Lee Jussim

Lee Jussim is an American social psychologist who was in born 1955 in the East New York section of Brooklyn, in New York City.

At age 5, Jussim's family moved into a Brooklyn-area public housing where they lived until he was 12. When he was 13, his family moved to Levittown, Long Island and his mother died of cancer. His father was stricken with grief and neglected Lee. It led Lee to become self-reliant at a young age.

Jussim dropped out of college twice before he met Lisa Baum who he would later marry in 1975. They have three children together. Baum convinced Jussim to return to school and, with reticence, he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 1979 in pursuit of a degree in marketing. He took two courses in psychology (memory and learning, and social psychology) with the intention of dropping one but enjoyed them so much he retained both and enthusiastically sought to become a social psychologist.

His early work in social psychology began as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan where he collaborated with Lerita Coleman (assistant professor) on data from two lab studies that conflicted with the popularly endorsed concept of self-fulfilling prophecy and racist hiring practices of White employers. Their data indicated that students’ self-concept is not shaped by teacher feedback and that White employers evaluate African-American job applicants more favorably than White applicants. These results were unpopular in the academic sphere but he did not see this reception as reason to abandon them. On the contrary, it motivated him to stand by his findings as a matter of principle.

He focused his dissertation on the well-researched area of teacher expectancies and was encouraged to conduct observations in the real world instead of the laboratory. The data he generated did not conform to popular opinion at the time that supported the pervasive effect of teacher expectancies. It suggested that teacher expectations did not have a significant effect on student performance and that teachers’ expectations predicted student achievement because they were accurate. He graduated with a doctorate in social psychology in 1987 and assumed a teaching position at Rutgers University that same year.

Today, Jussim continues to go against the grain. He acknowledges the influence of D.A. Carson's book Intolerance of Tolerance on his perspective. Among many other things, he runs the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University, Livingston Campus. The lab studies how people perceive, think about, and judge others. He is a leader in the fields of person perception, stereotype accuracy and bias and has been integral in the initiative for viewpoint diversity which advocates to correct the inaccuracies in the field of social psychology research. In support of the latter, he helped start the website hertodoxacademy.org, a collection of academics pushing for improvements in their academic fields. Dr. Jussim also runs Rabble Rouser, a blog that identifies errors in social psychology research and practice, suggests ways to improve it and discusses societal implications.

He has published and spoken extensively on scientific integrity and distortions in science motivated by politics, stereotype accuracy, prejudice, bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and social constructionism. A small sample of his publications include Social Perception and Social Reality (1991), which won an American Association of Publishers' Prize for best book in psychology, Social Belief and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (2012), Teacher Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (2009), Interpretations and Methods: Towards a More Effectively Self-Correcting Social Psychology (2016), and Stereotype Accuracy: One of the Largest Relationships in All of Social Psychology (in press). He has served as the head of the Psychology Department at Rutgers and is particularly proud of the high caliber graduate students he has trained. During his recent 2012-2013 sabbatical, he worked with colleagues at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the Behavioral Sciences to develop Stanford’s Best Practices in Science group.

Jussim is also a noted expert on the study of anti-semitism.

Jussim a founder of the Heterodox Academy.

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Carson, D. A. (2012). The Intolerance of Tolerance. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.