Winter 2011

Newsletter Editor: Manfred Schmitt (schmittm@uni-landau.de)

• News from the President    
• ISJR 2012 Award Recipients

• ISJR 14th Biennial Conference

• PhD-Workshop at the ISJR 14th Biennial Conference
• Storytelling of Justice Scholars: Linda Skitka
• Recent Justice-Related Books
  – Gosseries, A. & Vanderborght, Y. (Eds.) (2011). Arguing about Justice. Essays for Philippe Van Parijs. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
  – Cramme, O. & Diamond, P. (2009). Social Justice in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  – Robinson, P.H. (2008). Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who should be punished how much? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  – Bowles, S. & Herbert, G. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  – New Series in Political Psychology
• Justice-Related Dissertations
  – Van Camp, T. Is there more to restorative justice than mere compliance with procedural justice? A qualitative reflection from the victims’ point of view
• Conferences of Interest to ISJR Members
  – Morality and Justice Preconference at SPSP 2012
  – SPSP Political Psychology Preconference
• Awards to ISJR Members
  – Dan Landis APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology
• Research Projects of ISJR Members
  – Effects of procedural justice on the outcome of government-citizen interactions (Kees van den Bos)
  – Long term research project on the structural conditions of justice attitudes over the life-span (Stefan Liebig (PI), Carsten Sauer, Simone Schneider, Meike May, Peter Valet)
  – Justice Evaluations and Civic Socialisation in Complex Societies: The Israeli Case (Nura Resh & Clara Sabbagh)
• Obituary for Kevin Carlsmith
• Recent Publications of ISJR Members
• ISJR Membership Form
• Bylaws Changes

Dear ISJR members,

On behalf of the International Society for Justice Research (ISJR), I would like to heartily congratulate the recipients of its 2012 awards, Prof. Tom Tyler and Dr. Tyler Okimoto. These awards are given to justice scholars for their outstanding academic achievements and teaching, as well as for promoting the advancement of justice research across different disciplines. Prof. Tom Tyler, of New York University, United States, is the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award and Dr. Tyler Okimoto, of the University of Queensland, Australia is the recipient of the 2012 Early Career Contribution Award.

As you all know, this year has been difficult for Social Justice Research. However, since they took the Editorial office last year, Kjell Tornblom and Ali Kazemi have accomplished what seemed to be impossible – they have re-established the integrity and reputation of Social Justice Research. Their achievements include, to mention just a few, the production of five SJR Issues on schedule; the processing of a large number of back-logged submissions; the recruitment of a new book review scholar, Stefan Liebig, and the design of a new cover for the journal, signaling a new beginning and increasing the journal's visibility. For the coming newyear, Kjell and Ali are planning new interdisciplinary special issues which are likely to boost the journal's impact factor and publish book reviews, short research notes and profile articles in which eminent researchers who have contributed to the field are presented.

We are also looking forward to meeting you at our Biennial ISJR meeting that will be held in Rishon-LeZion, Israel, September 9-12, 2012 (for more information see below).  For this occasion we have invited representatives of other justice-related societies with the aim of facilitating the creation of international group of societies. Depending upon the number of participants, we plan to organize a round table in which ISJR members and members of other societies will be able to establish informal contact.

Moreover, at the 2012 ISJR meeting, we will hold the first ISJR workshop for PhD students (for more information see below). PhD students working on cross-disciplinary and international justice research will have the opportunity to present their work to their peers. The workshop will be mentored by two senior justice scholars – Manfred Schmitt and Kjell Tornblom. On behalf of our Society, I would like to thank the Connference organizers for enabling this activity.

Finally, at our upcoming Society's meeting, we will consider potential changes to our bylaws. The Executive Board has approved these potential changes so now they can be presented for your consideration (the proposed bylaw changes are included in the last section of this Newsletter). According to our current bylaws, ISJR membership must vote on any suggested changes to bylaws at the General Business Meeting (the next one of will be at our conference in Rishon LeZion in September 2012). The potential bylaw changes related to important  issues, such as our membership dues and the Executive Board's roles. Your participation at the General Business meeting is thus very important!

With my best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year

Clara Sabbagh
ISJR President

To Be Honored at the Upcoming ISJR Conference in Rishon LeZion, Israel

The International Society for Justice Research (ISJR) wishes to announce the recipients for its 2012 awards, Prof. Tom Tyler and Dr. Tyler Okimoto.

