Robert Paul Abelson (September 12, 1928 - July 13, 2005) is an American psychologist from Yale University and a political scientist with interests in statistics and logic.
| Robert Abelson | |
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| Scientific field | psychologist |
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| Awards and prizes | [d] ( 1989 ) [d] ( 1986 ) [d] [d] |
Biography
Born in New York and attended high school in the Bronx. He defended his thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his doctorate in psychology from the psychology department of Princeton University under the guidance of John Tekey and Silvano Tomkins.
From Princeton, Abelson went to Yale University, where he remained for the next five years of his career.
With Milton J. Rosenberg, he developed the concept of “symbolic psycho-logic,” using a peculiar form of the adjacency matrix of the sign graph, in the descriptive (rather than managerial) psychological organization of relationships and relationship coherence, which was the key to the development of the field of social cognition.
The notion that faith, relationships, and ideology were deeply connected structures of knowledge that are contained in the originals, plans, goals, and meaning of the work, which collected several thousand citations, and led to the first interdisciplinary program of specialization of cognitive science at the University. His work on analyzing the behavior of voters in the elections of 1960 and 1964 and the creation of a computer program for modeling ideology (“Goldwater machine”) helped to identify and build an area of political preferences.
He was the author of the book “Statistics as a Fundamental Argument”, which includes recipes for how to continue statistical analysis, as well as an image of what statistical analysis is, why we should do this, and how to distinguish a good from a bad statistical argument. He has co-authored several books on psychology, statistics, and political science. In 1959, Abelson published an article that explains various situations in which each individual tends to afford “dilemmas of faith” (Abelson: “Ways to Solve Dilemmas of Faith, 1959 Conflict Resolution Journal).
Abelson received an award for outstanding scientific contribution from the American Psychology Association (APA), an award of a distinguished scientist from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) and an award of an outstanding scientist from the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP - International Society of Political Psychology). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.
Books
- Bush, Robert R .; Abelson, Robert; Hyman, Ray (1956). Mathematics for Psychologists. New York: Social Science Research Council. OCLC 2301803.
- Schank, Roger; Abelson, Robert P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. New Jersey: Erlbaum. ISBN 0-470-99033-3 .
- Abelson, Robert P. (1995). Statistics as Principled Argument. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. OCLC 31011850.
- Abelson, Robert P .; Frey, Kurt P .; Gregg, Aiden P. (2004). Experiments with People: Revelations From Social Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. OCLC 51389089.
Links
- Rubrique nécrologique de l ' APA
- Rubrique nécrologique du new york times