Introduction to Miles Hewstone's SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award Address

Before I begin my introduction of this year’s winner of the Kurt Lewin Award, I want to recognize the other members of the award committee, Marilynn Brewer, James Jones, and Mark Snyder, and thank them for their hard work and spirit of collegiality in the committee’s deliberations. We had a number of outstanding candidates and there were several iterations before we reached a final decision. It was a real pleasure to go through this process with them. On behalf of the Committee and Society for the Psychological Study of Social issues (SPSSI), I am extremely pleased and honored to present the 2012 Kurt Lewin Award to Miles Ronald Cole Hewstone Professor of Social Psychology and University Lecturer in Social Psychology and Fellow of New College, University of Oxford. This award has been given annually for the last 54 years and the names of the people who have received it represent an almost overwhelming list of truly distinguished contributors to research on social issues and problems over the last half century. Our honoree today is a worthy addition to this list. Even when presenting an award like this, I am constitutionally incapable of not mentioning myself, so let me begin my introduction by noting that this is the fourth time I have had the pleasure of introducing the winner of the Lewin award. I was exceptionally pleased to give previous awards to Bert Raven, Marilynn Brewer, and Mark Snyder, and today my pleasure is increased by the fact that the award is going to such a close friend. But now let me turn to the business at hand. First, I want to talk at bit about Kurt Lewin. Lewin began his academic career at the University of Berlin, and quickly established himself as a brilliant young theoretician and researcher, who studied a wide variety of social psychological phenomena, but like our honoree today he