Psychology and Social Policy

Two important areas of psychology make key contributions to the study of inequality and social policy. The first is broadly the domain of social psychology, especially research on inter-group relations, interpersonal perception, stereotyping, racism, aggression, justice and fairness. These are the micro-level building blocks of structural inequalities and processes that are shaped by the larger context of race, ethnic and gender relations. They structure the landscape of opportunity that other social scientists in the social policy program study at the institutional level.

The second domain is more cognitive, particularly the fields of social-cognition, judgment and decision making. These are areas of research that study human information processing in a way that is not about individual differences, and often not social. These range from work in social psych that measures the impact of split second exposure to a candidate's face as a predictor of the outcome of elections, or work on survey methodology, where nuances of formatting, scale, or description, have a substantial impact on responses. Research on people's ability to predict their own preferences, or behaviors suggests we have a fairly bad understanding of what will bring us happiness. Issues of habituation and changes from the status quo are central to work on well-being.

The study of judgment and decision making, particularly behavioral economics offers important insights into social policy. The rational agent model is central to much of social science theorizing, as well as naive subjects' intuitions. Yet, behavioral findings contradict some of the fundamental assumptions in interesting ways: the ordering of preferences appears not to be terribly stable and slight changes in context, description, or method of elicitation, yield inconsistent preferences.

The Princeton Psychology department has a critical mass of scholars in each of these areas and working with them, students in the joint degree program will be able to benefit from cutting edge training in their laboratories, field experiments, collaborative work in the Center for the Study of Mind, Brain and Behavior and regular weekly seminars in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

Students in the JDP-Psychology program will be competitive for appointments in outstanding departments of Psychology. At the same time, there is a growing interest in the incorporation of Psychology in Schools of Law and in Schools of Public Policy, as the presence of distinguished psychologists in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School attests. Above all, JDP-Psych students will benefit from state of the art training in their home field as well as a broader perspective, born of their exposure to economics, politics and sociology.