2019 Cheiron Young Scholar Award: Zhipeng Gao

The 2019 Cheiron Young Scholar Award goes to Zhipeng Gao, Ph.D. from the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology program at York University (Toronto, Canada), and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada), for his paper, “From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China, 1949–1958.”

Gao documents the profound transformation of psychology in China in the decade after 1949. Led by radical intellectuals, psychology in China moved from a western model to a social intervention model. The Committee noted that Gao adroitly addresses not only the historical details of that transformation but also some ways in which sociopolitical milieus in general shape the assumptions of researchers. Another virtue of the paper is that Gao focuses on a part of the world whose history of psychology has been relatively neglected, and on an early form of indigenous psychology.
Although Cheiron’s YSA program encourages publication in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JHBS), this work has already appeared in another journal (online, at this point):

Zhipeng Gao, “From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China, 1949–1958,” Review of General Psychology 23 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268019880888

--2019 Cheiron Young Scholar Award Committee

Alan Tjeltveit (chair), Rémy Amouroux, and Phyllis Wentworth