Prof. Tom Tyler, of New York University, United States, is the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award. Tom's research explores the role of justice in shaping people’s relationships with groups, organizations, communities and societies.  In particular, he examines the role of judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance and cooperation.  He is the author of several books, including The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (1988); Social Justice in a Diverse Society (1997); Cooperation in Groups (2000); Trust in the Law (2002); Why People Obey the Law (2006); Legitimacy and Criminal Justice (2007) and Why People Cooperate (2011).

Dr. Tyler Okimoto, of the University of Queensland, Australia is the recipient of the 2012 Early Career Contribution Award. Tyler received his PhD from New York University in 2005, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at both Flinders University in Australia and Yale University prior to assuming his current appointment at the University of Queensland Business School.  An emerging expert in the psychology of injustice repair, his work has both challenged assumptions in the existing injustice literature (e.g., compensation as identity repair, the meaning of forgiveness) and forged new avenues of research (e.g., restorative justice).  Although he is strongly rooted in the theory and methods of social psychology, his work reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries, with publications and conference proceedings spanning from psychology (both basic and applied), to management, public policy, sociology, and criminology.

Lifetime Achievement Award Committee: Members of the ISJR Executive Board
Early Career Contribution Award Committee: Susan Clayton, Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Clara Sabbagh.

The ISJR 14th Biennial Conference will be held in September 2012 at The School of Behavioral Sciences, College of Management, ISRAEL, which is located in Rishon LeZion, Gush Dan (Tel-Aviv) metropolitan area.
Please keep the following dates in your records:
 
Sept. 8-9         PhD Students' Workshop        
Sept. 9            Cocktail Party        
Sept. 10-12     Conference Activities        
Sept. 13          One Day Trip (probably to the Dead Sea)     

The Call for Abstracts and poster presentations is open until the end of January 2012 at the conference webpage, http://social-justice.colman.ac.il. Three general themes were selected for the conference by the organizing committee in order to highlight major facets in the complexity of social justice, and provide a contemporary context for an inter-disciplinary dialogue. These themes are not meant to highlight a single focus, but rather to provide a basis for a panoramic view of social justice in a complex reality. Focal themes that will be identified as emerging from a plurality of submissions will provide a basis for organizing relevant new sessions thus contributing to an even wider panorama of contemporary views of social justice. The final program is expected to be publicized around March 2012 in the conference website after receiving and organizing all the submissions. We are happy to have Prof. Frances Raday, Chair of the Concord Research Institute for Integration of International Law in Israel at the College of Management and Elias Lieberman Chair in Labor Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Emerita), as a keynote speaker for the conference; additional keynote speakers will be publicized shortly in the conference website.

We are expecting an international and inter-disciplinary array of speakers fostering discussions of new ideas, research, and theories relevant to justice phenomena. We encourage the participation of scholars from a diversity of disciplines including social psychology, sociology and anthropology, law, education, philosophy, ethics, social work, and other professionals involved in the study of justice. COMAS - The College of Management Academic Studies, celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. It offers 13 degrees within eight schools and departments, including business, law, media, economics, computer studies, interior design and behavioral sciences (for further information see http://www.colman.ac.il/english).

As part of the upcoming 2012 Conference of the International Society for Justice Research (ISJR) in Rishon LeZion, a workshop for PhD students will be held and mentored by two ISJR senior justice scholars, Manfred Schmitt and Kjell Törnblom. The workshop will give five PhD students the opportunity to present their dissertation research and discuss it with the mentors and the workshop participants. In line with our society’s interdisciplinary and international mission, the workshop is open to students from all countries and disciplines that address social justice issues (psychology, sociology, economy, political science, education, philosophy).

Participants of the workshop have to be members of ISJR. Applicants are requested to join the ISJR prior to the application (http://isjr.jimdo.com/membership/).
The workshop will be held on Sunday, September 9, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in Rishon LeZion, prior to the conference. The conference itself will be opened with a cocktail party the same day at 6 p.m.

Each PhD student will have a time slot of 90 minutes for the presentation and discussion of his or her research project. The presentation itself should take about 30 minutes, at most 45 minutes. In the remaining time, Manfred and Kjell as well as the other students will give feedback and make suggestions aimed at improving the project.

