Robert B. Zajonc

Excerpts from an obituary in this morning's newspaper.

Robert B. Zajonc, a Stanford University professor who drew on his harrowing boyhood experience as a Polish refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II to become an expert on human behavior and a founding father in the field of modern social psychology, has died.

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Born in 1923 in Poland, he and his parents fled to Warsaw from their small hometown after the Nazi invasion. In 1939, the large apartment building where they were living was bombed. The 16-year-old boy woke up in a hospital, both legs broken, to learn that he was the only survivor of the blast.

He was later rounded up by Nazi troops and sent to a labor camp, where he made bales of hay. One night in 1942, he and another youth escaped the camp and spent the next three months on the run to France - hiding during the day, walking at night. In France, he was caught by Nazis and sent to a political prison. After connecting with the French resistance, in 1943 he escaped to England where he joined the U.S. Army, working as a translator. He eventually became fluent in seven languages.

When the war ended, he worked as a translator for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He relocated to New York in 1948 and worked as a statistician for American Express. A year later he was admitted to the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. There he taught until 1994.

Professor Zajonc helped shape the post-World War II science of social psychology.

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One of Professor Zajonc's early important studies led him to the conclusion that when someone else is present, one's performance is enhanced if engaged in a simple or well-known task. If, on the other hand, the task is difficult or unfamiliar, the presence of another person will adversely impact one's performance.

As part of that research conducted over three years, Professor Zajonc worked with cockroaches from Central America. A cockroach would run a simple maze faster if another cockroach were present. But if the maze was complex, or if the cockroach was alone, it would run the maze slower.