ISJR - Newsletter

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11th Issue - February 2006 , edited by Sampson Lee Blair

1st Issue; June 2001, edited by Ron Cohen
2nd Issue; November 2001, edited by Ron Cohen
3rd Issue; February 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
4th Issue; July 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
5th Issue; November 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
6th Issue; March 2004, edited by Dahlia Morre
7th Issue; December 2004, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
8th Issue; March 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
9th Issue; June 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
10th Issue; September 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair

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Contents

• Presidential Address
• ISJR-Editor's Rport
  
• Member Activities
  
• Upcoming Events
  

• PDF-Version of Newsletter
  

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     President’s Address

Nominations for the first Early Career Contribution Award of ISJR ended October 31, 2005. The Executive Board of ISJR has now established a panel of three scholars (including the President of ISJR) to review the nominations and to recommend a winner to the Executive Board. The past presidents Faye Crosby and Leo Montada accepted the invitation to join this panel.

I wish all of us a happy new year!

Claudia Dalbert, President ISJR

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ISJR-Editor's Report

Dear friends:  I am very pleased to report that we are making steady and substantial progress toward the goal of raising the scientific status and profile of Social Justice Research and making it the premiere niche journal for justice researchers in the behavioral sciences.  If you have not already done so, please visit the journal’s new website at: http://www.springeronline.com.

Electronic usage of the journal, which is now published by Springer (the company that bought Kluwer) has been increasing steadily since 2003.  This is clearly the future of academic publishing.  In each of the last two years (2004 and 2005), there has been an average of approximately 9,000 downloads of SJR articles!  I think that this is extraordinary.  Thank you for your enthusiastic interest in the journal!

With the invaluable efforts of my editorial assistant, Cara Jolly (cara.jolly@nyu.edu), our office in New York has processed approximately 70 manuscripts (including revisions) in the past year.  The increase in number of submissions means that we have been able to lower our acceptance rate to 25% (for a 75% rejection rate, excluding submissions for special issues).  The journal is becoming more competitive all the time, so please send us your high quality submissions now!

We remain strongly committed to the international and multidisciplinary emphases.  We have subscribers in 51 countries, and SJR is now available to more than 7,500 institutions, which translates to about 15 million users worldwide.  SJR is currently listed in several abstracting and indexing services (including PSYCinfo, Ingenta, EBSCO, Swets, and CAS).  Please always be sure to pay your membership dues on time to either Karen Hegtvedt (khegtv@emory.edu) or Sibylle Clasen (clasen@uni-muenster.de), so that mail delivery of your issues of SJR will be prompt and timely!

May I encourage you to further support SJR by posting Springer Alerts at various listservs promoting special issues, articles, or the journal itself; including a link to the journal in the signature portion of your e-mails; and referring others to check out the online journal website?  You can receive free emails notifying you when a new issue of SJR appears (and sending you the Table of Contents) by signing up for Springer Alert at: www.springerlink.com/alerting.

Finally, I am pleased to announce the first winner of the “Morton Deutsch Award for the best article of the year in Social Justice Research.”  A committee comprised of Joe Oppenheimer, Ramona Bobocel, and myself enjoyed reading (or re-reading) all of the SJR articles published in 2004 and identified one winner and two honorable mentions.  The first recipient of “the Mort” is Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, for her article entitled “Implicit Ingroup Favoritism, Outgroup Favoritism, and Their Behavioral Manifestations.”  This article was the most downloaded SJR article in 2005, having been viewed well over 200 times.

Honorable mentions for the award also went to Nicholas Epley and Eugene Caruso for their article on “Egocentric Ethics,” and to Detlef Fetchenhauer and Hans-Werner Bierhoff for their article entitled “Attitudes Toward a Military Enforcement of Human Rights.”  Two of the three finalists, it should be noted, appeared in the extremely popular June 2004 special issue of SJR on “The Social Psychology of Ordinary Ethical Failures,” which was guest-edited by Max Bazerman and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard University.  A new committee eagerly awaits consideration of the 2005 contenders.  Awards for both the 2004 and 2005 “Mort” winners will be presented at the biennial ISJR conference in Berlin this summer.  See you there!

John T. Jost, SJR Editor

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Member Activities

As with our previous newsletter, I sent a mass e-mail in which I appealed for more information about members’ activities.  Once again, the membership has obliged my request – Thank you and keep it coming!

