Tributes

Phoebe Ellsworth

Today, I have the honor of recognizing a great one amongst us. She has a brilliantly analytical mind immediately evident as soon as she turns her attention to your own work. She is among the most astute observers of social behavior. She pioneered research in two spheres where the mind and the world meet, any one of which would have been the basis of a great and accomplished career. She has a dry wit inflected with New England understatement that dignifies and elevates all who enter her orbit.

Phoebe Ellsworth received her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College, and her Ph.D. in three short years from Stanford. Even though it was still the dark ages, she managed to be tenured from within the junior ranks at Yale, then taught at Stanford, before arriving at University of Michigan in 1987, where she has been ever since. To many in this room, it will mean something to know that she was Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. She is currently Frank Murphy Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Law at the University of Michigan.

Phoebe has received more teaching and mentoring awards than anybody else we know, including APS’s Mentor Award in 2017. As well, SPSP’s Career Contribution Award, APS’s Cattell Award for Lifetime Achievement in Applied Research, the American Psychology & Law Society’s Distinguished Contribution Award and will soon receive the Cornell University Lifetime Achievement Award in Law, Psychology, and Human Development. Phoebe is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, Mount Saint Mary’s College in Los Angeles created the Phoebe C. Ellsworth Psychology and Justice Colloquium Series.

Speaking of her contributions to psychology and law, Hazel Markus her colleague of many years reminded me that Phoebe insisted from the start that the law needed psychology and especially social psychology. Law didn't listen for a long time and neither did psychology. But when I look at the deep connections that are now possible and even seem natural between these fields, the ease with which some of our own work has found a home in the law, we have to know that it is so because Phoebe had the vision and the tenacity to map out the landscape and to put down those first stones of empiricism to enter the law from experimental psychology.

Her student and collaborator, Sam Sommers, is correct when he says that Phoebe Ellsworth is a founding figure of the field that we now know as psychology and law. That her first paper on the topic was published in 1969 and that paper was titled “Legislative reform of child custody adjudication: An effort to rely on social science data in formulating legal policies”. In her utter modesty and pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, Phoebe Ellsworth perhaps had no idea then that she was inventing a field. What is noteworthy is that her 1969 paper appeared 12 years before the founding of the American Psychology and Law Society, Division 41 of the APA. That’s why we call her a visionary.

Phoebe’s contributions to psych and law now spanning over four decades are on topics so numerous that I will be out of breath just naming them: death qualification, death penalty attitudes, insanity defense, jury decision making, translation of attitudes into verdicts, eyewitness memory, accuracy-confidence relationship, leading questions, communicator expertise, juror racial bias, jurors’ understanding of law, expert testimony and legal reasoning. She fearlessly brought psychology to the law and said: please deal with the evidence. Her advocacy extending the science is noteworthy. Americans everywhere should feel fortunate that Phoebe Ellsworth sits on the Advisory Board for the Center on Wrongful Convictions and on the Board of Directors for the Death Penalty Information Center.

In the field of emotion, Phoebe’s work was equally ahead of the times. When everybody was focused on cognition Phoebe recognized the importance of the warm and the wet. She began her work on emotion as a graduate student helping Ekman and Friesen develop photographs to be used in New Guinea to measure the recognition of emotional expressions. Phoebe herself is known for her work on appraisal theory, accounting for individual variability in emotional responses to the same situations and especially for pointing to the pivotal role of culture in emotion, for work on cultural variation in the perception of emotion in faces, not to mention her deep expertise on the writings of William James on emotion.

Because you have and will read her work, let me use this occasion to say a little about the quality of scholar and scientist Phoebe is. I have to begin with a story that Bill McGuire told and that Anne McGuire his daughter who is here today was kind enough to pull out of Bill’s correspondence files for me. Bill McGuire, as you know, was a longtime editor of JPSP and here are Bill McGuire’s own words:

...”she [Phoebe] sent me a manuscript reporting two very interesting and elegant studies...I accepted the manuscript with high praise, calling for some cosmetic revisions and incidentally expressing some regrets that a few extra conditions had not been run and hoped that she would clear up the ambiguities left via later studies. She responded by thanking me for the suggestions and withdrawing the manuscript as not yet ready. A couple years later I did see the manuscript published, with the additional studies clearing up the ambiguities. This was the only occasion I recall among the three thousand or so manuscripts I dealt with as editor that a manuscript that I accepted was then withdrawn by the author as requiring more work.” Donald Trump would call you “a total loser” Pheobe, which is exactly why we, your colleagues, see you as among the greatest among us.

As a mentor Phoebe has no equal. Her student Ed O’Brien and Sam Sommers can tell you better than I the combination of honesty, integrity, and compassion – a caring for the whole person that represents Phoebe’s investment in her students, and you will understand why she is the recipient of APA’s Raymond Fowler Award for distinguished contributions to the professional development of graduate students. Her Michigan colleagues, older and younger, will tell you that people there count on Phoebe to make their work smarter and to keep their inner selves intact; that the phrase “Thank God, Phoebe is here” is a regular utterance at Michigan.

All this goodness is enhanced by Pheobe’s sense of humor. Bob Zajonc has a footnote in his famous paper Preferences Need No Inferences devoted to Phoebe’s delightful description of her struggle with her own emotions when making decisions. In this moment, in deciding whether to stay at the institution she was at or to move to another university, Phoebe is trying hard to be rational by using a balance sheet – by laying out the positives of both places in two separate columns. She says “I get halfway through my Irv Janis balance sheet and say “Oh hell, it’s not coming out right. Have to find a way to get some plusses over on the other side!”. This delightful introspection of her own irrationality serves to remind us all of our own.

From Sam Sommers I also learned of the busy weekends that make up Phoebe’s life. Sam remembers meeting her in a grocery store while shopping one weekend and Phoebe described that she was taking a break from grading papers and also finishing a manuscript. With her, in the grocery story was a man Sam had not met. It turned out that the man was a recent death row exoneree with whom Phoebe (and in fact her whole family) had been communicating for almost a decade while he had been in prison. Having been exonerated, the pen pal was shopping for ingredients so that he could cook Phoebe and her family his favorite meal from prison. To grade papers, write a ms, and shop for fajitas with a man released from death row all in one weekend – well, that’s Phoebe.

If you know Phoebe, you know that you are at once struck by her incisiveness coupled with complete authenticity as I once was a long time ago as she and I sat on a swing and talked during the break at a meeting of the NAACP/Legal Defense Fund. I had just had hints that research on implicit cognition may have something to say to the law. In that critical hour we spent together, Phoebe laid it all out for me including what she rightly saw coming -- the resistance we would confront if the work had any possibility to effect change. We all have our dark days at work, and when I have mine, when I’m prompted to remind people that they have a right to their own opinion but not to their own facts, I find myself generating a spine to utter these words by remembering what my friend Phoebe had predicted would happen and how to manage it.

So today, when we honor Phoebe Ellsworth, we honor more than the facts that make up her research findings. We honor a person of deep intellectual resources always given freely to others. We honor a person of integrity with not a shred of artifice in her interactions with her fellow beings. We honor Phoebe Ellsworth today for illuminating the most elemental aspects of our emotional lives and for her work to save people from wrongful death.