Peter Smith Named Honorary Fellow

This worthy recipient of an Honorary Fellowship from the IACCP began his cross-cultural journey after he had already established a reputation as an acute observer and analyst of group processes. A fellowship from the Canon Foundation took our recipient to Osaka where innovative work on the leadership of groups was then being done in Japan under the guidance of the late Jyuji Misumi. There, he initiated a series of four-culture comparisons of leadership.

He quickly mastered the exacting requirements of cross-cultural methodology, and with his innate sense of responsibility and fair play with others, began establishing a network of colleagues from other cultures with whom he has continued to publish. This multi-cultural work has included studies of how the performance and maintenance functions of leadership are enacted, how organizational events are managed, how values drive these processes, especially conformity, and how culturally socialized tendencies to acquiesce may be confounding our disciplinary attempts to map the world using self-report measures of psychological processes. He is the first author of the standard text in cross-cultural social psychology, now into its third edition, a text that has introduced the field to many students of psychology.

His range of knowledge and his personal contacts in the field, combined with his organizational skills and interpersonal diplomacy, made him an obvious choice to appointed as the fourth editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, a duty he performed with efficiency and good judgment from 1996 to 2001. During his watch, the journal gained in prestige because of the quality of the reviews it provided authors combined with his efficient processing of manuscripts.

In 2002, he was elected president of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology in recognition of his two decades of intellectual contributions and dedicated service to our field. In that role, he worked efficiently backstage to manage the growing affairs of the Association and was the public face of our organization, representing us with dignity and good humor to our Chinese hosts at the Xi’an conference in 2004 and at the conferences of allied associations.

In acknowledgment of his wide-ranging and stellar contributions to our discipline and to our organization, the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology hereby confers its Honorary Fellowship upon Peter B. Smith.