Communication

From the beginning, the Association’s founders considered it important that communication among the members and between the Executive Committee and the members would not only take place via conferences, exchange visits and specialized seminars, but also through a regularly appearing ‘letter’, sent to all members. To achieve this goal the Newsletter was created. Originally hand-typed and then mimeographed it contained information about research activities of the members, announcements of plans, reports of exchange visits and of seminars, references to relevant books, initiatives of the Executive committee and the like. The Newsletter was the predecessor of what is now the European Bulletin of Social Psychology. Its outward appearance changed over the years: from a primitive mimeographed and stapled document of about 10 pages it later became an visually attractive publication, first as a printed booklet and now an on line publication on the Association’s website. It still shows a number of the features of the original News-
letters, as it contains announcements of events, reports of meetings, and other activities. In addition, however, and making it not only a communication but also a true publication instrument, many Bulletin issues offer interesting articles on ‘hot’ topics in social psychology in general, but primarily within
the Association, reflecting the active involvement of the members in furthering its development.

The European Bulletin, as a bonding instrument between the members of the Association, is therefore a true reflection of what lives in the Association. The other supplementary source of information and communication is of course the Association’s website that contains a wealth of information concerning all aspects of the Association. In the early years of the Association websites were of course unheard of and recourse had to be taken to more primitive means of informing the members. In contrast, the present website contains literally everything a (prospective) member may want to know. Still, the fact that, at present, a wealth of easily accessible and attractively presented information is available to the members of the Association is by itself no guarantee that the members are in fact informed. Being informed requires reading the information in the first place. Such was not always the case in the early years, as was proven by the naughty test described earlier (a communication via the Newsletter that the Executive Committee would buy a yacht unless a sufficient number of objected; the call elicited only one reaction). We can only hope that the situation is different nowadays.