Doctoral Program in Social Psychology

Social, Personality, and Organizational

The social psychology program at New York University offers training in the psychological theories, principles, and research methods relevant to understanding the behavior of individuals and groups in social and organizational contexts. What distinguishes our program from many others is the combination of quality and breadth. With 13 core faculty and a number of affiliated faculty, our program is acclaimed for its cutting-edge research on a wide range of topics in the following areas:

Social cognition and attitudes: Person perception and social judgment (Jim Uleman, Yaacov Trope); relational processes, inferences about self and other (Susan Andersen); spontaneous trait inference, culture and social cognition (Jim Uleman), implicit/explicit attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice (David Amodio); political ideology (John Jost).

Motivation, emotion, and self-regulation: Action control and goal pursuit (Peter Gollwitzer); self-regulation of thought and action (Gabriele Oettingen); motivation and cognition (Yaacov Trope); intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Tom Tyler); system justification (John Jost), emotion and motivation effects on regulatory processes (David Amodio).

Relationships, personality, and social development: Significant others and the self, social cognition and personality, hopelessness/depression (Susan Andersen); relationships, stress, and coping (Pat Shrout).

Groups, organizations, and societies : Stereotyping and prejudice in the workplace (Madeline Heilman); and social justice (Tom Tyler, John Jost).

In addition, there is a burgeoning interest and presence in Social Neuroscience. In this growing field, research within the Program examines: the neural mechanisms underlying activation and control of racial bias; interactions with hormones and health (David Amodio); social effects on neural processes of fear learning (Elizabeth Phelps, in the C&P area). Several other faculty in the Program collaborate on various other social neuroscience projects, and the Psychology Department hosts a Social Neuroscience Speaker Series. The Psychology Building houses facilities for fMRI, EEG/ERP, TMS, eye-tracking, and other psychophysiological methods.

Graduate studies in the social psychology program at NYU means being part of a highly active research group. We share a fully computerized laboratory, and our philosophy is an 'open door' relationship between professors and students. While students typically work primarily in one professor's laboratory, we encourage and in fact require that each student work with more than one faculty member, to enable a breadth of training in a variety of methodological approaches and research issues. Our goal is to prepare students to be highly competitive in the job market for the type of career they seek, and we are proud of the steady success of our students over the past 15 years in obtaining academic positions at the best research universities.

What is best about our program is the high level of research activity and enthusiasm, resulting in the end in excellent academic jobs for students. In addition, our program has a special communal, cooperative spirit, with very high morale among the students. Finally, students can broaden their training by participating in the strong quantitative, developmental, community, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology programs to supplement the core curriculum in social psychology.

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Curriculum

What follows is a brief version of our curriculum. Full details may be found in our Graduate Student Guide. The basic philosophy of the program is that students are exposed to a broad range of scholarship in social psychology, and receive research training that will enable them to become independent contributors to the field. The program provides training in sub-areas including social cognition; motivation and self-regulation; close relationships, personality, and social development; and groups, organizations, and societies. Students may also choose a minor in another subfield of psychology, such as quantitative, or cognition and perception. All students accepted into our program are fully funded for five years with a graduate fellowship, research assistantship, or teaching assistantship. Support consists of a stipend plus full tuition.

Training Sequence

In their first two years, students focus on mentored research projects and coursework. Over this period they complete the majority of their 12 required courses (see below) as well as a Second Year Paper that reports the results of the research they have conducted in collaboration with one or more faculty. In their third year, students complete a Third Year paper (in place of a comprehensive examination), a theoretically integrative literature review modeled after articles published in Psychological Bulletin or Personality and Social Psychology. Students spend their third, fourth and fifth years focusing primarily on their research activities, culminating in their doctoral dissertation research. In a signature element of the program, students also participate in a weekly Brown Bag seminar. This is a forum for presenting and evaluating current student and faculty research, and it is a key component of student training over the five years.

Courses

Students take at least one course offering from each of four core groups: (a) Social Cognition, (b) Motivation and Self-Regulation, (c) Relationships, Personality and Development, and (d) Organizational. Students also take two advanced seminars from these four groups of courses, reflecting their interests. To expand the breadth of their training, students also take at least two additional courses in areas outside of the Social Program (e.g., in Developmental, Community, Quantitative, Cognition & Perception) or in other Departments (e.g., Neural Science, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, or Politics, or Organizational Behavior at the Stern School of Business, or Applied Psychology in the School of Education). Arrangements can also be made for students to take courses in other New York area universities. Finally, from their first year in the program onward, students take part in a 4-course methods and statistics sequence involving Research Methods, Intermediate Statistics, Advanced Statistics, and a fourth course such as Multivariate, Psychometrics, Structural Equation Modeling, or Analysis of Change. The course catalog and schedule are online.

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After the PhD

By the time they leave our program, students have had experiences and responsibilities (in coursework, teaching and research) that enable them to function as independent scholars. We are very proud of our graduates, many of whom have gone on to academic positions at major universities such as those noted below.

Graduates Include

Caryn Block, Teachers College, Columbia University
Joan Brett, Southern Methodist University
Tanya Chartrand, Duke University
Serena Chen, University of California, Berkeley
Melissa Ferguson, Cornell University
Grainne Fitzsimons, University of Waterloo
Kenneth Fujita, Ohio State University
Celia Gonzalez, Harvard University
Marlone Henderson, University of Chicago
Richard Martell, University of Montana
Gordon Moskowitz, Lehigh University
Leonard Newman, University of Illinois at Chicago
Abigail Panter, University of North Carolina
Eva Pomerantz, University of Illinois
Felicia Pratto, University of Connecticut
Eun Rhee, University of Delaware
Roger Giner-Sorolla, University of Kent (Canterbury)
Pam Smith, Radboud University Nijmegen
Charles Stangor, University of Maryland
Timothy Strauman, Duke University
Roman Thein, Ben-Gurion University
Alex Todorov, Princeton University
Howard Weiss, Purdue University

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