Abstract
Jane Sell’s contributions to social psychology include guides to theory building, experimental methods, public goods, prosocial interaction, gender, race, and status processes. She serves on committees and panels at the American Sociological Association (ASA), the ASA Social Psychology Section, and the National Science Foundation. Her doctoral students attest to her wise and patient guidance, and she continues to enrich social psychology through her research, her service, and her many students.
This year the chair of the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Social Psychology, Amy Kroska, gave me the privilege of chairing the Cooley-Mead Selection Committee. My fellow committee members were Dawn Robinson, University of Georgia; Jane McLeod, Indiana University; Edward J. Lawler, Cornell University; and Jeremy Freese, Stanford University. The committee selected Jane Sell as this year’s recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award.
Jane’s grandparents settled in Wisconsin because of the timber, now mostly gone. Her grandfather worked as a lumberjack. Her father attended college on the GI Bill and became an engineer. He earned advanced degrees and joined the faculty of the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked until his retirement.
After high school, Jane enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, with the understanding that she would prepare for one of these careers: nursing or education. Nursing sounded stressful, not to mention messy, and Jane rejected that immediately. So the plan became for Jane to marry right after graduation and settle into a career as a teacher. Jane studied secondary education, and taught seventh grade while still in college. She chose not to marry at that time, and her parents wistfully acknowledged her independent streak.
Jane’s major was American institutions, a program that included social psychology. She enrolled in courses taught by H. Andrew Michener, who always insisted on collecting reliable data to support claims about how people act. (Another of Michener’s students was Edward J. Lawler, Cooley-Mead 2001.) Jane also enrolled in small groups courses taught by Bruce Bushing. In those courses, Jane developed proficiency in coding discussion groups using the full, difficult, 12-category system developed by Robert Freed Bales (Cooley-Mead 1983). From working with Michener and Bushing, Jane saw the virtues of using experimental methods to test theory. Her undergraduate thesis was an experiment on communication patterns under uncertainty in task groups.
Financial aid was scarce, and Jane worked all through college as—what else?—a secretary. She first heard about graduate fellowships from a recruiter for Texas A&M. Like several of us at that age, she was amazed to discover that someone would pay her to get higher education. So Jane went to A&M and completed a master’s thesis on educational aspirations of minority youth. But she still wanted to conduct experimental research, and A&M at that time had no laboratory. She had read a 1973 experimental research paper in Sociometry by Lee Freese and Bernard P. Cohen (Cooley-Mead 2002), so she applied and was accepted at Washington State University. (For younger readers, Sociometry became Social Psychology Quarterly.) As a doctoral student, Jane worked with Freese on the forms and uses of axiomatic theory in sociology. That ambitious work is published in two book chapters (Freese 1980). Those chapters total more than 100 pages—small print, no pictures.
Washington State provided a social psychology laboratory, and just as important, it fostered interaction with faculty and other students. Besides being influenced by Lee Freese, Jane’s thinking was influenced by Irving Tallman, Louis Gray, Victor Gecas, Duane Alwin, and others. Students, some of whom Jane later conducted research with, include Kathy J. Kuipers, Wanda Griffith, Michael Martin, Larry Hembroff, Michael Sullivan, and Ted Greenstein. In 1979, Jane completed her dissertation on theoretically guided ways to reduce unwanted inequalities caused by status. She accepted an offer from Texas A&M, built a lab there, and progressed to become Cornerstone Professor.
Jane married Philip Berke, professor of land use and environmental planning and director of the Institute of Sustainable Coastal Communities, adjunct professor at the Bush School of Government at A&M, and adjunct professor of city and regional planning at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Jane and Phil have two children. LeeAnn Sell is the evaluation coordinator at the Center for Evaluation and Educational Policy at Indiana University. Timothy Berke is the country director for IsraAid, a nongovernmental organization, working in South Sudan.
As one reads Jane’s research, intellectual and personal qualities of the scholar come through. Some common threads are emphasis on developing theoretical understanding, conducting strong empirical tests, and applying the knowledge to improve people’s lives. Jane’s work is a fine illustration of how and why to study social psychology.
Some of Jane’s many contributions to diverse areas of social psychology display the work’s breadth and some features that I think are particularly important.
Theory and Experiments. These papers range from the proper uses of experiments (Martin and Sell 1979; Sell and Martin 1983; Webster and Sell 2014), to practical tips on building a laboratory (Sell et al. 2011), to measurement and intercoder reliability (Compton, Love, and Sell 2012), to uses of cross-cultural experiments (Sell and Webster 2016).
Public Goods and Altruism. These papers illuminate and analyze some of the processes involved in prosocial behavior (Sell and Love 2009; Sell and Son 1997; Sell and Wilson 1991, 1999) and ways to reduce free riding (Griffith and Sell 1988; Sell 1988).
Prosocial Interaction and the Environment. These papers apply basic principles to natural settings. One of my favorites is on environmental attitude measurement (McCleery et al. 2006). After surveying the literature on that topic, the authors gently note that “vaguely defined variables, scope conditions and survey questions … will likely yield vague, unusable results” (McCleery et al. 2006:539–40).
Status and Equality. These papers address theoretical topics, including ways to reduce unwanted interaction inequality caused by status differences (Lovaglia et al. 2005; Sell and Freese 1984; Sell et al. 2000).
Gender and Race Statuses. These papers illuminate similarities among women and men, despite common myths of differences (Goar and Sell 2005; Sell 1997; Sell, Griffith, and Wilson 1993; Sell and Kuipers 2009). They show that women and men act similarly when they are in comparable status positions. When status positions differ, for instance, in a society where status beliefs favor men, women and men act differently, but behavior is determined by structural inequalities, not by inherent gender differences. For reducing or eliminating gender-linked inequalities, that understanding is enormously important.
Jane’s intellectual outreach and influence range widely. She collaborates with, besides social psychologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, educators, and organization scholars, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation and a professor of forestry and wildlife management. Collaborators include scholars from the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies; the Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Science; and the Information Culture Center of Korea. All of them, surely, have been impressed with Jane’s commitment to clear thinking and reliable empirical information.
Jane has served as a council member, newsletter editor, and chair of our section and of two other sections of the American Sociological Association (Mathematical Sociology and Rationality and Society). She has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including American Sociological Review and Social Forces and has been a deputy editor and coeditor of a special volume of Social Psychology Quarterly. She has served on merit review panels for three programs at the National Science Foundation—Sociology; Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences; and Major Research Instrumentation for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has been a member of ASA Council. These activities represent our viewpoints in larger fora.
Jane’s students describe her as one who “has accomplished the most delicate balance of compassion and rigor for those who learn from her.” Her 20 doctoral students (to date) have competed successfully for National Science Foundation dissertation awards and other extramural funding, and they contribute to our professional meetings and journals, thus extending Jane’s lifetime contributions to social psychology.
Those of us privileged to work with Jane know that she downplays her contributions and praises the work of others. But in this space, we ignore Jane’s humility and pay tribute to all that she has done for her students, her colleagues, our section, and our discipline.