Psyc 411: Topics in Social Psychology

The level of specificity that goes into the selection of potential grad school programs is actually kind of mind-boggling. You might naively think that a person wanting to do experimental psychology (as opposed to clinical psychology) would simply try to get into the best psychology PhD program that will take her and that will give her good grants and/or fellowships. But in psychology at least, you have to narrow that down to what kind of psychology; though there are some schools that have a general experimental psychology PhD, for the majority of schools, they break the field down into several categories from which you pick before you even apply to the program. The most common areas in experimental psychology are: cognitive, developmental, industrial/organizational, and social/personality. And within each of these broad subject areas, there are myriad interest areas.

One of the tasks I am currently working on is coming up with a preliminary list of social psychology programs that have professors doing research in areas of interest to me. My interest is in consumer psychology, which is sometimes classified as a type of applied social psychology, and for which very few specific programs exist. So when assessing social psychology programs on this first pass, I am looking for research being done in:
- Consumer psychology
- Decision making
- Attitude formation and change (or persuasion)

I started with a list of 83 schools that supposedly have a PhD in social psychology; I put this together based on books from the APA (American Psychological Association) and Peterson’s. Of this list, I have looked up online the psychology programs of 52 so far. 7 of them do not currently have social psychology programs. 35 of them do not have research in areas of interest to me. 10 of them have some research area that is sufficiently close to my interests that I kept them on the list for now. (That’s an 81% rejection rate for programs during this first pass.)

One of the interesting consequences of this narrowing process is that I can reject the psychology programs at all kinds of really good schools out of hand while other random-seeming schools will get further attention. Sorry, no way Harvard. But Ohio State, you sound quite promising with your interdisciplinary program in consumer psychology. Rice does not have a social psychology concentration at all, though apparently Dave Schneider is in the process of putting one together, so I will not be reliving my experiences in that psychology lab.

Of course, the most probable outcome of all this investigation is that I will apply to very few psychology programs at all and many marketing programs. As you might imagine, interest in consumer behavior is extremely high amongst people in the business field, and I expect that the proportion of marketing programs with a focus on consumer behavior will reflect that. I have yet to delve into my list of 57 business schools that have marketing PhD programs, but I already know some things about a few of them. For instance, I know that UT’s marketing PhD program is ranked by some as the very best in the country and they have a correspondingly low acceptance rate of something like 4% (marketing PhD programs in general accept an extremely low number of students per year, like 2). Unlike some other schools, whose web sites try to sell you on why you should want to go there, UT takes the approach of trying to scare people away with dire predictions of how you, random prospective grad student, won’t do well up against the kind of brilliant, top-notch, highly-recommended-by-professors-of-international-renown people they deign to accept (maybe this is necessary to keep the number of applications manageable, since who wouldn’t want to go to school in Austin). I know that every program at Chicago is going to be extremely mathematically-oriented. I speculate that I will not be applying at Mississippi State or the University of Manitoba unless their programs blow everyone else away. One advantage of getting a marketing PhD is that you will make more money than you would with a psychology PhD. Even in academia, starting salaries for marketing professors can be significantly higher because, unsurprisingly, the overall demand for people with knowledge of things like “how to more efficiently separate fools from their money” is much greater than for those who specialize in “how hierarchies within toddler day care groups influence the development of social self-efficacy.”

Some of the kinds of research areas in social psychology that professors list as their areas of interest include things like (and these are at varying levels of specificity): social cognition (which was the area of my senior research project – my topic was emergent properties of complex social categories), close relationships, emotion, motivation, concepts of the self, social development, personality, issues surrounding race/sex/class like prejudice and “the psychology of women,” health psychology, group dynamics, social control, psychology and law, attribution theory, altruism, and cultural influences. But last night, looking at the research interests of social psychology professors at about 15 schools, I came across some real oddities. What do you think of these (listed verbatim)?
- The psychology of evil
- Radical Behaviorism
- Terror management theory
- Animal communication, bird song, nestbuilding, and biparental care in birds
- Parental care behaviors of voles [yes, this was a different person from the bird woman, but at the same school]

Robert’s response to the bird woman’s interest area was “She studies the social psychology of birds?!” It turns out that she is a professor in both the social psychology PhD program and the biology PhD program at her university and has a web site all about mockingbirds, which appears to be her primary species of interest. She is pursuing a very interdisciplinary area of study indeed.