00:00:00.640Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. I found out yesterday that the new president-elect of the American Psychological Association, the APA, which is a really venerable institution, at least historically speaking, not so much anymore.
00:00:18.060i've you know attended many of these apa meetings i've presented my work at some of these meetings
00:00:25.120division 23 of the apa used to be the society for consumer psychology and so obviously given my work
00:00:34.280in consumer psychology psychology decision making evolutionary psychology apa is one of the really
00:00:40.360important meetings huge meeting thousands and thousands of psychologists of all types
00:00:46.880some kooky stuff but also some very serious people so you would think that the president
00:00:53.660elect of such an august organization would be someone with just impeccable credentials yes
00:01:01.000so i first went ahead and i went to apa to look at their list of past presidents now some of these
00:01:08.580names i won't have time to go through all of uh you know the the background of these people but
00:01:13.840you know, just jot down their names if you'd like, or maybe I'll even, you know, give you the link to
00:01:18.960where I got their names. These are really historical academic psychologists that are truly
00:01:24.800some of the absolute elite of the behavioral sciences and psychology of different disciplines
00:01:34.200psychology. So let me just mention some of the ones that caught my eyes. So Robert Sternberg is
00:01:41.040somebody who has studied psychology of envy, among many other topics. He used to be the president
00:01:47.080of Yale. So a well-known and well-respected psychologist. Philip Zimbardo of the Zimbardo
00:01:57.480experiments at Stanford, the classic experiment where you put people in either as corrections
00:02:03.900officers or as prisoners and then you see how they conform to the expected roles of each of
00:02:11.300these two uh camps so philip zimbardo martin seligman uh i've interacted with him once not
00:02:19.000a very pleasant guy but a very you know the pioneer of positive psychology and happiness research
00:02:24.780donald campbell i'm reading here for you some of the past presidents of apa uh donald campbell
00:02:33.540wrote a classic paper uh campbell and fisk paper on multi-trade multi-method matrix very very
00:02:42.360important paper that very much relates to the what i talk about with nomological networks of
00:02:48.860cumulative evidence how do you decide that a psychometric scale is exactly measuring what you
00:02:55.140expect it to be measuring and nothing else and so on so there's a a procedure by which you can
00:03:00.360validate such scales so donald campbell and also donald campbell campbell has done incredible work
00:03:07.020in evolutionary epistemology very very important uh thinker philosopher albert bentura bendura one
00:03:15.380of the biggest most cited psychologists ever george miller who famously did the work on
00:03:22.420the structure of memory wrote a paper i think in the late 50s a absolute classic paper in cognitive
00:03:29.780psychology. Abraham Maslow of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, right? Self-actualization, perhaps the
00:03:39.680most famous of all humanist psychologists, was also president of the APA. Paul Meal, who studied
00:03:47.780the difference between actuarial judgments and judgments made, you know, based on
00:03:58.220people you know doing multi-attribute decisions uh huge psychology of decision making guy
00:04:08.600donald hebb who was a neuroscientist did work that would eventually be important for
00:04:14.880connectionism or artificial neural networks harry harlow he's the guy who did the research on how
00:04:22.100If you put monkeys in an impoverished lack of nurturance, then they end up having all sorts of downstream behavioral problems and psychiatric problems.
00:04:37.100uh lee crombach crombach's alpha is a way of establishing uh you know which which of many
00:04:47.460items that measure a single construct you're going to keep and which ones you're going to remove
00:04:52.180so typically a crombach alpha that's less than 0.7 means that you're not getting a very good
00:04:59.780internal validity for that measure. So a huge guy, Carl Rogers, founding psychotherapist,
00:05:09.980Gordon Alport, another classic guy, Lewis Thurstone, who was a huge psychometrician.
00:05:17.020These are for any of you who, many of you may be bored by these names, but these are,
00:05:20.860I'm mentioning all of these because these are really like, if you look at a history of
00:05:24.560psychology history of behavioral sciences these are really august important thinkers and many of
00:05:32.120them were huge public intellectuals john watson part of the school of behaviorism stimulus response
00:05:38.480models edward lee thorndyke another huge guy william james the father of modern psychology
00:05:47.640American psychology, William James, John Dewey, another one, James Baldwin, and then finally,
00:05:54.700James Cattell, another very famous. Now, these are, as I said, you pick up any history of psychology
00:06:00.920book, and their names are going to come up, some of the biggest thinkers,
00:06:06.420certainly in the past 100 plus years. And now we're going to come to the president-elect in a
00:06:13.980world of diversity, inclusion, and equity, where meritocracy is a form of white supremacy, where
00:06:22.340intersectionality is really what's important. Are you queer? Are you Latinx? Are you two-spirit?
00:06:29.500Are you indigenous? Do you have the right skin? You, meaning certainly not white, that is really
00:06:36.240what determines whether you should be leading the APA, the American Psychological Association.
00:06:43.980So the woman who just won that honor is Candice Nicole Hargens.