Tributes

Lee Ross

I owe a particular gratitude to Emily Pronin for including me this this event celebrating the life and work of Lee Ross, because unlike many of you, I was neither Lee's student, nor colleague, nor collaborator. He was not even my uncle (as Tim Wilson claimed). We didn't meet that much, although a bit more over the past 15 years where we found ourselves at small conferences often the only two psychologists at events of economists, legal scholars and policy wonks. It was clear that we felt an affinity even warmth (at least I did), and I have many good memories of discussions with him about what a psychological notion of justice, one that took into account what humans actually do, would look like. And this remains an open project, even today.

But there is a memory that Lee unknowingly planted and that is forever etched on my brain. When I first got to Yale in the mid-1980s, I was like any other rookie professor, full of eagerness to read all 100 applications to the graduate program in social psychology and admit students to my lab. But the sad outcome of all the work would be that students would come and make a beeline for the real professors there. I quickly figured out that they saw me as their helper. One of them said, I am desperate to work with Bill McGuire, but he isn’t making eye contact with me. What should I do? Me: Have you considered arriving at 5 am and lying down prostrate outside his office in worship until he trips over you? I hear Bill comes in early. Or Deborah the student who phoned me at home to ask if we could meet before 9 am the next day as she was stuck with a SAS analysis. Can we do it after 9 am, I tentatively asked. Absolutely not, she said, I have a meeting with Judy Rodin at 10 am and I must show her this brilliant analysis.

So I would go in at 8 am, knowing what it would take, and debug the program and this sort of thing continued, with me having been beaten into submission by the graduate students, until something happened. Students started to mention my name in their applications and when they showed up, they continued to talk to me about working with me! They began to say things like "Professor Banaji, it has been my life’s ambition to work with you; there is no other person in the universe at whose feet I wish to sit, whose every word I will internalize and go the ends of the earth to fulfill." So, hope grew even in my heart; this was looking really good. What I wasn’t expecting is that Lee Ross would occur. The first time such a student said that they were just going to "visit Stanford", given my cluelessness, I was quite encouraging: Of course, you should visit Stanford. It will be a great experience to meet all the great people there. All the while I would think to myself, surely this remarkable student with such good judgment can’t be so superficial as to be moved by geraniums blooming in January.

And indeed, the student would not be so superficial. But a couple of weeks later I would get an email with the subject heading Stanford, followed by an exclamation mark. And the message some version of which I was to receive for the next three years (only the signature of the student signing would change), said, "Dear Professor Banaji, as you know I was really excited about coming to Yale and working with you." Was excited? Hmm. An error in tense, surely. Let’s read on. "But I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. I met Lee Ross. He is mesmerizing. The work he does as you know, is just so cool. He and Gordon Bower took me for a ride on a scooter! We even went to an Indian restaurant and like, ate with our hands. I hope to see you at a conference in the future … someday." What? I’m from India. I eat with my hands every day. What’s so cool about that?

It took many years to recover from the mention of the name Lee Ross especially during recruiting season when a mere suggestion of an experiment set up as a quiz competition would bring on a full-blown anxiety episode. Many years later, I did tell Lee what he had done. He was very kind. He said, Oh Marzu, you exaggerate, there were not that many who came to Stanford. And besides, I did you a favor. They ate a lot of Indian food, but none of them were good enough to finish the program or go into psychology. I might have saved you!

But the real way in which Lee Ross saved me, as he did dozens and dozens of scholars and scientists, was of course by the nature and quality of his work – work on the deepest questions about human beings, work that was startlingly creative, work that was just a joy to read. His papers had a simplicity to them that allowed you to talk about them at cocktail parties, in introductory psychology and in graduate courses for he had packed into the work different levels of understanding that could be pulled out, both for the amateurs and for the sophisticates. And even more: what I love about Lee’s work – and here I must add Dick Nisbett as well – talking about both your work to others has always made me feel enormous pride to be a social psychologist. I found every possible way to make it clear that I was from the same tribe as you.

So, what meagre research offering can I make in this moment. Lee and I had talked a few times about many aspects of the IAT so I knew what he thought. But I recently learned from Emily Pronin about Lee’s reaction after he had taken his first IAT. It was that perfect combination I yearn for – an expression of disappointment about what the data are telling us about the state of our minds. But intertwined with that personal disappointment, a simultaneous excitement about learning something that may have been previously hidden from us. A new, first-hand experience of misunderstanding. The work I will mention is work that is relatively new and it is my hope that Lee would have harangued me with questions about it in the same way he did more than 20 years ago.

[A talk followed on Large Language Corpora as Reflector of Social Group Representations summarizing the work of Tessa Charlesworth and Aylin Caliskan; papers available from the publications page]