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 these topics and issues do not normally exist in a void, I am interested in contexts of discovery and justification. Working with colleagues and doctoral students, we've conducted research in social psychological contexts such as persuasion and opinion change, impression formation and stereotyping, rumormongering and gossiping, and interpersonal acumen (reading intentions and actions).

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.

In 1963, Mimi (Quin Medinger) and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove to Norwood, Massachusetts, to settle down in a small garden apartment and, the following week, to begin my Boston University teaching 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 and teaching in a new master's degree program on communication research was a dream job. Edward Robinson was chair of this new program, and he and I would later collaborate 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 some exploratory research on volunteer subject bias. He had written a conceptual paper on volunteer bias, and I had just 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 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 to California, where they had first met. Bob accepted an appointment as Distinguished Professor (then as University Professor) at University of California, Riverside. Our friendship and collaboration continued.

In 1967, Bob Lana, then at Temple University in Philadelphia (where he would chair the Department of Psychology and become Dean of the Graduate School), invited me to join him in developing a doctoral program in social psychology. Mimi and I liked New England a lot, and we probably would have settled there except for the cold winter weather. Bob Lana and I had become good friends, Temple offered me an enticing appointment as an associate professor, and Bob took Mimi and me to Society Hill Towers (overlooking the Schuylkill, and it accepted pets). I accepted the Temple offer, and Mimi and I are still very glad I did. In 1970, I was promoted to professor, and later was given a named chair (the 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 from active teaching at Temple University, was named Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton Professor Emeritus by the president of the university, and I began drafting a third edition of Essentials of Behavioral Research. No more faculty meetings, and ample time for reading, writing, and ruminating, etc. I am grateful to Temple University Library for finding and sending me published papers I needed, even some written centuries ago.

Cheers.