It was a somewhat circuitous path that led Bob Wyer to the field of social psychology. Raised in upstate New York, he received degrees in electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and New York University. After working for two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he became concerned that he might have missed out on a classic liberal arts education, and enrolled in graduate school in social psychology at the University of Colorado, receiving his Ph. D. in 1962. Working with O. J. Harvey and William Scott, he began to investigate questions of cognitive organization and social information processing, establishing the themes that have guided his scholarship throughout his career. On completion of his doctoral studies, Wyer held academic appointments at the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. In his earliest work, he investigated a range of fundamental questions about the nature of social beliefs, attitudes, and judgment. He developed a comprehensive view of the cognitive bases of judgment and inference in his first major book, Cognitive Organization and Change: An Information Processing Approach. In 1973, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent the next several decades of his research career. During that time, he began to develop a full-fledged social-cognitive perspective on topics such as attitudes, attribution, and impression formation, and became recognized as one of the most prolific scholars in the history of social psychology. Upon retiring from Illinois in 1995, he embarked on a research career in consumer information processing, holding visiting positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Cincinnati with an interim appointment in marketing at the University of Illinois
Research
Dr. Wyer is the author or coauthor of four books, the most recent being Social Comprehension and Judgment. He is the editor of several others including the Handbook of social cognition, the Advances in social cognition series and Understanding culture: Theory, research and application. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and was cited as having published the greatest number of articles in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in the first 30 years of its inception. He has published at least one article or book chapter in each of the 55 years since receiving his Ph.D. and has been the director of 46 doctoral dissertations at UI, HKUST and CUHK.
Services and Honors
Dr. Wyer is a former editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and, more recently, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals. He is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Special Research Prize for Distinguished Scientists in 1981, the Thomas M. Ostrom Award for Distinguished Contributions to Person Memory and Social Cognition in 1998, and Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2008 and the Society for Consumer Psychology in 2011 and was elected as a Fellow of the latter society in 2016. A tribute to his contribution to the field of social cognition was made by the book, "Foundations of Social Cognition: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert S. Wyer, Jr.".