Presentations & Publications

Claudia Dalbert (Martin Luther University) & J. Stoeber. (2005). Belief in a just world and distress at school. Social Psychol­ogy of Education, 8, 123-135.

Stephen W. Gilliland (University of Arizona), Dirk D. Steiner (Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis), Daniel P. Skarlicki (University of British Columbia), and Kees van den Bos (Utrecht University).  (2005) .  What Motivates Fairness in Organizations?  In Research in Social Issues in Management.

K. Otto & Dalbert, C. (2005). Belief in a just world and its functions for young prison­ers. Jour­nal of Research in Personality, 6, 559-573.

Manfred Schmitt (University of Koblenz-Landau) M. Gollwitzer, J. Maes, & D. Arbach. (2005). Justice sensitivity: Assessment and location in the personality space. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 21, 202-211.

David Schoem (University of Michigan) will be coordinating a faculty seminar in the Michigan Community Scholars Program in 2006-07 on religious pluralism and academic freedom as part of the Ford Foundation grant to the University of Michigan on "Difficult Dialogues."

Rhoda Unger (Brandeis University) is co-editor (with Rose Capdevila, University of Northhampton) of a special issue of Feminism & Psychology (Volume 16, #1, 2006).  In this issue, an international group of feminist psychologists look at the relationship between feminist psychology and political psychology - two fields that have had surprisingly few conversations with each other.  Information about the journal can be obtained at http://fap.sagepub.com

Funding

Gerold Mikula (University of Graz, Austria) recently received a grant from the Austrian Science National Fund for the research project "Division of family work: Evaluations and social comparisons".The research extends a previous cross-sectional study into a longitudinal study and deals with three different topics: (1) the investigation of long-term links between evaluations of justice concerning the division of family work and individual well-being and relationship satisfaction; (2) comparative analyses of the predictive validity of  retrospective evaluations and in-situ evaluations of justice of the division of family work; and (3) the role of social comparisons regarding the division of family work for feelings of injustice and relationship satisfaction.

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Upcoming Events

The 2006 ISJR Conference

The webpage for the 2006 ISJR meetings is now in place.  You can locate it at: www.isjr2006.org.  If you should have any questions or suggestions, you can also contact the organizers, Stefan Liebig (liebig@isjr2006.org) and Bernd Wegener (wegener@isjr2006.org), who can provide you with information.  In early November the registration and paper submission pages will be opened. All registrations and submissions will be completed online only. When the registration and submission period begins, emails will be sent to all ISJR members. Paper submission deadline is May 1, 2006.

Call For Symposium Abstracts

Symposium on "Retributive Justice and Punitive Reactions" (Organizers:

Mario Gollwitzer and Ute Gabriel)

The factors predicting and the processes underlying reactions to norm-violations, both in a juridical and an everyday context, have been investigated by philosophers, criminologists, and psychologists (see Darley & Pittman, 2003, or Miller, 2001, for reviews). Many singular models and empirical findings have been put forth during the last two decades, but theoretical approaches that allow for an integration of multiple explanatory levels ranging from culturally shaped normative systems (macro level) to social-cognitive processes (micro level) are largely lacking.

The symposium, which we have preliminarily titled "Retributive justice and punitive

reactions" aims at bringing together researchers from different areas who are interested in questions such as:

• Why do people want (or, need) to punish wrongdoers?
• Which forms of punitive sanctions are more endorsed than others, and which variables can predict individual preferences for different forms of punitive sanctions?
• What is the function of punitive sanctions from the victim’s and/or the general public’spoint of view? Are people interested in whether these functions are actually fulfilled bythe particular sanction, and how do they react to such information?
• How are retributive and punitive reactions to norm-violations shaped by socially andculturally shared beliefs and how do these belief systems manifest themselves on anindividual (cognitive) level?
• What are the social-cognitive processes underlying perceptions of and reactions to offenses and norm-violations?

Colleagues interested in presenting their work at the symposium are cordially invited to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words, which adequately describes the theoretical background, empirical approach, and (if applicable) findings of their research. Studies based on an innovative theoretical framework encompassing a multi- level or interdisciplinary perspective are particularly welcome.

Please submit your abstract no later than February 20, 2006, preferably via e-mail to Mario Gollwitzer (gollwitzer@uni-landau.de) or to Ute Gabriel (ute.gabriel@psy.unibe.ch).

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 You would like to print this newsletter? Click here! (PDF Document)

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Sampson Lee Blair (slblair@buffalo.edu)

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