Experience tells that PhD workshops are most profitable for participants who have already a rather clear idea of their research question and hypotheses as well as the design and the methodology they want to use (measures, experimental procedures, sample, data analysis), but who have not yet started to collect (all) data. Students who have completed their data collection and analysis tend to profit less from PhD workshops, because it is often too late at this time for substantial improvements of the studies.

PhD students who will conduct justice research as part of their dissertation and who anticipate having their research plan ready by September 2012 are invited to apply for participation. Applications should be sent via Email to Manfred Schmitt (schmittm@uni-landau.de) and Kjell Törnblom (kjell.tornblom@his.se). The deadline for applications is April 30, 2012. Applications should include an outline of the dissertation research (up to 5 pages) and describe the anticipated stage of the project at the time of the workshop. Moreover, the name and affiliation of the supervisor(s) should be indicated.

Senior members of the ISJR who receive this call are kindly invited to pass it on to eligible PhD students. PhD students who receive this call are kindly advised to discuss it with their supervisor.

Manfred and Kjell will discuss the applications. If more than five applications are received, they will select applicants based on quality, substantive fit, and developmental stage of the project. Applicants will be informed about their admission or rejection by May 31, 2012. Admission letters will contain more detailed information about the workshop venue and procedure.

Participation in the workshop will be free but it will not be funded by the ISJR. Participants have to cover their travel costs. Workshop participants are strongly encouraged to also attend the Justice Conference right after the workshop and present a paper or poster. This will give workshop participants an additional opportunity to receive feedback and start building an international research network early on.

Cordially,
Manfred and Kjell

1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your family? Where were you born and how can you characterize the familial, social, educational and political environment in which you grew up?

I was born and grew up in rural area of northern Michigan, located about 4-5 hours away from the closest urban center. My parents were high school teachers at the local high school. The school was so small there was no choice except to have each of my parents as my teachers as well. During my youth, many in the U.S. were deeply concerned about the war in Vietnam, affirmative action, women’s rights, and similar issues, all of which encouraged questions and discussions about justice and fairness: it was simply “in the air,” or so it seemed to me.

2. When did you first become interested in social justice research? Can you describe a key experience(s) which contributed to your interest in justice research?

I did my undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, where in addition to psychology courses, I became very active in women studies. I also started working with Patricia Gurin, a social psychologist (now emeritus) who was and is deeply committed to understanding the role of social identity in political attitudes and behavior, how gender and race relate to motivation and cognition in achievement settings—both areas of inquiry deeply connected to a passionate concern for fairness. Pat was a major influence on my choice to become a social psychologist and fed my already strong interests in questions related to social justice, and helped point these interests in a more scholarly direction.

3. Please reflect on how you see the current state of social justice research. Where do you think it is going, and is it going in the right direction?

I see research on social justice as continuing to be very vibrant and multi-faceted. As a relatively mature field of inquiry, much current work seems to be focused on middle-range theorizing and exploring boundary conditions of this or that effect. I think, however, that the time is particularly ripe for completely novel and new ideas and areas of focus. We know a lot about the justice motive and its consequences, how people think about distributive and procedural justice, etc.: I’m curious about what will be the next “big idea,” and the time feels especially right for trying to do more than incremental theorizing and research. One possibility is that increased recent concerns about income inequality will lead the pendulum of interest to swing more toward studying questions of macro-justice, instead of the current dominate focus on questions of micro-justice.

4. What advice would you give a young justice scholar?

I would encourage young justice scholars to try to think “outside of the box” of existing theoretical frameworks and paradigms—to step back, and ask: “What aspects of social justice haven’t yet been explored? What kinds of social justice questions are not being asked?” The academy is much like the market: It tends to favor risk takers.

More information at: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/series/SeriesinPoliticalPsychology/?view=usa

Is there more to restorative justice than mere compliance with procedural justice? A qualitative reflection from the victims’ point of view

Multiple evaluative studies have demonstrated that victims of crime are satisfied with their participation in a restorative intervention. The theoretical explanation for victim satisfaction with restorative practices has, until recently, remained largely neglected. Our dissertation concerns the exploration of factors contributing to victims’ satisfaction with the restorative approach and their relation to procedural justice. Our research objective is to verify whether victims’ appreciation of restorative justice complies with the procedural justice model and whether restorative justice transcends procedural justice in being satisfactory. We also examined the appreciation of the restorative approach relative to its timing in the criminal justice proceedings, i.e. before and after penal adjudication. Semi-directive interviews were conducted with victims of violent crime who participated in victim-offender mediation, family group conference or victim-offender encounters in Canada (N=13) and Belgium (N=21).

