Does psychology make a significant difference in our lives? 2

By Philip G. Zimbardo - Stanford University

Giving Psychology Away: The Call for Societal Accountability

And then along came George Miller whose American Psychological Association (APA)presidential address in 1969 stunned the psychological establishment because one of its own first-born sons committed the heresy of exhorting them to go public, get real, get down, give it up, and be
relevant. Well, that is the way I think I heard it back then when George Miller (1969) told his audience that it was time to begin “to give psychology away to the public.” It was time to stop talking only to other psychologists. It was time to stop writing only for professional journals hidden
away in library stacks. It was time to go beyond the endless quest for experimental rigor in the perfectly designed study to test a theoretically derived hypothesis. Maybe it was time to begin finding answers to the kinds of questions your mother asked about why people acted the way they did.
Perhaps it was acceptable to start considering how best to translate what we knew into a language that most ordinary citizens could understand and even come to appreciate.
I for one applauded George Miller’s stirring call to action for all these reasons. It was heady for me because I believed that coming from such a distinguished serious theorist and researcher—not some do-gooder, liberal communitarian whom the establishment could readily dismiss—
his message would have a big impact in our field.
Sadly, the banner raised by Miller’s inspirational speech did not fly very high over most psychology departments for many years to come. Why not? I think for four reasons:Excessive modesty about what psychology really had of value to offer the public, ignorance about who was “the public,” cluelessness about how to go about the mission of giving psychology away, and lack of sufficient concern about why psychology needed to be accountable to the public.
How shall we counterargue against such reasoning?
First, scanning the breadth and depth of our field makes apparent that there is no need for such professional modesty.
Rather, the time has come to be overtly proud of our past and current accomplishments, as I will try to demonstrate here. We have much to be proud of in our heritage and in our current accomplishments. Second, the public starts with our students, our clients, and our patients and
extends to our funding agencies, national and local politicians,all nonpsychologists, and the media. And it also means your mother whose “bubba psychology” sometimes needs reality checks based on solid evidence we have gathered. Third, it is essential to recognize that the media are the gatekeepers between the best, relevant psychology we want to give away and that elusive public we hope will value what we have to offer. We need to learn how best to utilize the different kinds of media that are most appropriate for delivering specific messages to particular target audiences that we want to reach. Psychologists need to learn how to write effective brief press releases, timely op-ed newspaper essays, interesting articles for popular magazines, valuable trade books based on empirical evidence, and how best to give radio, TV, and print interviews.
Simple awareness of media needs makes evident, for example,that TV requires visual images, therefore, we should be able to provide video records of research, our interventions,or other aspects of the research or therapeutic process that will form a story’s core.
“Media smarts” also means realizing that to reach adolescents with a helpful message (that is empirically validated), a brief public service announcement on MTV or an article in a teen magazine will have a broader impact than detailed journal articles or even popular books on the subject. Thus, it becomes essential to our mission of making the public wiser consumers of psychological
knowledge to learn how to communicate effectively to the media and to work with the media.
Finally, we can challenge the fourth consideration regarding societal accountability with the awareness that taxpayers fund much of our research as well as some of the education of our graduate students. It is imperative that we convey the sense to the citizens of our states and nation that we are responsive to society’s needs and, further, that we feel responsible for finding solutions to some of its problems (Zimbardo, 1975). It has become standard operating procedure for most granting agencies now to require a statement about the potential societal value of any proposed research. That does not mean that all research must be applied to dealing with current social or individual problems because there is considerable evidence that research that originally seemed esoterically “basic” has in time found valuable applications (see Swazey, 1974). It does
mean that although some of our colleagues begin with a focus on a problem in an applied domain, the others who start with an eye on theory testing or understanding some basic phenomena should feel obligated to stretch their imaginations by considering potential applications of their
knowledge. I believe we have much worthy applicable psychology, basic research, theory, and methodology that is awaiting creative transformations to become valuable applied psychology.

The Profound and Pervasive Impact
of Past Psychological Knowledge

Before I outline some recent, specific instances of how psychological research, theory, and methodology have been applied in various settings, I will first highlight some of the fundamental contributions psychology has already made in our lives. Many of them have become so pervasive
and their impact so unobtrusively profound that they are taken for granted. They have come to be incorporated into the way we think about certain domains, have influenced our attitudes and values, and so changed the way individuals and agencies behave that they now seem like the
natural, obvious way the world should be run. Psychology often gets little or no credit for these contributions—when we should be deservedly proud of them.

Philip G. Zimbardo

Authorized publication
Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association
Vol. 59, No. 5, 339–351
Psicolinea Gennaio 2006

2. To be continued

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_part one
_part three

Philip G. Zimbardo

is an internationally recognized scholar, educator, researcher and media personality, winning numerous awards and honors in each of these domains. He has been a Stanford University professor since 1968, having taught previously at Yale, NYU and Columbia. Zimbardo's career is noted for giving psychology away to the public through his popular PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, along with many text and trade books, among his 300 publications. He was recently president of the American Psychological Association.