Fully scanned copies of the following five books are openly accessible here for free downloading. Simply click "Images and Files" tab (above), scroll down and click on the title.
(1) Paradigms in Transition: The Methodology of Social Inquiry (Rosnow, 1981)
(2) People Studying People: Artifacts and Ethics in Behavioral Research (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1997)
(3) Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis (3rd edition) (Rosenthal & Rosnow, 2008)
(4) Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (Rosnow & Fine, 1976)
(5) Writing Papers in Psychology: Proposals, Research Papers, Literature Reviews, Poster Presentations and Concise Reports" (9th edition) (Rosnow & Rosnow, 2012)

How people make sense of things and justify their conclusions have long been of interest to me. Research methods, analyses of research data, and related issues (such as conflicts between ethical and methodological principles) all are of interest to me. I am also interested in contexts of discovery (qualitative and quantitative) and justification. As contexts need contents, among those that my students and I have explored and written about are persuasion and opinion change, impression formation and stereotyping, rumormongering and gossiping, and interpersonal acumen. For many years, I greatly benefited from insights of two very old friends, Robert Lana and Robert Rosenthal.

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 experimental studies of Lana's at the time, he was using a method of data interpretation in before-after studies described by experimental psychologist Richard Solomon in his exploratory work on pretest sensitization. Robert Lana's application of Solomon's method when the pretest involved opinions or attitudes whetted my interest. Thinking about a topic for a doctoral dissertation study, I recalled an idea of R. L. Thorndike's in the 1930s. Thorndike theorized that the bolstering effects of a reward (or "satisfying state of affairs") could spread forward and backward. For my doctoral study, I explored the forward and backward "spread of effect" of experimentally induced affect on opinion change responses to persuasive communications temporally contiguous (or not) with the source of affect. The results were consistent with theory.

With Ph.D. in hand, I remained another year in Washington, 1963, working on applied projects. One involved designing an apparatus that was a modification of a popular existing apparatus, the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer. The Program Analyzer recorded a dichotomous response, whereas the apparatus I proposed permitted a continuous and variable intensity response. To try it out, I used reactions to the 1960 presidential Kennedy-Nixon debates to explore the effect on an observer of the person's commitment to a political party or to a particular party candidate. Analysis of the results indicated a kind of splintering effect even two and one-half years after election of the Democratic candidate. I published the study in the Journal of Social Psychology, titled "Bias in Evaluating the Presidential Debates: A 'Splinter' Effect." My sphere of interests was expanding

That same year, I obtained an academic appointment as an assistant professor in a master's degree program in communication research at Boston University. Mimi (Marion Quin Medinger) and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove from DC to Massachusetts, to settle in a small garden apartment in Norwood. Mimi had graduated from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, majoring in English. She had been editor of the college newspaper, and she was eager to edit my writing. We would later collaborate on a manual on writing papers in psychology (ninth edition is available here). New England, teaching research methods and social psychology, and continuing my own research was a dream job. The chair of the program, Edward J. Robinson, was enthusiastic and thoughtful. We would later collaborate on "Experiments in Persuasion" (my first published book).

The early 1960s was also 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. I had completed an exploratory study of volunteer bias (inspired by Martin Orne's "good subject" concept in his work on demand characteristics), but I had not yet submitted the results to a journal. It would be our first published work together. For over 50 years, our friendship grew. We collaborated on many books (two are openly available here), research studies, journal papers, and invited chapters. When Bob was scheduled to be on sabbatical leave at Harvard, I was invited to teach his research methods course and my own open seminar course in social psychology. Bob and his wife, MaryLu, moved from Massachusetts to California in 1999. Bob had accepted an appointment as Distinguished Professor (then as University Professor) at University of California, Riverside. (Our long collaboration was uninterrupted by distance.)

In 1967, Bob Lana, who had moved to Philadelphia and Temple University, invited me to join him in developing a new doctoral program in social psychology. Mimi and I would probably have settled in Boston except for the cold winter weather. Temple University offered me an enticing appointment as an associate professor. Mimi and I liked Philly, and Bob Lana and I were good friends. The Psychology Department was one of the oldest in the United States. Philly was not that far from Surf City on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Philly was also a short driving distance to New York (where Mimi had family), and to Baltimore (where my parents and relatives lived, and where I was born and had great fun growing up). I accepted the Temple offer, and Mimi and I are very glad I did. In 1970, I was promoted to professor (and later, named Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton Professor of Psychology). Bolton, born in 1865, got 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. In 1924, Bolton started the department of psychology at Temple University. In August, 2006, Bob Lana died, and he is missed by those of us who remain.

When I was a kid, growing up in East Baltimore, I accidentally slipped backwards into a pickle barrel in a Lombard Street deli when I was mesmerized by the lightning speed of the man behind the cash register, who seemed to be doing tricks with numbers. Being wet with pickle juice did not diminish my curiosity for numbers.

After Bob Rosenthal's wife, Mary Lu, died in 2010, Bob and I filled the loneliness by making a habit of chatting every Saturday, enjoying one another's company, reminiscing about the old days and projects we never got around to completing, and virtually else under the sun. We always concluded with upbeat thoughts and expectations (the "Rosenthal effect" for lifting spirits).