Robert Zajonc

Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923 to 2008) was a Polish social psychologist known for decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. Born in Lodz, he lost both parents in an air raid on Warsaw in 1939, escaped from a German labor camp and then from a political prison in France, joined the French Resistance, and moved to England in 1944. After the war he emigrated to the United States, received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1955, was a professor there for nearly four decades and later became professor emeritus at Stanford. His best known contribution is the mere-exposure effect, the tendency of people to prefer an object simply because it is familiar, and he also studied social facilitation, including work with cockroaches, and theories of emotion such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis. He argued that human social behavior should be studied alongside that of other species. A 2002 survey ranked him the 35th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. He died of pancreatic cancer at Stanford, California.