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 (e.g., conflicts between moral assumptions and methodological imperatives in research with human participants) all are of interest to me. I am interested in empirical contexts of discovery and justification. Working with colleagues and doctoral students, we concentrated on various contexts, including persuasion and opinion change, impression formation and stereotyping, rumormongering and gossiping, and 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 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 with the source of affect. The results were consistent with theory. With that Ph.D. in hand, I obtained an academic appointment as an assistant professor at Boston University.

In 1963, Mimi (Quin Medinger) and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove to Norwood, Massachusetts, to settle in a small garden apartment, and I would commute to BU. 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 corroborate on a manual on writing papers in psychology (ninth edition is available here). For me, New England and teaching master's degree students in a new graduate program in communication research was a dream appointment. The chair of the new program, Edward J. Robinson, was enthusiastic and thoughtful. We would later collaborate on "Experiments in Persuasion" (my first published book). My sphere of interests was expanding.

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. I had completed an exploratory empirical study on volunteer bias (inspired by Martin Orne's 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 books (two are available here), research studies, journal papers, and invited chapters. Twice, when Bob Rosenthal was scheduled to be on sabbatical leave, I was invited to teach his Harvard research methods course and my own open seminar course in social psychology. In 1999, Bob and his wife, 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. Collaborating on ideas, books, and papers 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 new doctoral program in social psychology. Mimi and I would probably have settled in Boston except for the cold winter weather. Temple offered me an enticing appointment as an associate professor working with undergraduate and doctoral students. Mimi and I liked Philly, and Bob Lana and I had become good friends. The Psychology Department was one of the oldest in this country. Philly was not that far from Long Beach Island (where Bob Lana and his family and Mimi and I would be renting houses in Surf City every summer and dining together every night), or New York (where Mimi had family), or Baltimore (where I had family. I accepted the Temple offer, and Mimi and I are very glad I did. In 1970, I was promoted to professor. In 1982, I was appointed 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. It was Bolton who, in 1924, started the department of psychology at Temple University.

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. It did not affect my affinity for numbers, but it taught me to pay attention. My friendships with Bob Lana and Bob Rosenthal taught me much more. Bob Lana died in August 2006, and Bob Rosenthal died in January 2024. After Bob Rosenthal's wife passed, he and I made a habit of chatting every Saturday for an hour or two, reminiscing about ideas and projects we had never gotten around to completing, and virtually everything else under the sun, but we always concluded with positive expectations (Bob's famous formula for lifting spirits).