We found that the restorative approach complies well with procedural justice. Victim satisfaction with restorative justice also exceeds procedural justice because restorative practices are flexible, provide care, centre on dialogue and permit prosocial justice motives to be addressed. Finally, the appreciation for restorative interventions is positive both when it is used before and after adjudication. Whether restorative justice precedes or follows adjudication is, however, related to victims’ satisfaction with the criminal justice system. Victims who participated in a restorative intervention after adjudication were generally dissatisfied with the criminal justice proceedings, while victims who participated prior to adjudication were generally satisfied with the criminal justice system. Moreover, victims appreciate the complementary nature of the restorative approach in relation to judicial proceedings.

The findings suggest that restorative justice is appropriate in cases of violent crime and as such that it should be made more available prior and after adjudication. Because of its complementary nature, investment in the capacity of the criminal justice system to better respond to victims’ procedural and interactional needs is also required.

Ph.D. dissertation defended in March 2011
Tinneke Van Camp, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral fellow at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
van_camp.tinneke@courrier.uqam.ca
Under the supervision of Prof. Jo-Anne Wemmers
School of criminology, Université de Montréal, Canada

With talks from Max Bazerman, Joel Brockner, Carolyn Hafer, Josh Knobe, Francesca Gino, Eric van Dijk, the Justice and Morality preconference at SPSP 2012 promises to be stellar event that you would not like to miss! The preconference will be held at the San Diego Convention Center on Thursday, January 26, 2012 between the hours of 8:15 AM and 4:30 PM. The titles of the talks are now listed on the website. Please note that there are still some places open, so to register please go to the website:

http://moralconvictions.org/JusticePreconferenceSPSP.htm

Dave Mayer, Chris Bauman, and Kees van den Bos

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to join us for the 2012 Political Psychology Preconference, to be held in conjunction with the annual SPSP meeting in San Diego, California. The preconference will take place on January 26th at the San Diego Convention Center.
We are very excited about our line-up of speakers, as we believe they provide a diverse and penetrative glimpse into the field of political psychology:

·    Jesse Graham (University of Southern California)
·    John Hibbing (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
·    Aaron Kay (Duke University)
·    Bert Klandermans (Free University Amsterdam)
·    Milton Lodge (SUNY Stony Brook)
·    Rose McDermott (Brown University)
·    Hulda Thorisdottir (University of Iceland)

Registration is now open and will close when space is filled or January 6th, whichever comes first.
To register for the pre-conference, or to obtain more information, please visit:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/spsp_politpsych

We hope to see you on January 26th – it promises to be a great day!

Sincerely,
Jojanneke van der Toorn
Erin Henne

Dan Landis receives APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology

Dan Landis was selected by the APA Committee on International Relations in Psychology to be the 2012 recipient of the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology. They have invited him to make an address at the 2012 Convention in August in Orlando.

Dan Landis is

Emeritus Professor of Psychology (University of Mississippi)
Emeritus Dean, College of Liberal Arts (University of Mississippi)
Affiliate Professor of Psychology, University of Hawaii, Hilo and Manoa
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Intercultural Relations
Executive Director, International Academy for Intercultural Research
200 W. Kawili St.
Hilo, Hawaii. 96720 USA
808-9669891 (voice)
808-966-5039 (Fax)

Kees van den Bos

has received several research grants from the Dutch Ministery of the Interior to evaluate and supervise a field experiment on the effects of procedural justice on the outcome of government-citizen interactions (215 000 Euros).

Stefan Liebig (PI), Carsten Sauer, Simone Schneider, Meike May, Peter Valet

The German Science Foundation (DFG) has recently installed a new Collaborative Research Center (CRC 882) “From Heterogeneities to Inequalities” at Bielefeld University. The goal of the long term research projects within the CRC is to identify theoretically and empirically the mechanisms that generate social inequalities in modern societies. The central research question is how mere differences or heterogeneities between individuals translate into inequalities i.e. evaluated differences. Thereby the main attention is given to households, organizations, national and transnational social spaces as contexts of generating inequalities and affecting people’s perceptions and evaluations over the life-span. The project “Structural conditions of justice attitudes over the life-span” is a substantial part of the larger CRC 882 and investigates (a) the conditions under which social inequalities are perceived as problems of social justice and (b) how the embeddedness in different social contexts influences the formation of attitudes toward social justice across the life course.

