Teaching is a challenging and most rewarding aspect of being a professor. When my students grasp a new idea, when they discover how to extend abstract psychological principles to concrete instances of human behavior, when they gain new perspectives on old problems, when they develop original, creative insights and analyses—it is then that I feel an enormous satisfaction and pride in being the catalyst for these achievements. To be able to share the knowledge and expertise that I have and to help inspire both the use and further development of that knowledge are goals that I have always considered paramount in my professional career.

Social psychology is my area of specialization within the field of psychology. It is defined as the study of the individual within a social context—that is, how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an individual are influenced by other people. One of the most exciting aspects of teaching social psychology is that this level of analysis matches that of the student's personal experience in everyday life. In a sense, the student's daily life is a social psychology laboratory in which psychological principles can be applied to real-life events and new hypotheses can be tried out. I often assign projects in which students have to observe ongoing, naturally occurring behavior. The sorts of behaviors they observe are often of the mundane, everyday variety, but they have to develop different perspectives on these observations and so they find themselves seeing the same old things in a brand new way. They then have to develop an original conceptual analysis, based on both the concrete information they have collected and the abstract principles they have learned from lectures and readings. In this way, I hope to be able to recast their self-image so that they come to see themselves as active generators of knowledge, not passive repositories of other people's ideas.

An ongoing theme in my work has been the creative interplay of teaching and research. Because I am so fascinated with social psychology, and so invested in it as a researcher, teaching it is an inherently interesting and pleasurable activity. Moreover, I find that teaching plays an important role in the development of my research and in my professional growth. Sometimes my research has led to the development of new classes; sometimes my courses and interactions with students have led to the development of new hypotheses and research designs. I learn a great deal from my students, just as I hope they learn a great deal from me, and it is this reciprocal enrichment that makes teaching such a continual joy for me.