SPSP President's Report
Linda J. Skitka
University of Illinois at Chicago
2018 was an exciting and important year for SPSP! We completed our first diversity climate and sexual harassment surveys sponsored by the SPSP Diversity and Climate committee (co-chaired by Julie Garcia and Diana Sanchez) and the sexual harassment task force (co-chaired by Oz Ayduk and Sam Sommers). Based on the lessons learned from these surveys (available here and here) SPSP has and will be continuing to launch a number of new initiatives.
Some of the changes implemented this year included new family care grants, a presentation template designed for maximum accessibility, an increase in the number of diversity travel awards, gender inclusive bathrooms that were included on the mobile app and map, a reception specifically for international attendees, and a new Member-at-large position on the board to represent primarily undergraduate institutions.
We also hired an Ombuds service to allow conference attendees a means to report incidences of sexual harassment at the conference, and updated our SPSP code of conduct (available here). SPSP intends to continue to monitor these issues and to lead rather react to continue our efforts at inclusiveness, equity, accessibility and safety for all our members.
In addition to these new initiatives, SPSP continues its commitment to facilitate outreach by extending last year's op-ed training to include 30 new trainees in 2019 as well as three coaches assigned to support the trainees in both pitching and writing their op-eds.
We created a new Government Relations committee who will help focus SPSP's efforts in the areas of advocacy and policy work. We also restructured the Nominations and Elections Committee to make it a separate entity from the Board of Directors to promote transparency and diversity in SPSP's governance.
The International Task Force is now an ongoing International Committee within SPSP (co-chaired by Steve Heine and Nick Haslam), and we created a new Climate Task Force (co-chaired by Janet Swim and Leor Hackel) that is charged with studying and making recommendations to SPSP about ways to improve the organization's carbon footprint and to facilitate social psychological and personality science in this important area of inquiry.
The annual convention in Portland was a huge success with the largest attendance of any annual conference in SPSP history. Our membership continues to also grow: SPSP now has 7,777 members.
Finally, SPSP is expanding its conference offerings for the first time this year by offering a Summer Forum. Summer Forums are meant to be smaller collaborative meetings than the annual convention, and each annual Forum will have a specific theme that cuts across sub-disciplines of social and personality science. The theme for this summer is Big Data in Personality and Social Psychology, and will be held August 2 — 4, 2019 in St. Louis. Registration is now open here. Hope to see you there!