We assume that individuals evaluate the justice of inequalities, and that they hold particular attitudes toward justice because, and as long as, these help them to attain their fundamental goals and to solve problems that arise through cooperation with other people (cooperative relations). Hence, attitudes toward justice are not viewed as rigidly stable orientations across the life span or as “Sunday best beliefs” i.e. short-lived opinions that are adjusted continuously to fit situational interests. Instead, they are viewed as a result of (life-long) learning and social comparison processes at all stages of life and in different social contexts.

The goal of the project is to use longitudinal survey data to explain why individuals have particular notions of justice. Changes in the social context in which individuals are embedded over their life course – household, social network, or workplace – are considered as one key aspect in explaining the formation of justice beliefs. This is because social contexts offer opportunities to make social comparisons and mediate social learning processes that are decisive in the formation of particular attitudes to justice. The project will investigate this empirically by realizing a twofold research design:

(1) Continuation and expansion of the longitudinal survey of evaluations of the fairness of earnings conducted by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP).

(2) Conducting a longitudinal panel in combination with process-generated individual data of the German Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and information on companies and households (the intention is to carry out three survey waves over an 11-year period). In the 2-stage sampling procedure we first randomly draw German companies with more than 10 employees. Then we sample up to seven respondents within each company (proportional to the size of the company) to obtain multi-level data which enable us to investigate context effects.

The results will enable us to draw conclusions on how the consequences of changes in a society's social and economic structure influence its members' ideas about justice. The project therefore supplements the analysis of the mechanisms that produce inequality by analyzing subjective evaluations, and it complements that focus by addressing the mechanisms of attitude formation.

Nura Resh, Clara Sabbagh

The research project we report here was at first conceptualized as a bi-national cooperation (Israeli-German) between us and Claudia Dalbert as the German partner. Hence, Claudia deserves some credit for the ideas developed in the proposal. The proposal was highly rated but unfortunately, did not get the GIF (German-Israeli Foundation) financial support. We then restructured the proposal and submitted it the Israeli Science Foundation, where it won the competition with a promised financial support for 3 years.

In our research project we set out to examine whether and how justice experiences at school (i.e., evaluations regarding resource distribution) shape different facets of civic attitudes and behavior (e.g., trust in institutions and democratic orientations, civic engagement and involvement in deviant behavior in school). We adopt a multidisciplinary – psychological and sociological – approach, in order to examine to what extent these relationships are affected by individual (psychological, i.e., justice sensitivity) and contextual (sociological), i.e., school and class 'fair climate') factors. Assuming that the nature of civic education and the formation of justice evaluations can only be understood by adopting a comparative perspective, the study will delve into a comparison of more or less disadvantaged groups in a country that features multiple notions of citizenship stressing liberal values of equality, while recognizing sub-group cleavages. Specifically we shall relate here to the national/ethnic cleavage in Israel: Jews (secular, religious) vs. Arabs.

We think that our multidisciplinary approach will yield a more integrative and comprehensive perspective on the study of justice evaluations. Our findings may significantly contribute to an in-depth understanding of justice conflicts at school and their consequences.

The study was designed as an empirical (quantitative) panel investigation among 8th and 9th (middle school) students in a national sample of 50 public middle schools (25 Jewish secular, 10 Jewish religious, 15 Arab) with about 5000 students, who answered a detailed questionnaire. Few school characteristics that will serve as controls were elicited from the Ministry of Education data base. The data base for this investigation is now ready and we are beginning data analysis that hopefully will produce outcomes to be presented in the next ISJR conference in Israel.

It is my sad duty to report that Kevin Carlsmith died on November 19. Those of us who were fortunate to know Kevin will miss him greatly; he was an incredibly nice person and an amazing scholar. Chris Carlsmith (Kevin's brother), John Darley, (his Ph.D. adviser), Rebecca Shiner (the Chair of Kevin's department at Colgate), and I (his postdoc adviser) wrote the following comments and observations about Kevin:  

Kevin M. Carlsmith died peacefully on November 19, 2011 from cancer in his boyhood home in Portola Valley, CA, surrounded by his family.

An accomplished researcher and a popular professor of Psychology at Colgate University since 2003, Kevin earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University (2001), an M.A. at University of New Hampshire (1996), and a B.A. from Lewis & Clark College (1989).

