Robert Paul Abelson (September 12, 1928 – July 13, 2005) was a

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

and

political scientist Political science is the science, scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of politics, political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated c ...

with special interests in

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

and

logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

Biography

He was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and attended the

Bronx High School of Science The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Spec ...

. He did his undergraduate work at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

and his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in psychology at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

's Department of Psychology under

John Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distributi ...

and

Silvan Tomkins Silvan Solomon Tomkins (June 4, 1911 – June 10, 1991) was a psychologist and personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory. Following the publication of the third volume of his book ''Affect Imagery Consciousness'' in ...

. From Princeton, Abelson went to Yale, where he stayed for the subsequent five decades of his career. Arriving during the ''Yale Communication Project'', Abelson contributed to the foundation of attitudes studies as co-author of ''Attitude Organization and Change: An Analysis of Consistency Among Attitude Component'', (1960, with Rosenberg, Hovland, McGuire, & Brehm). While at Yale, Abelson was briefly a bass in the

Yale Russian Chorus The Yale Russian Chorus is a tenor-bass choral ensemble at Yale University, established in 1953 by Denis Mickiewicz, a student at the Yale Music School, and George Litton, president of the Yale Russian Club. The group sings a variety of secular a ...

. With

Milton J. Rosenberg Milton J. "Milt" Rosenberg (April 15, 1925 – January 9, 2018) was a prominent social psychologist who was professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and was the host of a long-running radio program in Chicago, Illinois. Rosenberg was ...

, he developed the notion of “symbolic psycho-logic," an early attempt, using an idiosyncratic kind of

adjacency matrix In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph. In the special case of a finite simp ...

of a

signed graph In the area of graph theory in mathematics, a signed graph is a graph in which each edge has a positive or negative sign. A signed graph is balanced if the product of edge signs around every cycle is positive. The name "signed graph" and the no ...

, at a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) psychological organization of attitudes and attitude consistency, which was key to the development of the field of

social cognition Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactio ...

. The notion that beliefs, attitudes, and ideology were deeply connected knowledge structures was contained in ''Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding'' (1977, with

Roger Schank Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the ...

), a work that has collected several thousand citations, and led to the first interdisciplinary graduate program in cognitive science at Yale. His work on voting behavior in the 1960 and 1964 elections, and the creation of a computer program modeling ideology (the “Goldwater machine”) helped define and build the field of political psychology. He was the author of ''Statistics As Principled Argument'' which includes prescriptions for how statistical analyses should proceed, as well as a description of what statistical analysis is, why we should do it, and how to differentiate good from bad statistical arguments. He was a co-author of several other books in psychology, statistics, and political science. In 1959, Abelson published a paper to elucidate different ways in which an individual tends to resolve his "belief dilemmas" (Abelson «Modes of Resolution of Belief Dilemmas» Journal of conflict Resolution 1959). Abelson received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from APA, the Distinguished Scientist Award from SESP, and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1978. He died of complications of

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms usually emerge slowly, and as the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms becom ...

Books

* * * *

Bibliography

* Ira J. Roseman, Stephen J. Read, "Psychologist at Play: Robert P. Abelson's Life and Contributions to Psychological Science", ''Perspectives on Psychological Science'' 2:1:86-97 (March 2007)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Abelson, Robert P. American political scientists American social psychologists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Princeton University alumni Yale University faculty 1928 births 2005 deaths Deaths from Parkinson's disease Neurological disease deaths in the United States Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences The Bronx High School of Science alumni 20th-century political scientists

Biography

Books

See also

Bibliography

References