Artifacts in Behavioral Research

Robert Rosenthal is distinguished professor of psychology at UC Riverside. He spent 37 years as a professor at Harvard University before joining the UCR faculty in 1999, and is internationally known for his foundational work in statistical analysis of social science literature, the influence of expectations, and nonverbal behavior (including the Rosenthal Effect). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and among his many prizes and awards is a Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Rosenthal's research has centered for some 50 years on the role of the self-fulfilling prophecy in everyday life and in laboratory situations. Special interests include the effect of teachers' expectations on students' academic and physical performance, the effects of experimenters' expectations on the results of their research, and the effects of clinicians' expectations on their patients' mental and physical health. For over 40 years he has been studying the role of nonverbal communication in (a) the mediation of interpersonal expectancy effects and in (b) the relationship between members of small work groups and small social groups, including teacher-student, doctor-patient, manager-employee, judge-jury, and psychotherapist-client interactions. He served as Chair of the Research Committee of the Bayer Institute for Health Care Communication. Ralph Rosnow is Thaddeus Bolton Professor Emeritus at Temple University, where he taught for 34 years and directed the doctoral program in social and organizational psychology. He also taught at Boston University and as a visiting professor at Harvard University. He was the General Editor of Oxford University Press's Reconstruction of Society Series. He has been a Fellow of AAAS and APA since 1970 and a Charter Fellow of APS since 1988, and has collaborated with Robert Rosenthal for over 43 years on books and articles on research methods and data analysis. In research and theory, Rosnow has explored the imposition of meaning from the perspective of contextualism, rumor and gossip, attitude formation, social cognition, and interpersonal acumen. He has published extensively on each of these topics. Currently, he is interested in focused data analysis and effect size estimation.