2002 to 2008. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

2015 - Brenda Major, PhD & Jennifer Crocker, PhD

The members of the Campbell Award Committee are pleased to nominate Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major for the 2015 Donald T. Campbell Award in Social Psychology for their ongoing and sustained excellence in research in social psychology.  Dr. Crocker and Dr. Major have been among the most influential scholars on social stigma, self and identity, and mental health.  Their collaborative theoretical and empirical research on social stigma and mental health challenged conventional wisdom and the zeitgeist on how stigmatized groups have been studied in social psychology over the last 25 years.  This groundbreaking work brought to the forefront of mainstream social psychology the notion that stigmatized individuals are not inherently flawed but rather their behaviors are a function of their social context.  Moreover, in an area dominated by the perception that stigmatized individuals, particularly African Americans, have low self-esteem, they showed that this is not the case.  Crocker and Major’s work has been published in the most prestigious journals in social psychology.  Individually, they each have produced over 150 journal publications and book chapters.  Collaboratively, their 15 papers have been some of the most well cited papers in social psychology.  Indeed, their 1989 Psychological Review paper, “Social stigma and self-esteem: The self-protective properties of stigma” has been cited well over 3,000 times, according to Google Scholar.  This work was conducted when both were faculty in the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  Currently, Dr. Crocker is Professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology at The Ohio State University, and Dr. Major is Professor Above-Scale in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Their distinctive research makes them well-suited to receive this honorable award. 

2014 - Norbert Schwarz, PhD

Norbert Schwarz is one of the world’s experts on human judgment, decision making, and the interplay of feeling and thinking. A consistent theme of his extraordinarily prolific body of scholarship is that human judgment is a constructive process.  With Gerald Clore he developed the “feelings as information” hypothesis, which holds that people construct their judgments about themselves and the social world by consulting their current affective state. He has found that people’s attitudes, too, are often constructed on the spot from information that is accessible, rather than reflecting long-held stable evaluations. More recently, he has shown how people use metaphors about the mind and body to construct judgments and make decisions. And for years he has demonstrated the importance of these constructive processes for applied domains, including consumer behavior and survey methodology. Schwarz obtained his doctorate at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and carried out his early research at the University of Heidelberg. He then served as Scientific Director of ZUMA (now GESIS), an interdisciplinary social science research center in Mannheim, Germany.  Schwarz established close collaborative contacts with several leading laboratories in the United States, culminating in his move to the University of Michigan where he served as the Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Ross School of Business, and Institute for Social Research.  Schwarz is currently Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Southern California.  He is an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina. 

2013 Timothy Wilson

Timothy DeCamp Wilson has made social psychology a more interesting and more important field. He is a brilliant experimentalist and insightful theorist whose research examines the many ways in which people are mistaken about themselves—mistaken about the causes of their past actions, about the unitary nature of their present attitudes, about the duration of their future happiness. Although his contributions are wide-ranging—from reasons analysis to unconscious attitudes to affective forecasting—each explores the limits of self-insight, and explains how and why we are strangers to ourselves. In addition to being an innovative and influential scientist, Wilson is a citizen-activist who "gives psychology away” in newspapers, textbooks, and trade books, and who works tirelessly to ensure that public policy is informed by scientific fact. Wilson is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, an Elected Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2012 Daniel Wegner

Dan Wegner is internationally recognized for the originality and quality of his scholarship. He is known within and beyond social psychology for his work on the role of thought in self-control and in social life. In particular, his work on thought suppression has been highly influential, showing that people who are asked not to think about something become preoccupied with thinking about that very thing. As a result, we often end up thinking about the doubts, worries, fears, and alarms that we have tried to erase from our minds. A creative and generative theoretician, his research has also broken new conceptual ground in exploring: transactive memory, or how people in groups and relationships remember things cooperatively; action identification, or what it is that people think they are doing; and conscious will and apparent mental causation, or how we are sometimes misled into thinking that we are the authors of our actions. In each of these research areas, he has identified a topic that had been neglected by previous researchers and conducted highly original and provocative experiments to demonstrate both the importance of the phenomenon and the value of the theoretical ideas he offered to account for it. Dan Wegner has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

2011 John Dovidio

John Dovidio has a stellar track record in research on stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination. In particular, together with his long-time collaborator, Samuel Gaertner, he has shown how contemporary forms of prejudice and discrimination toward Blacks and other disadvantaged groups are more subtle and less recognizable than traditional racism. Through his work on the negation of stereotypes and on the common ingroup identity model, he has also shown how to overcome the pernicious consequences of stereotyping and favoring the ingroup. In a research domain dominated by cognitive approaches, he has shown the value of embracing a variety of methods and measures, including the study of nonverbal behavior and emotion regulation, and the combination of both explicit and implicit measures. He has also made major contributions to research on interpersonal helping and prosocial behavior, through the development of the "arousal: cost-reward” model of helping. Moreover, he has shown a consistent concern to explore the social policy implications of his and others’ research. In addition to his many research achievements, he has been a terrific ambassador for the field of social psychology, working tirelessly to build bridges and to develop the discipline internationally.

2010 Russ Fazio

2009 Susan T. Fiske

2008 Carol Dweck

2007 Michael Scheier, Charles S. Carver

2006 John A. Bargh

2005 David Kenny

2004 Mark Snyder

2003 Robert Cialdini

2002 Hazel Markus

2001 Claude Steele

2000 Richard Petty, John Cacioppo

1999 Abraham Tesser

1998 Arie Kruglanski

1997 Mark Zanna

1996 E. Tory Higgins

1995 Shelley Taylor

1994 Tony Greenwald

1993 Alice Eagly

1992 Marilynn Brewer

1990 Bernard Weiner

1988 Robert Rosenthal

1986 Bibb Latane

1984 Ellen Berscheid

1982 Richard Nisbett

1980 Elliott Aronson