Here is my speech from the ceremony held at EASP's general meeting in Krakow:
It is difficult for me to express in words how honored and how humbled I am to serve our community as the next president of EASP, entering the big shoes – literally but also metaphorically – of Kai Jonas.
And because it was difficult for me to find these words, I thought – we are in 2023, why not ask ChatGPT? So ChatGPT said, and I agree, that EASP has played a vital role in the development of social psychology in Europe and beyond. And that the association's activities have helped to promote excellence in research and use the insights gained through this research to improve society.
ChatGPT was particularly excited about EASP’s role in promoting diversity in science, and as the head of the Mid-Career award committee I again agreed: demographically, our awardees come from diverse regions and backgrounds (such as first generation to higher education), they study a wide range of topics, and use highly diverse methodologies including field experiments, experience-sampling, and cross-cultural comparisons. While there is sure room for further improvement, I believe that such diversity represents our broader community.
What ChatGPT didn’t say, however, but for me is the core of our association, is that EASP is like a family. Now, my partner works for a large American corporate, he works for Google, so I realize that this is often used as a cliché – but with EASP I genuinely feel that there is truth to it.
All our activities are made possible by members who volunteer to run the association because they care about social psychology and about our community. This includes journal editors and reviewers, members of ad-hoc and ongoing committees, the ombudsperson, and the organizers of our workshops, summer schools, and the small-sized, medium-sized, and of course the general meeting.
After three years on the executive committee, I can attest that we are doing work - such as taking care of legal procedures, database, finance – which is not highly exciting, not to say tedious, but at the end of the day we need this if we want to make exciting science.
So, this is also like in a family, at least from my perspective as a mother: a lot of unexciting labor, but it is worth it :-)
One of the things that, unfortunately, impeded the perception of EASP as a family among our younger members is covid-19. For a long time, we didn’t have face-to-face meetings. If you joined EASP in August 2017, this is your first General Meeting. I hope that we will soon be able to close this gap and that our younger members will experience the sense of community experienced by members like me, who are young at heart but not otherwise...
I hope that through this experience our new members will also endorse the view of science as a collaborative project. Even though prestige and competition are often a part of the game, what should bring us here is genuine intellectual curiosity and the wish to better understand and, if possible, improve ourselves and our societies.
This view of science, I believe, is especially common in the EASP.