How people make sense of things and justify their conclusions have long been of interest to me. I am interested in methods of research and data analysis, and in related issues such as ethical conflicts and inferential validity (an expression for the implication that the causal inferences made in a laboratory, simulated setting, or a questionnaire study are applicable to the real-life experiences they are meant to represent). As these topics and issues do not exist in a social void, I also am interested in the nature of social contexts of discovery and justification. Among contexts I have explored, Methodological, statistical, conceptual, and related topics and issues in research with human participants are longtime interests. Topics and issues don't survive in a vacuum. They need contexts.

When I was a doctoral student at American University, I studied and worked with social psychologist Robert E. Lana, who was engaged in research using a design by experimental psychologist Richard Solomon to explore pretest sensitization in before-after experiments. I was fascinated both by the design and by Solomon's data analysis. Lana was specifically interested in sensitization when the pretest involved opinions or attitudes, and that deepened my interest in social psychology. For my doctoral research, I focused on R. L. Thorndike's idea in the 1930s that bolstering effects of a reward (or "satisfying state of affairs") could spread backward as well as forward in time. I started a program of research that I would continue after the Ph.D. It also led me to meet social psychologist William J. McGuire, who told me that he and I might be the only living psychologists still interested in the contiguous spread of effect. More importantly, the study led to further research, and Bob Lana and Bill McGuire were my mentors and friends for life.

In 1963, Mimi and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove to Norwood, Massachusetts, to begin my Boston career. Mimi had gone to Wheaton College in Norton for her degree in English. She had been editor of the college's newspaper, and now she was eager to edit my work. For me, living in New England and teaching research methods and statistics and advising master's degree students in a new communication research program, chaired by Edward Robinson, was a dream job. Ed and I collaborated on a book titled 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 volunteer bias. He had written and published a conceptual paper, and I had done an empirical study (inspired by Martin Orne's work on demand characteristics) but had not yet submitted it to a journal. It would be our first published collaboration. For over 50 years, our friendship and work together grew. The two times that Bob was to be on semester sabbatical leave at Harvard, I was invited to teach his research methods course and an open seminar on a topic of interest in social psychology, Temple University granted me a leave of absence.

In 1967, Bob Lana invited me to join him in another new adventure -- developing a doctoral division and program in social psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I liked New England a lot, as did Mimi, and we would have settled there but for the cold winter weather. I was offered an associate professorship at Temple, and I was happy to accept. Three years later, I was given tenure and promoted to professor, and later I was awarded 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, Thaddeus Bolton who, in 1924, started the department of psychology at Temple University. My relationship with Bob Rosenthal continued, and I had doctoral students to work with and what a marvelous cohort it was. In 1999, Bob and Marylu moved to California, where they had first met. Bob resumed his teaching, now at University of California, Riverside. In 2002, I retired at Temple University, was named Thaddeus Bolton Professor Emeritus, and began my current quiet life of reading, writing, and ruminating. We decided to ask publishers of several of our books whether we could have the copyrights so that we could leave them as a kind of legacy gift.

Scanned copies of two of our coauthored books are openly available here for free downloading: (1) Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis (seventh edition) and (2) People Studying People: Artifacts and Ethics in Behavioral Research. Additional books here for free downloading are: (3) Paradigms in Transition: The Methodology of Social Inquiry; (4) Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (coauthored by Gary Alan Fine); (5) Writing Papers in Psychology (Proposals, Research Papers, Literature Reviews, Poster Presentations and Concise Reports (coauthored by Mimi Rosnow). To download, click on the Images and Forms tab (above), scroll down to the book you want downloaded, and click on the title.

Cheers.