Posted 5/26/10

Gifford Weary’s work as a social psychologist is a marriage of head and heart. The researcher, educator, and interim dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences has made a career of examining the effect of emotions on the mind. 

U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Ohio State’s social psychology program No. 2 in the nation. “Its reputation is as good as it is because of the quality of its faculty and the quality of its graduate students . . . and the marks that they have left once they leave Ohio State,” Weary said. 

Weary also attributes the program’s success to its focus on specialization from the get-go. “It made sure that it was front and center at a national level in terms of research on attitudes and persuasion,” she said.      

Social psychologists dissect a variety of topics, from stereotyping to prejudice to what makes us tick. 

“Basically, social psychology looks at the effects of real or imagined people on our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our motivations, our behaviors,” Weary said. “It gets right at the core of the human experience.”

Fields as diverse as mental health, public policy, workplace relations, and trauma recovery have benefited from research in social psychology.

“Marketing departments, advertising departments, [and] research and development departments have increasingly recognized the role that psychologists can play in their organizations,” Weary said.

“They increasingly rely on survey data from customers; they increasingly want to tailor marketing messages to various kinds of clients. And social psychology, with its focus on attitudes, persuasion, values, decision making—those kinds of content areas all are of interest to the corporate world.”

So, social psychologists are not clinicians a couple would visit if their marriage was on the

rocks. Instead, they are researchers who might, for instance, try to understand how depressed partners perceive their spouses and the world around them.

Weary did her graduate work at Vanderbilt University, which allowed a dual focus on social and clinical psychology. While most of her peers were studying cognitive processes, she took a different path. 

“I was very interested in the effect of emotional states on our perceptions of, and behaviors toward, other people,” she said. 

In one of Weary’s early studies, she sought to learn whether depressed people are less attuned to what is going on around them, as many had assumed, or if they are overly engaged and attentive. To the surprise of many, she found the latter is true.                      

Contributing to the understanding of a subject often is the ultimate payoff for Weary and fellow researchers. As an educator and dean, she also wants to continue to build on her program’s strengths.

Weary, through her family’s foundation, recently donated $2 million to create the endowed Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Chair in Social Psychology. She hopes the investment will help attract the brightest minds and recruit the most effective mentors for students.

It is unusual for an educator to make such a large donation, but supporting scholarship is in Weary’s blood. 

“One of the big activities in which [my parents] engaged while they were alive was giving to a variety of universities,” she said. 

“My dad saw the impact and the doors that could be opened by higher education. He was a small-town kid from Kansas who went to Harvard, and he learned firsthand what that educational experience could afford one and prepare one for in life, and my mother as well. 

“[My parents] sacrificed greatly during their lives and worked very hard, and so I feel a real obligation . . . to invest in education as one path toward improving the lives of people,” Weary said.

The greatest good

Gifford Weary talks about her foundation’s gift to the social psychology program. 

What is an endowed chair?

[It means that] somebody has given money to endow a chair, and that money goes into an endowment and it spins off 4 percent interest every year. And that 4 percent goes toward helping defray the cost of the salary and benefits of the faculty member. It also goes toward supporting the person’s teaching and research activities.

Why did you believe it was important to establish an endowed chair?

For a place like Ohio State to attract the best and the brightest of students, and to make the maximum contribution to society, we need to attract the very best faculty members here. And it’s very difficult to do without additional resources. . . .

An endowed chair is an important piece of what it takes. It also takes a very strong university and a very strong department into which those faculty will go.

Why an endowed chair instead of a scholarship fund, for instance?

I could help a small number of students gain access to higher education with a scholarship, but by investing in a faculty position, I can impact the educational outcome of a large number of students. 

How will the endowed chair position benefit the department?

The ability for them to go out and hire another senior faculty member . . . will help to maintain the excellence [the program] has achieved over the years. And that’s something that’s very hard to do over very many years. 

What is one way the endowed chair will directly affect students from the start?

The chair holder will play, I hope, a central role in advising undergraduates and graduate students about their career goals and preparing them to meet those challenges as they go forward.