Kevin grew up next to Stanford University as the son of two academic psychologists, J. Merrill Carlsmith and Lyn K. Carlsmith. At the age of four he was a participant in Walter Mischel’s famous study of delayed gratification at Bing Nursery School. He knew many members of the Stanford Psychology faculty informally, and his childhood antics were frequently cited by Lyn in her classes on childhood development. Despite (or perhaps because of) his proximity to the field of psychology, he did not embrace that academic discipline until his freshman year of college, when he discovered it was a topic for which he exhibited both passion and talent. His other great collegiate passion was the outdoors, which he had come to love as a boy on backpacking trips to Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Kevin was deeply involved with the outdoor program at Lewis & Clark and led frequent trips into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. After college he worked at the North Face and served as a river guide and rock-climbing instructor for Outward Bound. He loved the wilderness for both its beauty and its unpredictability. He taught for four years at the White Mountain School in New Hampshire, tutoring students with learning disabilities, supervising a dormitory, and offering instruction in a variety of outdoor activities all year long.

Kevin’s experience at the White Mountain School was transformative in several ways. He realized that while he loved outdoor education, he was equally fascinated by classroom pedagogy and by the opportunity to figure out how his students were thinking.  He had rediscovered his interest in psychology, and in 1994 he returned to academia to pursue an M.A. degree at the University of New Hampshire under the direction of Jack Mayer.  In 1997 Kevin moved on to Princeton to study with John Darley and earned his doctorate there in Psychology in 2001 with a dissertation on revenge and justice. John Darley remembers that Kevin was consistently prepared and wonderfully well-organized, with well-developed skills in statistics and in expository prose. Kevin himself was proud of his ability to thrive intellectually in such a rigorous academic environment. He had found his calling at last.

Kevin’s research examined lay theories of morality and justice, including people’s naive theories about important kinds of social behavior (e.g., punishment for deviant acts) and how these theories drive behavior (e.g., the kinds of prison sentences people recommend).  One interesting question he examined, for example, is whether people are fully aware of how they form judgments about transgression; there appear to be many cases in which people say one thing but do another when it comes to determining punishment.  He uncovered a number of interesting cases in which people’s theories about transgression and punishment bear little relation to the rationale behind the legal codes.  In addition to examining basic questions about people’s views of morality and social behavior, this work has intriguing implications for social policy.

He and John Darley found a joint interest in determining which of the many goals that exist for punishing wrongdoers are the ones that really motivate ordinary people to assign punishment to those who have been convicted of crimes.  Certainly, people do this in order to deter crime but Kevin and John discovered that individuals from western cultures tend to have an immediate intuition that the offender “deserves” punishment and the magnitude of the punishment is to a considerable extent shared on most offenses.

A two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia allowed Kevin to work with Tim Wilson and to further refine his research agenda.  During this time Kevin conducted research on the affective consequences of revenge, finding that whereas people believe that exerting revenge (punishing a free rider) will make them feel better, it actually makes them feel worse. He also taught the introductory social psychology course at UVa to rave reviews.  He once said that he treasured every minute of class and hated letting the students go, feeling that he had more to say about the many fascinating topics in social psychology. Clearly his students felt the same way, giving him some of the best course evaluations in the department.  One student sent an unsolicited letter to the Chair of the department that read, “Kevin Carlsmith is a phenomenal professor . . . I view this course as one of my most valuable experiences in the past few years, and will carry the lessons learned here with me forever.”

In 2003, Kevin became an assistant professor at Colgate; he was promoted to associate professor in 2009.  He taught a variety of classes at Colgate, including Social Psychology, Statistics, Propaganda and Persuasion (initially developed with Joel Cooper at Princeton), and a freshman seminar of his own design entitled “Just Punishment.” A 2008 letter in support of Kevin’s tenure application described him as “a thought provoking, dynamic, organized, and enthusiastic teacher” who routinely incorporated new academic technology into his classroom. At a gathering in Fall 2011 to honor Kevin, his Colgate students spoke and wrote with poignancy about how his teaching influenced their view of the world in very practical ways. For example, many of his students reflected with laughter and wonder on Kevin’s assignment for them to consciously break a social norm on campus, and to document the reactions of others and of themselves; this is a clear example of Kevin’s ability to help students apply academic material to their own lives and to societal issues. He also served as Chair of the Institutional Review Board at Colgate and as Faculty Advisor to the Psychology Club. His students and colleagues there speak in glowing terms of the contributions that Kevin made to the department and to the school. His advisees praised his compassion and his willingness to let students make the major decisions. Kevin inspired students to pursue challenging theses and ambitious research projects; he championed both efficiency and collegiality in department decision-making; he provided humanity and practical suggestions in administrative capacities; he was a valuable resource for colleagues in thinking through the research design and statistical analyses of their own research.

