ABELSON, ROBERT PAUL

(b. Brooklyn, New York, 12 September 1928; d. New Haven, Connecticut, 13 July 2005),

social and political psychology, cognitive science.

Abelson was a major figure in social psychology during the last half of the twentieth century, a man whose ideas both helped to shape the agenda of social psychology, and contributed to the emerging fields of political psychology and cognitive science. Trained in part as a mathematical statistician, Abelson was a very early champion of mathematical models and computer simulations within these fields, applying these techniques to study the development of social attitudes and networks, the structure of political ideologies, the forecasting of electoral outcomes, and the representation of people’s everyday generic knowledge of the dynamics of recurrent social situations. Among his many specific contributions were his formal models and empirical studies of cognitive consistency, his detailed analyses of the frequently irrational“psychologic”underlying people’s social and political attitudes, his computer simulations of both political ideologies and electoral outcomes, and his introduction of “social scripts” as a method for analyzing the acquisition and organization of people’s everyday knowledge about the expected goals and actions of individuals in familiar social settings.

Early Life and Career. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Miles and Margaret Abelson in 1928, Abelson attended an experimental grammar school created to serve highly gifted students, and then moved after graduation to the widely acclaimed Bronx High School of Science. He received his BSc in mathematical statistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), staying there to pursue an MSc in mathematics. As a student, Abelson served as a participant in a study of communication networks being conducted by Alex Bavelas, a student of Kurt Lewin. He became fascinated with this topic and eventually wrote his master’s thesis on the mathematics of such networks. From MIT he went to Princeton University, from which he received his PhD in psychology in 1953. There, in addition to his formal training in psychometrics, he met two important mentors. One was the legendary statistician John Tukey, who helped to sustain Abelson’s lifelong interest in statistical issues and in political forecasting, and the other the irrepressible personality theorist, Sylvan Tomkins, whose creatively idiosyncratic ideas on emotions proved an important stimulus to Abelson’s later work on social attitudes and political psychology.

Abelson taught at Yale University for the next forty years in the psychology and political science departments. First recruited there to serve as a research assistant by Carl Hovland in 1952, he progressed rapidly through the ranks to become a full professor in 1963. It was also there that he met his wife and muse for more than fifty years, the former Willa Dinwoodie, a psychologist who had trained at Radcliffe College. It was there as well that their two children, William and John, were born. Sadly, it was in New Haven, as well, that he was first diagnosed with the Parkinson’s disease that so crippled his body for the last fifteen years of his life.

Work on Social Attitudes and Political Attitudes. At the time Abelson first arrived at Yale, Hovland’s famed Communication and Attitude Change Program was just starting to make the study of social attitudes and attitude change into the central and most distinctive topic in social psychology, as it would remain for the next quarter of a century. Surrounded by an exceptional collection of talented young researchers from different backgrounds, all recruited by Hovland and all focused on the topic of how to change people’s attitudes, Abelson, in a characteristically maverick move, chose to address the reverse side of the problem, focusing on the question of why, in the real world, social attitudes seemed so often and so apparently irrationally resistant to change.

Abelson’s answer to this question involved the study of what he called “psycho-logic”—those pressures within an individual’s larger belief system that might constrain that person’s willingness to change individual beliefs within that system, even in the face of potentially probative and persuasive new evidence. This analysis, explicitly designed to be contrasted with a purely logical analysis, emphasized the array of emotional and motivational factors that often seemed to be stronger determinants of social attitudes than more purely rational factors. With Milton Rosenberg (1958), Abelson examined the way in which the organization of attitudes and the pressures toward affective and cognitive consistency, in particular, made real-world persuasion difficult. Their mathematical generalization and extension of Fritz Heider’s early qualitative consistency model, balance theory, explicitly quantified these consistency pressures and suggested how one could predict which of an individual’s beliefs should be most likely to change in the face of new information or persuasive communications of different sorts. In addition, Abelson himself (1959) elegantly elaborated a number of more specific psychological mechanisms that people often use to resist persuasive attempts, especially when those attempts were directed toward challenging attitudes or beliefs that they hold with conviction (1988).

