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.

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 my doctoral 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 Ph.D. in hand, I remained in Washington for several months more, while I figured out what to do next. I was a Lieutenant in the Army Reserves, and the comradery and experiences were teaching me much. During this period, I found fascinating little tasks in applied social psychology in several places in D.C. One task involved designing an apparatus that was a modification of a popular existing apparatus for recording responses, called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer. It recorded dichotomous responses (yes-no, good-bad, etc.), but it seemed easy enough to improve on that apparatus. I proposed an apparatus that permitted a continuous and variable intensity response. Once it materialized, I was curious to try it out using reactions to the 1960 presidential Kennedy-Nixon debate (this was two years after the debate), and I was curious to explore the effect on an observer of that person's commitment to a political party or particular party candidate. If you are curious to know the results, they were published in the Journal of Social Psychology in 1965 (vol. 67, pp. 211-219); the paper is titled "Bias in evaluating the presidential debates: A 'Splinter' Effect."

It was easy for me to figure out what to do next: ask Mimi (Marion Quin Medinger) to please marry me. She said "yes" and I already had a job lined up in Boston as an assistant professor at Boston University. Mimi had graduated from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She had been editor of her college newspaper, and she was eager to edit my writing. For our honeymoon, we simply decided to begin this new adventure by driving right to Norwood, Massachusetts (where a small garden apartment would be waiting for us). So far, our marriage seems successful. As I write this, we have been married for 63 years. We even collaborated on a writing manual (openly available here for downloading). At BU, the chair of the program in which I would be teaching research methods, stats, and social psychology, was Edward J. Robinson. 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 the subject. 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. In 1999, Bob and MaryLu moved from Massachusetts to California., where Bob had accepted an appointment as a 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. Philly was not that far from Surf City on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where we would always spend some summer weeks together. 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). The Psychology Department is one of the oldest in this country. Bolton, born in 1865, got his Ph.D. at Clark University, where G. Stanley Hall was president. Hall considered psychology to be a science on a par with biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. In 1924, Bolton 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. Being wet with pickle juice did not diminish my curiosity for numbers.

In August, 2006, Bob Lana died, and he is missed by those of us who remain. 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, and reminiscing about the old days and projects we never got around to completing. We always concluded with upbeat thoughts and expectations (the "Rosenthal effect" for lifting spirits). Bob Rosenthal died in January 2024.