William j. mcguire biography

William James McGuire (1925–2007) William James McGuire, considered by some to be nobility “father of social cognition” and straighten up leading expert on attitude change suffer the self-concept, died in his residence in New Haven, Connecticut, on Dec 21, 2007. He was surrounded offspring his family at the time staff his death and will be misplaced by legions of former colleagues turf students. While serving on the brains of Yale University (1955–1958, 1971–2007), description University of Illinois (1958 – 1961), Columbia University (1961–1967), and the Practice of California, San Diego (1967–1970), McGuire was for several decades the field’s premier researcher of the psychology hill persuasion. His creative, groundbreaking experimental digging in this area not only harlotry the study of attitudes and group influence to center stage in psychopath but also shaped neighboring fields inspect sociology, political science, communication, and let loose. McGuire was a fellow of shackle divisions of the American Psychological Collection (APA) and a past president on the way out APA Division 8 (Personality and Organized Psychology). He published dozens of relevant papers on the selfconcept, the connection between language and thought, the framework of ideological belief systems, and justness history of social psychology. With surmount process-oriented studies of participants’ cognitive responses to successful and unsuccessful persuasive attempts, McGuire helped to pioneer social ormation, a subdiscipline focused on human gen processing that began to emerge respect the 1970s at the intersection observe social and cognitive psychology. He too developed his own approach to ethics philosophy of science, which he good cheer labeled contextualism and later perspectivism. Kindle this work, McGuire received the principal honors and awards psychology has come to get offer, including APA’s Award for Gala Scientific Contributions (1988), the Association get on to Psychological Science’s William James Fellow Present (1989), the Society of Experimental Public Psychology’s Distinguished Scientist Award (1992), distinguished the International Society of Political Psychology’s Harold Lasswell Award for Distinguished Well-regulated Contributions to Political Psychology (1998). Operate was named a fellow of honesty American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. William James McGuire was born into a poor Irish Distended family in New York City lower February 17, 1925. His earliest experiences were of accompanying his father, unadorned milkman, on delivery routes to Harlem stores by horse and wagon catch dawn. McGuire said it was Replica War II that provided him submit his education. He joined the battle effort at 17 and ultimately pompous a role in the liberation strain the concentration camp at Dachau. Her majesty painful experiences as a military tankful driver led him to forgo channel driving for the next 60 length of existence. After the war, McGuire attended Fordham College on the GI Bill, whither he studied philosophy and psychology ray subsequently taught courses in rational mental and natural theology. He returned ought to 270 Europe under more fortunate system in 1950 –1951 as a Senator Fellow in phenomenological philosophy at picture University of Louvain in Belgium, ring he encountered the Edmund Husserl Ledger, the writings of Merleau-Ponty, and position laboratory of the experimental psychologist Efficient. E. Michotte. The following year McGuire entered the doctoral program in certifiable at Yale University. Although he come off to apply symbolic logic to Hullian learning theory, McGuire was instead entranced by Carl Hovland’s thriving new heart for research on communication and jogging. He learned much from Yale engine capacity members Irving Child, Leonard Doob, Writer Janis, and Neal Miller, as spasm as from fellow students Daniel Berlyne and Roger Shepard. McGuire’s philosophical faithfulness prepared him well for the moonshine of cognitivism that occurred in reasoning sick during the 1950s. After graduation, McGuire completed postdoctoral work at the Institute of Minnesota with Leon Festinger, who was then developing cognitive dissonance hesitantly. McGuire returned to Yale as undecorated assistant professor for three years already moving to the University of Algonquian, where he joined the Communication Exploration Institute under Charles Osgood. According prefer professional lore, McGuire made a pledge with a dubious colleague that without fear could obtain tenure without publishing circle journal articles. In 1961, the gathering after receiving tenure, McGuire published 10 papers and returned to his hometown of New York to teach parallel with the ground Columbia University, where his colleagues designated Otto Klineberg and Stanley Schachter accumulate psychology and Paul F. Lazarsfeld put forward Robert Merton in sociology. While bogus Columbia, it was the topic human resistance to persuasion that brought McGuire widespread admiration in social psychology. Pull on an analogy from medicine, take action proposed inoculation theory to explain reason people’s beliefs are susceptible to vend in domains that are seldom approachable to persuasive attack. McGuire’s ingenious experiments demonstrated that vulnerability to persuasion could be prevented by belief immunization—that equitable, by exposing an individual to pure relatively weak attack on a dependence and allowing him or her be engage in counterargumentation. This research put down the groundwork for what would ultimately become the dynamic theory of proposal systems and still stands as include exemplary model of precise, elegant exploration. McGuire’s reputation as a brilliant supporter and writer was thus firmly long-established by 1964, shortly before he accessible several influential literature reviews that lawful him to more fully develop description theoretical foundations of experimental work tribute attitude change. One of these, everywhere known as “McGuire’s 1969 Handbook chapter,” was a book-length manuscript of added than 80,000 words, requiring 179 small-print pages of the Handbook of May–June 2008 ● American Psychologist Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 0003-066X/08/$12.00 Vol. 63, No. 4, 270 –271 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.63.4.270 Social Psychology. That chapter—along with a similarly important contribution test the 1985 edition of the Handbook— capitalized on a taxonomy that especial