Robert B. Zajonc, a Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to better understanding human cognition.
Zajonc (ZYE-unts, rhymes with “science”), professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford, identified many mental processes that influence human behavior and helped revolutionize social psychology. He died December 3 in Palo Alto from complications of pancreatic cancer. He was 85.
Born in Lodz, Poland, Zajonc fled with his family to Warsaw in 1939 after the Nazi invasion. While he was staying with relatives, a bomb killed both his parents and broke Zajonc’s legs. Nazi soldiers sent Zajonc to a labor camp, but he escaped—twice. In 1944, at 21, he reached England and worked as a translator for the U.S. Army until the end of the war.
Zajonc immigrated to the United States in 1948 and earned his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. He stayed in Ann Arbor, where he was a professor of psychology and directed the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the Institute for Social Research. He came to Stanford in 1994.
When the study of human behavior was nearly solely concerned with people’s environment, Zajonc looked to the mind—specifically the interplay between cognition and emotion. He pioneered the “mere exposure effect,” the phenomenon that people prefer images they see over and over. He also discovered that people who perform tasks well perform them even better in front of an audience and that facial expressions affect emotions, not just vice versa. He received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the American Psychological Association in 1978. At Stanford he urged interdisciplinary research on massacres and analyzed responses to the 9/11 attacks.
Zajonc is survived by his wife, Hazel Rose Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; their daughter, Krysia, ’07; three sons from a previous marriage, Peter, Michael and Joseph; and four grandchildren.
