Last week I traveled to Ohio to say farewell to one of my graduate school advisors. Tim Brock died on December 20, 2009, after a long illness; he was 74 years old. I worked with Tim from 2001 through 2006, a time when his scientific mind was keenly focused on the psychology of narratives. In that spirit, I want to share stories about this generous, exacting, and creative man.
Tim was born in Milwaukee, grew up in New York City, and studied at Fordham, La Sorbonne, and the Free University of Berlin. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1960, having worked with Carl Hovland and other luminaries during the twilight of the Yale Communication and Attitude Change Program. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Iowa State University, and subsequently joined the psychology faculty at The Ohio State University.
Tim remained at OSU for the rest of his professional career, from 1964 onward. Tim founded and helped to cultivate a doctoral training program in social psychology which is internationally acclaimed and has attracted faculty, students, and visiting speakers of the highest calibre. Tim published a number of books, and hundreds of scholarly articles, on topics ranging from cognitive dissonance to aggression to persuasion to immersion in stories. Tim held leadership roles in many professional organizations, including the presidency of the Society for Consumer Research, and editorial positions at a number of journals, including Social Psychology Quarterly and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
One of the reasons that Ohio State research psychologists are productive is the huge pool of participants that comes with such a large university; a motivated person could conceivably run more than a dozen experiments per semester, something that is impossible at campuses with smaller enrolments.
The dangerous flip side of this asset is the temptation to view participants as disposable, something that Tim clearly did not do. During our lab meetings, he would stress that our participants were the most valuable resources we had as psychological scientists, and that we had to get as much out of these resources as possible. Tim would actually work 'at the bench' and be part of the raw data collection process, something quite rare among senior faculty. (A more typical attitude is: "That's what my students are for!") If a research assistant was ill, or if a graduate student accidentally double-booked research and teaching commitments, Tim would step in and take over. He would do this for hours at a time, on weekends, and on holidays. If he granted such burdensome favours grudgingly, he never let on.
Tim had a strong sense of the history of social psychology. Many junior students lamented the fact that Tim assigned us dense readings by nearly-forgotten writers such as Gustav Ichheiser and Fritz Heider, but Tim knew that our understanding of social cognition and attribution theory would be incomplete without exposure to such foundational thinkers. One got the sense that Tim was full of juicy stories from across his lengthy career, but he was always reluctant to spent time idly chatting about the past. I am fascinated by the history of my science, the personalities and personality clashes that spurred its progress, and I wish I had spent more time cajoling him to share these stories with us.
Tim also had strong ideas about the future of social psychology. He saw value in theory development, but like Kurt Lewin he took a pragmatic approach to his science. If our experiments weren't leading us to some applied end, then we were dooming ourselves to a life of theoretical navel-gazing and hair-splitting. Tim's body of work shows that he was committed to using social psychology to create practical technological solutions to problems as varied as auto accidents, food sales, and genocide. A few days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Tim convened a lab meeting to brainstorm ideas about how to stop similar attacks from being successful. He was inspired by the United 93 passengers that fought back, and thought that simple social psychological manipulations of perceived responsibility (i.e., shifting it from the air crew to the passengers themselves) could encourage heroism in similar emergencies.
Tim had a quick wit and a broad appreciation for language. He would pepper his communications to me with phrases in Latin, German, and French, but not gratuitously -- they were used only when they were les mots justes. I never did get to challenge him at Scrabble, one of his favourite games, but I expect that I would have suffered quite embarrassing losses.
One of the things I loved most about Tim was his sense of humour. While planning validation studies for the "Need for Entertainment" scale that we had developed together, our conversation turned to best- and worst-case scenarios for the future of this instrument. "Well," said Tim, "I imagine that people will be curious about the Livingston and Brock scale... or, as we'll call it when it becomes popular," he added with a sly grin, "the Brock and Livingston scale."
Tim loved to work. He was one of those scientists that can't wait to get out of bed and get to the office, every new day carrying the promise of learning some new thing. He read voraciously: journals, books, newspapers, and magazines. He kept up with new theories and methods; I remember his clear excitement after returning from a "virtual reality" workshop in California. He would be at work before you arrived, and still be there after you left. As someone who was completely burnt out by the age of 22, I was amazed at Tim's continued passion for psychological science at an age when many are itching to simply retire. I can imagine that Tim's devotion to his work must have taken a toll on relationships with friends and family, especially his beloved wife Sherry, and I thank them for sharing so much of him with us. (Health problems forced Tim to retire in 2006, and it was clear that retirement was not something he wanted.)
Tim also loved to facilitate the work of others. If you had a suggestion for a new set of experiments, he would encourage you to pursue them... even if they weren't very interesting to him personally. If you gave him manuscript pages to edit, they would typically be done and returned within the day. He was a tireless advocate for his students, and generous with praise when it came time to provide letters of reference and recommendation. He could occasionally be curt -- hilariously abrupt ends to telephone conversations were just one of the many classic "Tim-isms" -- but I always got the feeling that this was more about his desire to just get back to work than any lack of respect on his part.
I doubt that my career will lead me to a similar place as Tim's did, but the key lessons I take from his example are to enjoy what you do, pursue the truth, work on issues that matter, and worry little about other people's opinions. On a cold Monday morning, at a lovely Catholic service held at St. Joseph's Cathedral in Columbus, one of Tim's daughters eulogized him thusly: "He wasn't normal. He was better than normal."
I can't say it any better. Tim Brock was truly a gentleman scholar, and I will miss him. Thank you, Tim, for all that you did for your science and your students.
(And thank you, Dear Reader, for permitting this sentimental indulgence. I will return to "regularly scheduled programming" next week.)