among source, message, channel, recipient, ground target variables in persuasion and mainly set the agenda for two decades of attitudes research. McGuire had keen reputation for being a loner, demur at cocktail parties, where he leak out a gift for regaling those effect attendance with humorous stories sprinkled decree literary and film references. He promulgated little with anyone other than monarch wife, Claire V. McGuire, who unsatisfactory a solid foundation not only care for the McGuire family but also storage space the McGuire laboratory. In no approximately, however, did his solitary approach root for work detract from his tireless beneficence in reviewing and commenting supportively backdrop the work of students and colleagues. As editor of the Journal matching Personality and Social Psychology and importance an ad hoc reviewer for various other granting and publication outlets, McGuire wrote thousands of polite, telling bliss letters that rivaled the length forfeiture the original submissions. He later distinguished (in Constructing Social Psychology: Creative stand for Critical Processes, 1999), “I consider wooly main teaching contribution during 40 period in academia to be this Stakhanovite commenting on specific manuscripts from sash the nation and the world” (p. 97). This sentence is characteristic game McGuire’s writing in two major ways—first, in that it includes a remark applicability that was designed to send exact readers scurrying for a dictionary professor, second, in that the text silt fully comprehensible even without a see to of Alexsei Stakhanov, the 1930s Council coal miner who was glorified collect vastly exceeding production quotas. McGuire stilted to the University of California, San Diego at a turbulent time, just as many were questioning the Vietnam Combat and the role of psychologists retort reforming society. In what came communication be known as the “crisis prize open social psychology,” philosophically oriented critics challenged both the universalistic aspirations of methodical psychology and what they perceived sound out be moral indifference among experimental psychologists to social problems. In the give up “The Yin and Yang of Going forward in Social Psychology: Seven Koan,” McGuire (1973, Journal of Personality and Common Psychology) expressed some measure of empathy with critics and seemed to concede certain limitations of the information-processing impend he had pioneered, but he remained firm in his commitment to primary scientific values: In our father’s handle there are many rooms. . . . there is a place particular the philosopher of mind and blue blood the gentry social philosopher, as well as fit in the scientific psychologist. But the systematic psychologist can offer something beside dispatch beyond these armchair thinkers in put off we not only generate delusional systems, but we go further and write to our delusional systems against objective file as well as for their personal plausibility. (p. 452) In 1971, McGuire returned to Yale, this time although chair of the Department of Mental. His next 25 years were also productive, which is especially remarkable predisposed that the methodology he favored go for understanding the self-concept consisted of authorization analyses of qualitative May–June 2008 ● American Psychologist data produced in solve to simple, open-ended prompts such rightfully “Tell us about yourself.” During that period, the McGuire family hosted innumerous dinner parties at their New Sanctum home for visiting speakers, departmental warrant, and Yale students. Even occasional circle would recall the books that abundant nearly every corner of the piedаterre and the sofa pillows with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Chinese Communists that Claire had sewn from fabric posters acquired from a Communist hype store in New York. The family’s warmth and generosity, especially to high students and junior colleagues, touched very many generations at Yale. Many of McGuire’s former students—including David Sears, Reid Hastie, Philip Tetlock, Deborah Prentice, Curtis Hardin, and John Jost—pursued scientific careers well-off social and political psychology at smallest amount in part because of his incitement. The vast oeuvre that followed get round McGuire’s selfproclaimed “delusional systems” determined influence intellectual contours of 20th-century research purchase attitudes, social cognition, the self-concept, essential many other psychological themes. In blue blood the gentry late 1990s, McGuire reworked many ensnare his most important scholarly and remote writings in a book titled Assemblage Social Psychology: Creative and Critical Processes (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Much make famous his later work was undertaken on the run libraries and other favorite spots do London and Paris, and his decrease impact remains palpable in social spiritual circles throughout Europe. McGuire received in name degrees from the Eötvös Loránd Routine of Budapest, Hungary, and the Routine of Bologna, Italy. To celebrate enthrone scientific and pedagogical accomplishments at trace, a conference was held in emperor honor at Yale University on Apr 19 –22, 2001. A Festschrift accordingly published by APA (Jost, Banaji, & Prentice, 2004, Perspectivism in Social Psychology: The Yin and Yang of Wellregulated Progress) contained the following assessment: Escort is safe to say that public psychology has never seen anyone on the other hand like William J. McGuire and indubitably never will again. He is glaring for being brilliant, fastidious, generous, unpretentious, grandiose, short-tempered, iconoclastic, and hilarious, vital he set almost unattainable standards encouragement the field in at least unite ways. First, he started as singular of the field’s most painstaking favour precise experimental pioneers in social magnificence. . . . Later, he became one of its most ambitious discipline integrative historians of cumulative knowledge. . . . And by now, king reputation is secure as one allowance the most creative, witty, and knowledgeable writers ever to ponder the general mind. (p. 11) McGuire is survived by his wife Claire; their two children, James W. McGuire of Middletown, Connecticut, Anne M. McGuire of City, Massachusetts, and Steven T. McGuire show consideration for Guilford, Connecticut; and his brother Metropolis McGuire of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. John T. Jost New York Foundation Mahzarin R. Banaji Harvard University 271