Lee Jussim


Lee J. Jussim is an American social psychologist.

Early life and education

At age 5, Jussim's family moved into a Brooklyn-area public housing where they lived until he was 12. When he was 13, his family moved to Levittown, Long Island and his mother died of cancer.
Jussim dropped out of college before he met Lisa Baum whom he would later marry in 1975. They have three children together. Jussim enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1979, where he majored in psychology.
His early work in social psychology began as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan where he collaborated with Lerita Coleman.
He focused his dissertation on the well-researched area of teacher expectancies and was encouraged to conduct observations in the real world instead of the laboratory. He graduated with a doctorate in social psychology in 1987 and assumed a teaching position at Rutgers University that same year.

Career and research

Jussim runs the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University, Livingston Campus. The lab studies how people perceive, think about, and judge others. He is a researcher in the fields of person perception, stereotype accuracy and bias and has been integral in the initiative for viewpoint diversity which advocates to correct the inaccuracies in the field of social psychology research. In support of the latter, he helped found the Heterodox Academy, a collection of academics concerned with what they see as narrowing of political viewpoints on college campuses, itself having ties to conservative think tank The Koch Foundation. Dr. Jussim also runs Rabble Rouser, a blog that identifies errors in social psychology research and practice, suggests ways to improve it and discusses societal implications.
He has published and spoken extensively on scientific integrity and distortions in science motivated by politics, stereotype accuracy, prejudice, bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and social constructionism. His works have won professional wards: his 2012 book Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy won an American Association of Publishers' Prize for best book in psychology, and his 1991 book Social Belief and Social Reality: A Reflection-Construction Model received the Gordon Allport Prize for Research in Intergroup Relations. During his recent 2013–2014 sabbatical, he worked with colleagues at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the Behavioral Sciences and co-founded Stanford’s Best Practices in Science group.
Jussim has also published papers on the topic of antisemitism.

Selected academic articles and book chapters

As of October 2018, Jussim's five most cited articles/chapters were :