William James McGuire

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William James McGuire (1925-2007) served on the faculties of Yale University (1955–1958, 1971–2007), the University of Illinois (1958– 1961), Columbia University (1961–1967), and the University of California, San Diego (1967–1970). His creative, groundbreaking experimental research not only brought the study of attitudes and social influence to center stage in psychology but also shaped neighboring fields in sociology, political science, communication, and marketing. He published dozens of influential papers on the self-concept, the relation between language and thought, the structure of ideological belief systems, and the history of social psychology. With his process-oriented studies of participants’ cognitive responses to successful and unsuccessful persuasive attempts, McGuire helped to pioneer social cognition, a subdiscipline focused on human information processing that began to emerge in the 1970s at the intersection of social and cognitive psychology. He also developed his own approach to the philosophy of science, which he first labeled contextualism and later perspectivism. For this work, McGuire received the highest honors and awards psychology has to offer, including APA's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1988),
APS's William James Fellow Award (1989), SESP's Distinguished Scientist Award (1992), and ISPP's Harold Lasswell Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Political Psychology (1998). He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.
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