These concerns with cognitive consistency also led to Abelson’s first forays into the then-novel domain of computer simulations. Most famous among these was his “Goldwater machine” (early 1960s), which sought to model the ideology of a then-current candidate for the U.S. presidency during the height of the Cold War era. In particular in this work, Abelson sought to show how “hot” affective or motivational processes might be incorporated into an otherwise “cool” and rational computer-based model of political attitudes. The resulting simulation proved quite successful in generating responses, which despite their endearingly clumsy syntax, seemed to contain enough real-world knowledge to capture the gist of at least one simple and consistent political worldview. Thus, told that the John F. Kennedy administration had been too soft on the Berlin Wall, the simulation might reply that: “Yes, I would not hesitate to say that recent administrations not make trouble for Communist schemes.” At the same time, the program’s failings were equally manifest in its inability to reject similarly ideologically consistent, but practically absurd, statements like “Castro throws eggs at Taiwan,” to which the program blithely responded “That’s just the sort of provocation you would expect from a Communist.”

This intersection of Abelson’s interests in political attitudes and computer modeling also led to his contributions, with Ithiel de Sola Pool, to the art and science of political forecasting. Pool, Abelson, and Samuel Popkin, for example, published an early and influential illustrative simulation of the 1960 U.S. presidential elections, titled Candidates, Issues, and Strategies (1964). In this study, traditional sociodemographic variables and reported party identification were combined in an innovative but historically informed manner to generate an extensive and detailed typology of literally hundreds of potential voting blocks that could later be used to explain actual election outcomes. This work, in turn, led to Abelson’s extended involvement, with John Tukey, in some of the very first voter forecasting models used by the major American television networks to predict election outcomes in real time, in the face of only early and fragmentary returns. Indeed, from 1962 to 1972, Abelson worked behind the scenes for the National Broadcasting Company, deciding when to “call” major state and national races.

Modeling Belief Systems Searching for a way to incorporate more of the types of mundane real-world knowledge that went into the political forecasting work into his ideology simulations, Abelson encountered the work of the computer scientist Roger Schank at Stanford University. After helping to lure Schank to Yale’s own computer science department, Abelson began a long-term collaboration on the problem of how to represent, in programmable terms, people’s generic everyday knowledge of human motives and actions. Certainly, the most prominent result of this collaboration was Schank and Abelson’s landmark book, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (1977). Even for those psychologists who had little personal interest in computer simulations, the mere introduction and elaboration of the concept of generic social “scripts” as descriptions of the way in which people analyze, encode, and understand actions in everyday life (as well as the political domain) proved a major theoretical contribution (1981). Such scripts, consisting of sequences of expected interactions coupled with lists of plausible alternatives to specified default options, allowed psychologists to understand and represent people’s knowledge of how individuals in their culture typically behave in various recurring everyday settings, such as dining at a restaurant, going to the beach, or interviewing for a new job.

Perhaps more than most academics, however, Abelson’s considerable influence derived not only from his own published work, but also from his legendary efforts as a classroom teacher. For four decades, he taught the graduate statistics courses in the psychology department at Yale, in a fashion as unusual as it was compelling. Even in this frequently dry subject, he was able to generate interest and enthusiasm, and promote understanding, through the use of anecdotes, quips, and stories that his students would later routinely wish that they could duplicate. Indeed, many of his former students have testified to consulting their carefully preserved notes from his courses even some thirty or forty years later. Fortunately for the field, many of his insights and at least some of the charm and eloquence embedded in these courses was eventually published as Statistics as Principled Argument (1995).

A charismatic teacher and inveterate storyteller, Abelson also conveyed to his students a distinctive appreciation of so-called high impact experiments, at least in the domain of social psychology. Classic studies (such as those of Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, Muzafer Sherif, and others), he suggested, could best be thought of as empirical parables, designed to bring slices of the real-world into the laboratory, in the form of otherwise carefully staged dramas, in which the only unscripted element was the actual reactions of subjects placed in these staged settings but unaware of the artifice involved. These arguments were later illustrated and elaborated in Abelson’s last book, with Kurt Frey and Aiden Gregg, titled Experiments with People and published shortly before his death (2004).

