Homage to Psychologist Donn Byrne ( )

Transcription

1 1 Homage to Psychologist Donn Byrne ( ) Donn Byrne, a social psychologist, famous for his similarityattraction hypothesis which has had considerable impact on research in management as well, died on August 10, 2014 in New York, USA. Ramadhar Singh, his former graduate student ( at Purdue) and currently a Distinguished Professor with us (2010- ), looks back at his illustrious mentor s life and career. I wish we all were mentoring our FPM students like Donn Byrne! Donn Byrne Sushil Vachani, Director Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore Kabir ( ), the Indian mystic, asked, Given both Guru [teacher] and God standing in front of you, whom should you bow to first? Kabir counselled, All the glory should go to your Guru for showing the path to God. I then unreservedly bow to one of my esteemed Gurus Donn Byrne, Ph. D. (Stanford, 1958; Supervisor: Clarence L. Winder). During his more than four decade of academic career at the University of Texas ( ), Purdue University ( ), and the University at Albany, SUNY ( ), Byrne initiated 52 doctoral students from several countries to Psychology as a Science. We fondly remember his advice to make only one difference between experiments on an issue and to continue research only if you enjoy doing it. Donn, born on December 19, 1931, in Austin, Texas to Bernard and Rebecca Singleton Byrne, died peacefully at his home on Sunday, August 10, 2014 at Feura Bush, New York. He is survived by three daughters (Robin Lynn Byrne,

2 2 Lindsey Kelley Byrne, and Rebecka Byrne Kelley) and a grand-daughter (Teagan McLaughlin), and was predeceased by a son, Keven Singleton Byrne. Byrne is perhaps best known for his research on attitude similarity and interpersonal attraction. People have long suggested that birds of a feather flock together. Byrne (1961a) translated this adage into a testable hypothesis that the greater the similarity between attitudes of two strangers, the greater is the attraction between them. The regression equation of Y = 5.44X (Y: attraction response measured on a scale of 2 [lowest] to 14 [highest]; X: proportion of similar attitudes between the participant and the partner manipulated by the experimenter in a study; and the empirical coefficients of 5.44 and 6.62 are the respective slope and intercept of the regression line) represented the positive linear relationship between proportion of similar attitudes and attraction that Byrne identified early in his research. Byrne was so attached to this law of attraction that he often queried me during our 44 years of contact as to how well his equation fit each new set of data! Byrne s doctoral students at Purdue University continued the attraction research he had initiated at the University of Texas. The outcome was The Attraction Paradigm by Byrne (1971). The foci of this book were the way in which research is conducted and the way in which both theoretical and applied may be seen to grow out of a base relationship [i.e., the law of attraction] (p. 414). Byrne further noted, the attraction paradigm represents a continuing research program which may constitute a useful model for other research, and, if it has anything to offer, should continue to grow and to change (p. 415). Of his nearly 20,000 citations in Google Scholar as of August 29, 2014, Byrne s (1961a) article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and his 1971 book were cited 1,325 and 4,945 times, respectively. The affective and cognitive mechanisms underlying the attitude similarity-attraction relationship and their sequential orders continue to be actively researched even today in social psychology (e.g., Montoya & Horton, 2013; Singh, Wegener, Sankaran, Singh, Lin, Seow, Teng, & Shuli, 2014). Donn Byrne circa 2000 Byrne also extended his similarityattraction theory to issues related to management and organizational behavior. For example, Byrne and Neuman (1992) articulated the implications of attraction research for organizational issues in general, and Pierce, Byrne, and Aguinis (1996) applied it specifically to workplace romance. In fact, similarity-attraction is one of the

