Making the case

My brief remarks about a legend winning the National Medal of Science

My dear colleague and mentor, Dr. Shelley Taylor, recently received the highest American honor in science, our version of the Nobel Prize.  President Joe Biden personally bestowed the National Medal of Science on her in October.  Last week, the UCLA Psychology Department hosted a celebration for Shelley and I was honored to say a few words. Below is a lightly edited version of my remarks.

OK, so I’m here to present the case.  I’ll try to be quick.  I’m sure you all read the report.  We had a national search for a new social psychology hire.  I wasn’t on the committee but unfortunately the chair of the search couldn’t be here today and asked me to present the case.  Unfortunately, I’m pretty unfamiliar with this case, but I’ll do my best.

So, the search committee looked far and wide and decided we should make an offer to…Shelley…Taylor.  It says here that Shelley got her Ph.D. at Yale and then spent some time at Harvard University.  But everyone makes mistakes early in their career.  We shouldn’t hold that against her.

Let’s see – there’s a section on her CV that lists awards and honors.  Let’s have a look.  Oh, that’s weird – she did this wrong.   She must not have realized she was supposed to list the awards and honors she herself had gotten.  As best I can tell, it looks like she just made a list of all of the awards and honors that exist – which is totally not what we asked for.  So maybe some problems following instructions, but let’s move on.

The biggest problem I see is that she does way too much service.  A million different editorships and editorial boards. All these different board of advisors, board of trustees, board of governors for every organization involved in psychology.  And we all know anyone doing that much service is probably just covering over not getting much research done.  Let’s turn to that next.

Let’s have a look at her publication record.  When I look for the number of pubs it says she has 43 – hey, that’s really good for a newish hire.  I can see why the committee liked her.  Oh, wait, hold on, my mistake, it says in the report that her CV has 43 PAGES just for listing her publications and that it was too many for the committee to count – it says they stopped counting at 500.  Also, there’s a note here – it says “If Dr. Taylor just shows some more independence from her mentors she will probably be in good shape for tenure.”

Shelley’s h-index is 147.  For those of you who don’t know, that means Shelley has 147 papers that have been cited at least 147 times.  That’s the highest H-index anyone from UCLA psychology has ever had.  She has over 5000 citations this year – this year, a decade after retiring and with 2 months left in the year!  In 2000, she published her famous “Tend and Befriend” paper showing that while males tend to respond to fear with fight or flight, females instead react with nurturing behavior. That paper has just over 5000 citations by itself and it barely makes her top 5.  At number 2 is her “Illusion and Well-being” Psychological Bulletin paper.  Her work on positive illusions was all the rage when I was in grad school.  We used to talk about that one regularly in my cohort.  That one has been cited over 13,000 times.  And of course, Shelley was one of the founders of the social cognition movement in social psychology that was so successful it’s kind of like saying she was one of the founders of the alphabet.  Social psychologists everywhere pretty much use the methods she pioneered in the field and she literally wrote the book on social cognition – that’s the title, Social Cognition.  It’s the book I learned social cognition from as a graduate student and the book I taught social cognition from as a professor.  That one has been cited over 21,000 times and still going strong (500 cites this year!).  And I’m not even talking about the fact that she also helped found the entire field of Health Psychology back in the 1970s and 80s.

Now here is the most amazing statistic – it’s a two parter.  According to Google Scholar, Shelley is the most cited woman in the entire history of social psychology.  You know who the second most cited woman in social psychology is?  Shelley’s student!  Susan Fiske.  Shelly is #1 and her student is #2.  In fact, among the 100 most cited social psychologists in the entire field, 4 of them are Shelley’s trainees.  So, she and her students represent 5% of the top 100 all by themselves.  Only a handful of entire departments can claim that much influence in the field.

So as the stand in for the search committee chair, I can say that the committee and the whole department unanimously endorses having Shelley at UCLA for almost her entire career.

On a more personal note, I am so grateful, Shelley, for everything you did to influence my career, Naomi Eisenberger’s career, and for letting us watch a master at work when we were in your lab.  Before I was a professor at UCLA, Shelley was one of my postdoctoral mentors along with Barbara Knowlton in behavioral neuroscience.  Every week, in lab, Shelley would tell us stories about how “big science” really happened because that was what she was doing.  But here’s the most impressive thing I got to see up close – Shelley has some of the best vision for seeing the biggest ideas before anyone else and knowing how to pitch them at a level that is going to get countless labs working on the problem she laid out in seminal paper after seminal paper.  I’m not sure I can think of anyone in social psychology who has had more distinct high impact ideas than Shelley. 

I’m also pretty sure that Shelley singlehandedly got me hired at UCLA.  Please don’t hold that against her.  I applied for the job at UCLA with two publicationss.  One of these was published in Personality and Individual Differences and was so weak that my PhD advisor, Dan Gilbert, had suggested I not try to publish it. In retrospect, I do not disagree with him.  The second was a review paper suggesting there should be a thing called social cognitive neuroscience. Very few schools interviewed me.  People usually don’t want to be first with something new.  But Shelley always saw things before other people did.  She knew that social neuroscience could be the next big thing and so she fought to get a single faculty line turned into two faculty lines so they could hire the appropriate social psychologist and also take a chance on an oddball like me.  Shelley continued to mentor me as an assistant professor and we published more than a dozen papers together.

I am more than a little nostalgic for the time when Shelley was leading the Social area with Anne Peplau, Chris Dunkel-Schetter, Tara Scanlan, David Sears, Bernie Weiner, and Jim Sidanius.  Every one of them a rock star and every one of them taught me lessons I’ll never forget.  They were kind of like a boy band where each person had their own specific role that together made the whole group really special.  But make no mistake - Shelley Taylor was the Justin Timberlake of the group, the undeniable breakout star that gave our Social area a whole string of #1 hits.  She never flaunted her status, but she didn’t need to.  We all knew she was social psychology royalty. 

Let me just end by saying, Shelley, I watched you live on TV a few weeks ago getting the National Medal of Science from President Biden.  I happened to be watching the live broadcast of the National Medal of Science awards being given out, but I literally had no idea you were receiving one.  When I heard your name and saw you go up and get the award from Joe, I teared up and felt so much pride.  Shelley, thank you, thank you, thank you, for showing us all how it’s done.