Running through Abelson’s manifold contributions to fields as diverse as social psychology, political forecasting, and cognitive science were several prominent threads. The first was his obviously prodigious intelligence and exceptional originality. Always known for his way with words, on the one hand, Abelson was the father of many concepts and terms, and especially contrasts, now a part of the standard lexicon in psychology: logical versus “psychological,” “hot” versus “cold” cognition, “scripts” versus schemas, and “neat” versus “scruffy” (i.e., more top-down and linear versus more interactive and emergent) styles of writing computer code. He was equally at home, on the other hand, with mathematics and proved just as creative in inventing new statistical methods and contrasts more closely tailored to fit particular data sets and specific theoretical questions that he and his students encountered.

The second thread was his penchant for theatrical metaphors. Whether discussing the characteristics of classic psychology experiments, the centrality of scripts to our everyday understanding of social interactions, the importance of familiar metaphors and prototypes as determinants of political attitudes and actions, or perhaps the best way to present a difficult concept to his students, Abelson was prone to think in terms of stories. A dedicated amateur thespian and director, a talented singer, and a renowned charades maven, he had not only a keen sense of drama but also the ability to take on half a dozen or more roles himself in the space of a single tale.

Finally, there was Abelson’s famed sense of humor. Whether titling a course in social cognition “Things That Go Bump in the Mind,” coining deep but entertaining “laws” of statistics such as “Chance is lumpy,” and “There is no such thing as a free hunch,” or penning papers with titles such as “On the Surprising Longevity of Flogged Horses,” Abelson always managed to capture his audience’s attention and pique their curiosity. Indeed, in his final years, his body increasingly racked by the advance of his Parkinson’s disease, he was still able to author a heart-breakingly sad, yet funny, account of his struggles with the disease in a paper titled, “Like a Hole in the Head— Pallidotomy Surgery for Parkinson’s Disease: A Patient’s Journal.” Abelson brought to the study of social psychology a statistician’s rigor, an artist’s eye, and a playwright’s ear, inspiring countless students and colleagues with his uncanny ability to turn work into play.

Abelson was twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and was an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Statistical Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also named a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society and received Distinguished Scientific Contribution awards from the American Psychological Association and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY ABELSON

With Milton J. Rosenberg. “Symbolic Psycho-logic: A Model of Attitudinal Cognition.” Behavioral Science 3 (1958): 1–12.

“Modes of Resolution of Belief Dilemmas.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (1959): 343–352.

“Computer Simulation of ‘Hot’ Cognition.” In Computer Simulation of Personality: Frontier of Psychological Theory, edited by Silvan Tomkins and Samuel Messick. New York: Wiley, 1963.

With Ithiel de Sola Pool and Samuel Popkin. Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 Presidential Election. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964.

With Elliot Aronson, William J. McGuire, et al., eds. Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook. Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1968.

“Social Psychology’s Rational Man.” In Rationality and the Social Sciences: Contributions to the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited by Stanley I. Benn and Geoffrey W. Mortimore. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976.

With Roger C. Schank. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977.

“The Psychological Status of the Script Concept.” American Psychologist 36 (1981): 715–729.

“Conviction.” American Psychologist 43 (1988): 267–275. Statistics as Principled Argument. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.

With Kurt Frey and Aiden Gregg. Experiments with People: Revelations from Social Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004.

OTHER SOURCES

Read, Stephen J., Ira J. Roseman, Mark R. Lepper, et al. “In Memoriam: Robert P. Abelson (1928–2005).” Association for Psychological Science Observer 19 (December 2006): 19–25. A collection of short tributes by a dozen contemporaries and collaborators.

Roseman, Ira J., and Stephen J. Read. “Psychologist at Play: Robert P. Abelson’s Life and Contributions to Psychological Science.” Perspectives on Psychological Sciences 2 (2007): 86–97. A thoughtful, short biography introducing Abelson and his contributions.

Schank, Roger C., and Ellen Langer, eds. Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision Making: Psycho-logic in Honor of Bob Abelson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994. A Festschrift by former students and collaborators in honor of Abelson’s retirement from Yale.

Mark R. Lepper