At its mid-winter meeting on January 14, 2005, the Governing Council of the International Society of Political Psychology authorized the establishment of the Caucus of Concerned Scholars: Committee on Ethics and Morality. The Caucus will hold two sessions at the annual ISPP meetings and will issue an annual report to the ISPP Governing Council on its activities. The Caucus works with the UCI Ethics Center to encourage the dissemination of scientific work and compile a list of scholars willing to speak with the press about work in this area. Members of the media and scholars interested in the Caucus activites should contact Kristen Monroe, Head of the Caucus, at KRMONROE@uci.edu.

The Caucus's mission is to:

• Encourage and conduct research on the foundations of ethical action, ranging from altruism and cooperation at one end of a moral continuum to bystander behavior and prejudice, discrimination, ethnic violence, and genocide at the other end, with special emphasis to the psychological mechanisms and origins of all forms of behavior having to do with ethics,
• Convene workshops and seminars on this topic,
• Develop curricula and collect syllabi for the teaching of related courses, to students ranging from elementary and secondary students to college and graduate students,
• Establish a website to publicize substantive findings and work in this area,
• Collect names of serious scholars doing research in this field and to provide these names to legitimate media outlets and community groups interested in scholarly speakers,
• Collaborate with other relevant agencies interested in the subject, such as Holocaust Museums, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Southern Poverty Center, and academic institutes similar to UCI’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality
• Facilitate the generation and coordination of grant proposals to advance scholarly work in the field, including both educational grants dedicated to teaching students and research grants for original research.

As of August 2009, Caucus members had held meetings in Dublin, Barcelona, Portland, Oregon, Irvine, California and Stanford, California. They have future meetings planned for San Francisco in July 2010. Their first edited volume, On Behalf of Others: The Psychology of Care in a Global World, edited by Sarah Scuzzarello, Catarina Kinnvall, and Kristen Monroe, will be published by Oxford University Press in the Fall of 2009. Contributors include Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Christian Fernandez, Sarah Scuzzarello, Gard Meyer, Kai Jonas, Fred Alford, Katarzyna Hamer, Jakub Gutowski, Nimrod Rosler, Daniel Bar-Tal, Keren Sharvit, Eran Halperin, Amiram Ravi, Neil Ferguson, Katharina Schmid, Orla Muldoon, Anne Birgitta Yeung, Kristen Renwick Monroe and Maria Luisa Martinez.

The Caucus held several sessions on political narrative at the Dublin Meetings and plans an edited volume based on these papers.

ISPP Members