3 3 theoretical approaches to understanding the process effects of diversity in contemporary organizations (Jackson & Joshi, 2011). Byrne is equally known for his enduring contributions to personality psychology and human sexuality. His articles on the Repression-Sensitization Scale (Byrne, 1961b) and on erotophobia erotophilia as dimension of personality (Fisher, Byrne, White, & Kelley, 1988), for example, were cited 1,231 and 663 times, respectively. His textbook An Introduction to Personality: A Research Approach (Byrne, 1966) changed the established paradigm of teaching the grand theories in personality courses to the scientific study of the assessment, antecedents, correlates, dynamics, and change of dimensions of individual differences. Donn Byrne authored/co-authored 140 research papers, 36 chapters in edited volumes, and more than 30 textbooks. Among his textbooks, the aforementioned personality textbook and its subsequent two editions (2 nd and 3 rd in 1974 and 1981, respectively), and Social Psychology: Understanding Human Interaction (Baron, Byrne, & Griffitt, 1974, and its subsequent 10 editions with Baron and the th editions with Baron and Branscombe) have been very popular and influential. Byrne also coauthored four editions of a textbook of psychology with Henry C. Lindgren and two editions of another textbook of psychology with Robert A. Baron and Barry H. Kantowitz. Byrne was a member of the US President s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography ( ). His paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Byrne, 1977) provided an overview of the history of the scientific study of human sexuality. It also offered a new perspective on how the external stimuli and the mediating processes might determine human sexual behavior. His textbook, Exploring Human Sexuality coauthored with Kathryn Kelley, is widely referred to and had two editions in 1977 and Byrne served as the President of the Midwestern Psychological Association ( ) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality ( ). After his retirement from SUNY-Albany in 2001, Byrne continued there as a Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and remained a Fellow in the Association of Psychological Science, American Psychological Association, Midwestern Psychological Association, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. As much as being a man of science and logic, he also had aesthetic inclinations. He enjoyed music, painting, reading, and writing as well as Chinese and Indian food. Byrne was an exceptional mentor to his doctoral students and mentored 52 doctoral students. Way back in the late

4 4 70s, I was his 21 st graduate student. He trained his students not only for a degree to get a job but also to contribute responsibly to the organization where they worked and to the country in which they lived. In my case, he encouraged and supported my transfer from Ball State University to Purdue University in 1970 for doctoral training. Byrne wanted me to continue research in India for which computer was necessary. Thus, he contacted Kamta Prasad, the then-head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, recommending that he hire me as an Assistant Professor in His training and mentoring laid the foundation leading to where I have been and am now. Our last meeting, regrettably, was on July 18, However, he will always remain an inspiring Guru and well-wisher for me. I am honored to express my admiration for Donn Byrne and gratitude to him from Ramadhar Singh and Jeffrey D. Fisher (Byrne s another doctoral student and currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut) with Donn Byrne at his Feura Bush Home on July 18, making me what I am today. References Baron, R. A., Byrne, D., & Griffitt, W. (1974). Social psychology: Understanding human interaction. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Byrne, D. (1961a). Interpersonal attraction and attitude similarity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, Byrne, D. (1961b). The Repression- Sensitization Scale: Rationale, reliability, and validity. Journal of Personality, 29, Byrne, D. (1966). An introduction to personality: A research approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. New York: Academic Press. Byrne, D. (1977). Social psychology and the study of sexual behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, Byrne, D., & Neuman, J. H. (1992). The implications of attraction research for organizational issues. In. K. Kelley (Ed.), Issues, theory, and research in

5 5 industrial/organizational psychology (pp ). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Jackson, S. E., & Joshi, A. (2011). Work team diversity. I. S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (Vol. 1, pp ). Washington, DC: APA Books. Pierce, C. A., Byrne, D., & Aguinis, H. (1996). Attraction in organizations: A model of workplace romance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 17, Fisher, W.A., Byrne, D. White, L.A., & Kelley, K. (1988). Erotophobiaerotophilia as a dimension of personality. Journal of Sex Research, 25, Montoya, R. M., & Horton, R. S. (2013). A meta-analytic investigation of the processes underlying the similarityattraction effect. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30, Singh, R., Wegener, D. T., Sankaran, K., Singh, S. Lin, P. K. F., Seow, M. X., Teng, J. S. Q., & Shuli, S. (2014). On the importance of trust in interpersonal attraction from attitude similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32, in press. Ramadhar Singh, Ph. D. (Purdue) Distinguished Professor of Management Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India Webpage: Acknowledgment. I thank Krithiga Sankaran, my current Research Associate, for searching Donn Byrne s citations as of August 29, 2014 and assisting me in the preparation of this document.