Psychological Association (Member). Association on the Social Science Research Council (Representative). Society for the Psychological Study of Social Science (Chairman). President Hoover's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Survey Research Center (Consultant) Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (Acting Editor). Associated Artists of Syracuse (President). American Psychological Association Phi Beta Kappa American Association for the Advancement of Science American Sociological Association Western Psychological Association Psychonomic Society General System Research Social psychology Allport was the founder of the modern field of social psychology. He was the first to write a dissertation in the US on social psychology (called "The social influence: An experimental study of the effect of the group upon individual mental processes"). He challenged much of the way of thinking of his day by focusing on behavioral interpretations of social themes and stressing individuals rather than groups as the agents of social behavior, in which context he coined the terms social facilitation and producing tendency. His work includes research on social influence, convergence and conformity, personality theory, and measurements of attitudes. His textbook Social Psychology (1924) was the means by which social psychology began to take hold as an experimental science. Instead of stressing sociological issues and themes, which is what had exclusively been done up to this point, Social Psychology emphasized individual behaviors and measurements of attitudes. In this textbook, he called for much stricter research design, after which he developed the methodology that added a greater focus on experimental and objective reactions of individuals. He examined convergence of individual judgment in group settings, reference groups, and group norms through laboratory research. This empirical examination helped to solidify social psychology as a legitimate field of study. Allport also showed how easy it was to transform certain psychoanalytical accounts into more behavior oriented language to explain how we develop certain habits. Allport also extensively studied attitude. He was unhappy with existing means of attitude measurement so he created an original technique. It provided lists of items that subjects may hold different attitudes on which got ranked from one extreme to another, and then the average rankings on each position were scored. This was one of the first solid efforts of quantifying attitudes, another way that social psychology worked to verify itself within the field of psychological research. Research "The influence of the group upon association and thought" In this 1920 study, Allport described what we know as social