Lethal Stereotypes: Hair and Eye Color as Survival Characteristics During the Holocaust1

In spite of many false negatives and false positives quite familiar to the people of Nazi‐dominated Europe, dark hair and eyes were salient among the physical stereotypes of Jews that the Nazis promulgated along with psychosocial ones. Many narratives of the Holocaust refer to someone surviving because he or she “did not look Jewish,” and others being caught and killed because they did. A quantitative test of the validity and impact of this attribution showed that a higher proportion of Holocaust survivors than of a North American Jewish control group had light‐colored hair, eyes, or both during the relevant period. The paper discusses possible reasons why these were survival characteristics under the conditions of the Holocaust, the possible short‐ and long‐term effects of such selectivity, and implications for stereotyping in other situations of ethnic persecution and genocide.     

Parallel lines in life,divergent lines in science: Complexity encompasses different worlds

This paper has two major parts. The first recounts the beginning and growth of the friendship between Siegfried Streufert and Peter Suedfeld, who in the mid-1960s were graduate students in Harold M. Schroder's social psychology laboratory at Princeton University. Each continued to develop a different line of theory and research on cognitive aspects of personality and social psychology while maintaining their contacts and friendship. The second part describes the background, characteristics, and applications of the integrative complexity (IC) work of Peter Suedfeld and his collaborators and students.