Scanned copies of five books (which my coauthors and I received copyrights from the publishers) are openly and freely available here for downloading: (1) Rosenthal and Rosnow, "Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis" (third edition); (2) Rosnow and Rosenthal, "People Studying People: Artifacts and Ethics in Behavioral Research"; (3) R. L. Rosnow, "Paradigms in Transition: The Methodology of Social Inquiry"; (4) Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, "Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay"; (5) Ralph and Mimi Rosnow, "Writing Papers in Psychology: Proposals, Research Papers, Literature Reviews, Poster Presentations and Concise Reports" (ninth edition).

To download any of these five books, click on the Images and Forms tab (above), scroll down to the book you want downloaded, and click on the title.


How people make sense of things and justify their conclusions have long been of interest to me. Research methods, analyses of research data, related issues (such as conflicts between moral assumptions and methodological imperatives in research with human participants) and implications for inferential validity (my term for the implication that the causal inferences made in a laboratory, or a simulated setting, or a questionnaire are applicable or generalizable to the real-life experiences they are meant to represent) -- all are of interest to me, as is precision in communication of quantitative and qualitative findings. As these interests do not merely exist in a void, I also am interested in contexts of discovery and justification. Working with colleagues and students, I have explored and written about persuasion and opinion change, impression formation and stereotyping, rumormongering and gossiping, and levels of interpersonal acumen.

From 1960-62, I was a Ph.D. student in psychology at The American University in Washington, D.C. I had the good fortune to work with Robert E. Lana, then an associate professor of psychology and statistics. For some research of Bob Lana's at the time, he was using a statistical analysis interpretation created earlier by the experimental psychologist Richard Solomon for his exploratory studies of pretest sensitization in before-after experiments. Bob Lana's application of Solomon's design and data analysis in sensitization when the pretest involved opinions or attitudes wetted my interests. Thinking about a topic and question for a doctoral dissertation study, I recalled an idea of R. L. Thorndike's in the 1930s, which was that bolstering effects of a reward (or "satisfying state of affairs") could spread forward and backward. For my doctoral research, I explored the "spread of effect" of experimentally induced affect on opinion change responses to opposing persuasive communications that are temporally contiguous with the source of affect. As a serendipitous consequence of my study, I would meet social psychologist William J. McGuire, who told me that he and I may be the only living psychologists still interested in Thorndike's contiguous spread of effect.

In 1963, Mimi (Quin Medinger) and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove to Norwood, Massachusetts, to begin my Boston University career. Mimi had graduated from Wheaton College in Norton with a degree in English. She had been editor of Wheaton College's newspaper, and she was eager to edit my work. A few years later, using an old-fashioned typewriter, we coauthored the first edition of our little book on writing papers in psychology. For me, living in New England, teaching (research methods, statistics, and social psychology), working with bright master's degree students in a new communication research program (chaired by Edward Robinson), and given an office that was a short walk to Charles Street -- it was a dream job for a young assistant professor still wet behind the ears. Ed Robinson and I collaborated on my first book: Experiments in Persuasion.

The early 1960s also was when Bob Rosenthal began his Boston teaching and research career. We met, became friends, and I invited him to join me in research on the volunteer bias. He had written a conceptual paper on volunteer bias, and I had completed an empirical study (inspired by Martin Orne's work on demand characteristics) but had not yet submitted the results to a journal. It would be our first published work together. For over 50 years, my friendship with Bob and his wife, MaryLu, grew. Bob and I collaborated on many books, research, and published papers and invited chapters. The couple times that Bob planned to be on a sabbatical semester leave at Harvard, I was invited to teach his research methods course and an open seminar in social psychology. In 1999, Bob and MaryLu moved from Massachusetts back to California, where they had first met. Bob accepted an appointment as Distinguished Professor (then as University Professor) at the University of California, Riverside. After MaryLu's passing in 2010, Bob and I made a habit of chatting every Saturday (our Shabbat schmooze).

In 1967, Bob Lana, then at Temple University in Philadelphia (where he would later chair the Department of Psychology and then become Dean of the Graduate School), invited me to join him in developing a doctoral program in social psychology. Mimi and I liked Boston and New England a lot, and we probably would have settled in Massachusetts except for the cold winter weather. Temple University offered me an enticing appointment, Bob Lana and I had become good friends, Mimi and I had been to Philly and we liked it, the weather was okay, it would be an opportunity to rent a terrific apartment (that allowed dogs) overlooking the Schuylkill and very close to the historic area, restaurants and shopping were booming. I accepted the offer and Mimi and I are still very glad I did. In 1970, I was given tenure and was promoted to professor, and later I was granted a named chair (Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton Professor of Psychology). Bolton, who was born in 1865, earned his Ph.D. at Clark University, where G. Stanley Hall was president. Hall considered psychology a science on a par with biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, and it was Hall's Clark University student, Bolton, who in 1924 started the department of psychology at Temple University. In 2002, I retired at Temple University, was named Thaddeus Bolton Professor Emeritus, and began my current quiet life of reading, writing, and ruminating.

Cheers.