Testimonial: Fabrizio Butera (2011-2014)

During my time in office, Europe was struck by the devastating economic crisis that we all witnessed. The crisis created a time of economic and social uncertainty in all countries, with extreme consequences in the countries that were already vulnerable from an economic point of view. These consequences were also visible in all the domains pertaining to research: Academic positions have been frozen and careers hindered; salary cuts have turned the attention of many scholars away from research; universities have reduced or even discontinued resources for participating in conferences or organising scientific events; and reduced access to national funding has threatened the potential for innovation of many countries.

In such dire straits, we decided to devote a great deal of our efforts and activities as an Executive Committee to mitigate, or at least provide some help to cope with the hardship that our colleagues from the most severely hit areas were facing. We therefore implemented three measures that we hoped could attract some attention to the difficulties many of us were experiencing throughout Europe. First, we changed our membership fee structure, to allow any member, upon self-declaration, to benefit from the reduced fees. This was done in recognition of the difficulty in identifying clear and objective indicators of relative suffering, and of the rapidly changing nature of the ongoing crisis. Second, we introduced a new scheme, the Research Knowledge Transfer Scheme (RKTS) to promote knowledge transfer, but most of all solidarity between better-off and worse-off scholars. Third, we worked to improve the position of social psychologists in European institutions and agencies. Our discipline was underrepresented in these organisations, with negative consequences in terms of funding of projects rooted in social psychology; a state of affairs made particularly problematic by the cuts in research funding that made resources very difficult to access in many countries.