Kevin published his findings in numerous prestigious journals, and was regularly invited to comment in the mass media, including the New York Times, LA Times, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, about contemporary issues of punishment, such as analyzing the motivations and justification for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. He possessed a particular expertise in statistics, an ability that he may have inherited from his father, Stanford professor J. Merrill Carlsmith. The recipient of three grants from the National Science Foundation, Kevin was first author of more than a dozen articles as well as numerous encyclopedia entries, and a regular reviewer of scholarly articles for journals in psychology and law.
In 2009 Kevin received a major grant from the National Science Foundation to advance his research on revenge and punishment. The anonymous reviewers were unanimous in their praise for Kevin’s project. One wrote: “I see Carlsmith's work as transformative in the most profound sense, because his research will help shape the future of research and public discourse on an important scientific, social, and political question: why do people support and carry out torture? This question is not just important for the United States, and not just for the Bush and Obama administrations. This is a global issue.” Another reviewer added: “[T]his proposal is of interest to many disciplines including law, political science, and public policy, not simply to psychology. It is also of great relevance to current events, and has the potential to make an impact not only within academic circles but also on actual public policy decisions. The broader impact of this research is not in doubt.”
Perhaps the most telling comment of all came from a reviewer who expressed frustration at being unable to find any flaws at all in the project’s design:
Reviewers are supposed to read proposals carefully and point out all of the ways in which the proposal could be improved. This grant has me feeling like the Maytag repairman. I think this grant is terrific in all ways, and I have nothing to criticize or even recommend to improve the PIs existing ideas.  .  . I clearly have no ideas that the PI has not considered already, and the ones I was considering were not as interesting as the ones he proposes. The predictions are interesting and counterintuitive, with pilot data to support them. The experiments are programmatic and ambitious, moving the clear ideas mentioned in the introduction into new and interesting areas.. I anticipate that the PI will generate many more interesting follow-ups than he even anticipates at this point. It's among the best proposals I have seen. That it's being conducted at an undergraduate institution only augments my very positive impression of this proposal. It is terrific, and deserves the highest priority of funding.

In 2001 Kevin married Alison Mathias, a Virginia native whom he had met in a swing-dance class at Princeton University. They have two daughters, Abigail and Julia. A devoted father, Kevin lavished attention upon “his girls” as he affectionately referred to all three of them. He relished the opportunities to introduce his daughters to ice-skating in the winter, Disneyworld in the spring, and swimming at his family’s camp in New Hampshire during the summer.

In 2010-11 Kevin was appointed as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He was eager to introduce his wife Alison and his two young daughters to the splendors of the Bay Area, and he was delighted to have the chance to collaborate with so many other social scientists. He was also pleased to follow so closely in his parent’s footsteps: Merrill had been a Fellow at CASBS in the 1970s, and Lyn was a frequent visitor there as the steadfast companion of Director emeritus Gardner Lindzey. Sadly, Kevin’s cancer prevented him from utilizing the resources there to his full advantage, and his health declined significantly during his year there. During that same year, Kevin provided sensitive and compassionate care to his ailing mother Lyn while managing his own health issues, taking care of his family, and arranging his affairs. A clear-eyed social scientist right to the end, Kevin wrote a blog about his illness that showcased his dry wit, his optimism and zest for life, and his detailed understanding of the disease that afflicted him.

Kevin was always thoughtful and deliberative. Gentle and kind, he retained a fierce desire to live coupled with a serene dignity in the face of death. Even as he battled his own disease, he paid extraordinary attention to his ailing mother to make sure that she was well-cared for, and to his daughters so that they would be prepared for his passing. We will miss his wise counsel; his delight in the achievements of his children; his keen insights into the human mind; and his enthusiasm for family, friends, psychology, and the outdoors.

In addition to his immediate family of Alison, Abby, and Julia, he is survived by his brother Chris Carlsmith and his family of Arlington, MA, and his sister Kim Sampson and her family of Orlando, FL.

Christopher Carlsmith (University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
John Darley (Princeton University)
Rebecca L. Shiner (Colgate University)
Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia)

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