Of Zajonc?s ever-changing focus, friends joke ?What about Bob??

At a recent Festschrift, colleagues try to figure out what drives this unique researcher.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

When social psychology was looking to the external environment to explain behavior, Robert B. Zajonc, PhD, turned to the mind, infusing ideas of cognition into his work on social interactions. And when the field had all but dropped the study of social facilitation, he picked it up and posited a grand new theory to explain it.

Over his varied and influential career, Zajonc (pronounced Zy-unce) tackled such subjects as attitude formation, the connection between birth order and intelligence, and the biological roots of affect, changing his focus almost every five years.

His tendency to shift focus and tackle unpopular topics may in part stem from the combined influence of a childhood in pre-war Poland and graduate training in the University of Michigan psychology department of the 1950s, according to Zajonc?s wife, Stanford University psychologist Hazel Markus, PhD.

She and 50 or so colleagues spent two days last spring trying to 'figure Bob out' as part of a Festschrift in his honor organized by former Zajonc student John Bargh, PhD, and sponsored by APA?s Science Directorate and the University of Michigan.

People referred to him as brilliant, a giant in the field of social psychology and a trendsetter. Markus, for her part, analyzed his scientific methods through the lens of the cultures that helped shape him. But Zajonc himself would only say that, as far as he?s concerned, 'irritation' drives his research: A problem gets under his skin and he needs to figure it out, or at least try.

To relieve his itch, he?s attacked many different areas of social psychology, leaving in his tracks new theories for each.

Deconstructing Bob

Zajonc isn?t sure why he chose to study psychology, except that he remembers becoming enthralled by the book 'Psychopathology of Everyday Life' by Sigmund Freud while working on an assignment to translate part of the book into Polish for a high school English class.

He rambled around college, studying philosophy, but kept returning to psychology. He emigrated from Poland to the U.S. in 1949 and received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1955, where he stayed until taking a faculty position at Stanford University in 1994.

Along with shaping his career choice, his early years in Poland also may have influenced the way Zajonc approaches science, says Markus. To better understand the workings of her husband?s mind, she deconstructed his persona in the context of his cultural upbringing.

She characterizes his personality and career into several main themes, including 'topic changer Bob,' who switches his focus often and doesn?t follow the mainstream, and 'minimalist Bob,' who seeks clarity, values simplicity, searches for regularities and looks for universals.

These tendencies, Markus contends, stem in part from the cultural context of pre-war Poland and the United States of the 1950s. Indeed, a key factor in his propensity to change topic and to take the contrarian point of view may be his practice and understanding of 'freedom' in the Polish sense, says Markus.

For Poles, 'freedom' means freedom from the oppression of others and the belief that the mind shouldn?t be constrained, regulated or hemmed in by others? ideas.

One way to achieve freedom from others and their ideas is to work on problems that no one else is working on. This contrasts with the U.S. definition of freedom as primarily freedom of choice?'if I want to do something I can do it,' but it?s okay if someone else is doing it, too.

Zajonc?s mindset was ideally suited to American psychology of the 1950s, says Markus. The social and behavioral sciences were largely uncharted territory. It was easy to find something unique to study and just as easy to find funding support. Researchers could be rebels without hurting their careers.

'Bob had a fortuitous confluence of two worlds,' says Markus. 'He had the desire to break out on his own and was in an environment that allowed that.'

In a sense, Zajonc lets his mind wander to whatever topic seems most interesting at the moment, he admits.

'My initial impression of his work was that he came up with these big ideas and then never touched them again,' says Susan Fiske, PhD, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst psychologist who is editing a book of Zajonc writings. 'But he does credible research on [each idea] for a while, and then lets others take up the nitty-gritty work.'

For example, Zajonc and his students conducted studies trying to prove his theory of social facilitation. Previous research had been inconsistent, finding that sometimes an audience facilitated performance?as with bike racers who do better when competing than when riding alone?and other times it hindered performance?as with people who try to memorize a set of words in front of an audience. Zajonc proposed a solution: an audience facilitates behaviors that are well learned, but hinders behaviors that are poorly learned. Zajonc isn?t doing much with the topic any more, but his initial work spurred a new interest in the area.

Fueled by irritation

The work on social facilitation is a good example of a problem that 'irritated' Zajonc into taking it on. 'If I see some conflict, and it presents an intellectual challenge, I grab onto it,' he says.

That?s also how he wound up studying the connection between birth order and intelligence in the 1970s. He noticed a 1973 paper in Science by Lillian Belmont and Francis Marolla finding a strong correlation between birth order, family size and intelligence in a sample of 400,000 Dutch men. And he also recalled a 1972 article by Carmi Schooler in Psychological Bulletin proclaiming 'Birth order effects: not here, not now.'

The contradiction hooked him. And he spent several years developing and testing a mathematical model to explain how family size can affect a child?s intellectual development. Because a family?s intellectual resources diminish with each successive child, he surmised, the older children would be smarter on average, especially those in small families. Based on the model and statistics on average family size in the United States, Zajonc predicted in a 1976 article in Science that SAT scores would drop to a low point in 1980 and rise again through the 1990s. A recent analysis published in American Psychologist (Vol. 52, No. 7, p. 685?699) bears his prediction out.

Although the model works well on the aggregate level, it can?t explain individual differences in intelligence, admits Zajonc.

That means that he can?t predict much about a single person based on their family size and birth order, but he can look at current birth rates and predict what the average classroom will be like in five to 10 years.

Bob the minimalist

The 'confluence' model of intelligence, as Zajonc calls his birth-order theory, is an example of how he looks for simple answers to complex questions, says University of Virginia psychologist Tim Wilson, PhD, who was a graduate student at Michigan while Zajonc was there.

This search for simplicity may stem from Zajonc?s strong training in mathematics as a student in Poland, says Markus. One teacher in particular emphasized the need to limit the number of unknown variables in any equation. This minimalist tendency is most obvious in Zajonc?s theories of attitudes and behavior.

'He doesn?t think that most behavior involves a lot of active or conscious mediation and elaborate attitudes,' says Markus.

As opposed to the idea of the mind as a machine that formulates and plans, he believes that much of human action and thought comes from the way we engage with the world.

For example, we have automatic preferences for items we engage with and those preferences influence our decisions. Zajonc elaborates these ideas in his theories of 'mere exposure' and 'preferences need no inference.'

By these theories he means that the mere presence of an object?a word, a person, a sound?is enough for people to form preferences without conscious thought. So, people exposed to a group of Chinese characters will form preferences for those characters they?ve seen the most, even if they can?t remember which characters those are. In turn, these automatic, and primarily unconscious preferences may affect behavior by biasing people toward certain environments, people or objects.

The search for consciousness

Zajonc believes social psychology is on the brink of a significant paradigm shift. The field, he predicts, will abandon its 'blind reliance on strict cognitive psychology' and include collective aspects of behavior, culture, ethnography and content.

'We need to look less at the mind and more at interactions,' he says, adding that research needs to move beyond the artificial boundaries of university departments.

One of his greatest accomplishments, he believes, was his initiative to establish the multidisciplinary Institute for Social Studies (ISS) at the University of Warsaw.

A big puzzle that social scientists at ISS and around the world will grapple with over the next decade will be the question 'what is consciousness,' Zajonc predicts.

'I have a hunch it will be solved by social psychologists,' he says. 'We have the right tools and the right mindset for it.'

APA will publish a book based on the Festschrift next year.