The 2017 Meeting of SIOP was the first for the new History Committee. We had the privilege of continuing the tradition of conducting the Living History Series interviews with past SIOP President and past Editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Dr. Sheldon Zedeck. The full hour-long interview is available here. In this brief installment of the History Corner, we reflect on the experience.

One of our favorite sessions from the 2017 SIOP conference was a panel discussion about prosocial I-O.  Despite being toward the end of the program, the session was well-attended, and the audience members were very engaged as the panelists discussed the work they’d done with various organizations.  However, there are very few sessions that get scheduled in a room big enough to hold all of SIOP’s members, and the experiences the panelists described in working with nonprofits were interesting enough that we wanted to build on their discussion in this issue’s TIP offering.

As such, we’re pleased to introduce Holly Payne (Gartner), Don Scott (Development Dimensions International/DDI), and Doug Wolf (Select International).  They bring a wealth of experience in terms of volunteering with nonprofits and using I-O in prosocial endeavors, and we thought you would find both their experience and their thoughts about prosocial I-O, and how to communicate what I-O is to organizations you may end up volunteering with, useful.  We certainly did

Over the last few years, increased awareness and concern over aggression and bullying in school children have spurred efforts to develop effective prevention programs for these behaviors.  Although these behaviors in children have been going on for many years, objective research on the incidence and prevention of it is relatively recent.  Part of the difficulty with research on the subject is that childhood aggression and bullying is common only in a broad sense, but it is not something that everyone experiences—either as the aggressor or the victim (thank goodness!).  Even though this topic of bullying focuses on children, there are important learnings for I-O psychology in both the methods of research and in the findings.  After all, we were all once children, and though we age, it is debatable how much the behavior patterns of many adults actually mature and improve.