Prof. Kruglanski Honored by FPSP

The Foundation for Personality & Social Psychology (FPSP) recently inducted Distinguished Professor of Psychology Arie Kruglanski into its Heritage Wall of Fame. The Heritage Fund Initiative is designed to celebrate personality and social psychology's heritage by honoring some of the great teachers and scientists who have made major contributions to field. In doing so, the Initiative is aimed at ensuring the field’s future heritage by assisting its next generation of scholars.

The Initiative allows students and colleagues to honor a cherished mentor by raising funds to establish an award in their name. Once sufficient funds have been raised, that mentor is placed in the Heritage Wall of Fame. FPSP has begun to use these funds to underwrite Heritage Dissertation Research Awards, which support graduate students conducting their dissertation research.

Professor Kruglanski was born in Lodz, Poland in 1939, amidst tumultuous social and political circumstances. His family later moved to Israel, where Professor Kruglanski attended high school and served in the armed forces. Afterward, he moved to North America, first to the University of Toronto, Canada, where he obtained a B.A. degree in psychology in 1966, and then to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he rapidly earned his Ph.D. under the guidance of Harold H. Kelley in 1968. Professor Kruglanski returned to Israel, where he spent 15 years as a Professor at Tel Aviv University and was elected President of the Israel Society for Social Psychological Research. He settled at the University of Maryland in College Park in 1987, where—in addition to his work in the Department of Psychology—he is a founding co-Principal Investigator of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START).

Professor Kruglanski has been a pioneer in the psychological study of closed-mindedness—or the "need for cognitive closure"—and the ways in which epistemic motivation is linked to rigid, fundamentalist belief systems and to violent extremism. His research has addressed the formation of subjective knowledge from the perspective of lay epistemic theory; the relationship between self-regulation and action; a unified conception of human judgment with implications for persuasion, stereotyping, attribution, and probabilistic reasoning; an analysis of political ideology as motivated social cognition; the motivational underpinnings of terrorist activity; and general theoretical frameworks for understanding goal systems and “cognitive energetics.” On these topics and others, he has published over 300 journal articles and book chapters. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the U.S. Air Force, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Naval Research, as well as the Ford and Templeton Foundations.

Professor Kruglanski has received numerous awards and honors, including the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award conferred by the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He was named as a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in 2003. He is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, the University of Maryland Regents Award for Scholarship and Creativity, a Senior Humboldt Award, and the Regesz Chair at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Kruglanski is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and has served the discipline by editing several prominent journals, including Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, and American Psychologist. He has also served on National Academy of Sciences panels related to counterterrorism and educational paradigms in homeland security.

Story and photo courtesy of FPSP.

Published on Wed, Jul 8, 2015 - 9:30AM