Robert Zajonc

Robert Bolesław Zajonc (/ˈzaɪ.ənts/ ZY-ənts; Polish: [ˈzajɔnt͡s]; November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008) was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes.

One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect.

Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.

He also made contributions to comparative psychology.

He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior.

An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species.

Zajonc, born in Łódź, Poland on November 23, 1923, was the only child of the family.

In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland reached Łódź, his family fled to Warsaw.

During their short stay, the building they were living in was hit by an air raid.

Both of Zajonc's parents were killed, and he was seriously injured.

The rest of his time in Warsaw was dedicated to studying at an underground university in Warsaw until he was sent to a German labor camp.

He escaped from the work camp, got recaptured, and then sent to a political prison in France.

After escaping for the second time, he joined the French Resistance, continuing his studies at the University of Paris.

In 1944, he moved to England where he became a translator for the American forces during their European Campaign.

After the end of World War II, he immigrated to the United States, where he applied for undergraduate admission at the University of Michigan.

Under probation, he was accepted.

In 1955, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he was a professor for nearly four decades, until 1994.

During his time there, he held the positions of Director for the Research Center of Group Dynamics in the 1980s and Director of the Institute for Social Research in the 1990s.

He then became Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University.

Zajonc's first marriage, to Donna Benson, ended in divorce.

He had three sons with Benson: Peter, Michael, and Joseph Zajonc.

He spent the rest of his life with his second wife, Hazel Rose Markus, a social psychologist at Stanford, known for her contributions to cultural psychology.

Zajonc had one child with Markus, a daughter named Krysia.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

He died in Stanford, California from pancreatic cancer on December 3, 2008, at the age of 85.

One of Zajonc's contributions to psychology is the demonstration of the mere-exposure effect.

The exposure effect demonstrates a phenomenon by which people show a preference towards an object simply because they are familiar with it.

He focused on processes involved in social behavior, with an emphasis on the relationship between affect, or emotion, and cognition.

Zajonc claims that this phenomenon exists across cultures, species, and different stimulation.

One experiment he did with fertilized chicken eggs and rats provides evidence for the mere-exposure effect.

He also proposes that the mere-exposure effect proceeds unconsciously through a Subliminal channel.

Another contribution that Zajonc made to psychology was through demonstrating social facilitation.

Social facilitation is the improvement of performance around the presence of others.

Zajonc was able to provide support for social facilitation through a variety of experiments.

In one experiment he sought to see if individuals would change their decisions depending on the presence of an audience.

He found that in the presence of an audience, the dominant preference would be enhanced.

In another experiment on social facilitation, Robert Zajonc gave participants associations to 184 words alone and in the presence of an audience.

Half of the participants worked alone, then with an audience, and vice versa.

Zajonc found that participants were affected by the presence of an audience, and fewer unique responses were given when with an audience.

The audience acts as a general drive energizer, in the presence of an audience there would be an increased probability of the dominant response.