Roger Brown: He taught that human personality resists an easy and entirely rational description

Roger William Brown was born on April 14, 1925 in Detroit, Michigan, into a family of four brothers that, by the time he was ready for school, began to experience economic distress from the Great Depression. Roger attended the Detroit public schools and the University of Michigan. During his first year he enrolled in the Navy's V-12 Program. He was at the battle of Okinawa and was on the first ship to enter Nagasaki Harbor following the explosion of the atomic bomb. After the end of World War II, Roger returned to the University of Michigan to complete his undergraduate education and then, in 1952, to earn his Ph.D. His strongest interests lay in language and its acquisition. He became an instructor and then assistant professor at Harvard. In 1957 he took a position at MIT where he wrote his monumental book, Words and Things. That book, still in print, explored the degree to which human thought limits language, and the converse, the degree to which the structure of specific languages influences thinking. Roger even dealt with the way in which onomatopoeic phonemes connote their meaning symbolically regardless of language. He became a full professor at MIT in 1960.

Roger returned to Harvard in 1962 as professor of social psychology. His 1965 textbook, Social Psychology, was widely adopted in many universities and remained in print for over 20 years. The success of Social Psychology encouraged him, in 1986, to undertake a second textbook on social psychology. Although entirely new in content, he titled it simply Social Psychology: The Second Edition. His research strategy was quintessentially empirical and inductive. "It always started," he said, "with some phenomenon and only later became theoretical." He avoided as much as he could theoretically centered studies because he believed that "theory is in the center ring, and to operate in the center ring you need a combative temperament, and I have never been combative." He tended to "pick some mystery and poke it and prod it and turn it all around in an effort to figure it out." These were small phenomena with grand implications, such as the acquisition of a first language, the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, the puzzle of richly detailed memories of events that are accompanied by peremptorily strong emotions, which he called flashbulb memories, and the nature of politeness. In studying how we learn a first language, he focussed on three children, Adam, Eve, and Sarah. On the basis of careful examination of spontaneous conversations between each mother and her child in the natural setting of their home, he established empirical generalizations that even now are still being explored and mined. For example, he found that there is remarkable consistency in the sequence in which English morphemes are acquired; that the "mean length of utterance" is a reliable measure of a child's status in learning English; and that inflections of nouns come earlier than inflections of verbs. And he observed that parents do not praise their children for speaking sentences that are grammatically or syntactically correct or criticize them for those that are wrong. Rather parents correct those utterances that are factually false. Therefore, contrary to Skinnerian ideas, children do not learn their language in accordance with principles of reinforcement, but rather on the basis of an epigenetically unfolding cognitive capacity. Most of the leading scholars of language acquisition were trained by Brown, by his first students, or influenced by his research. His subsequent work -- on categorization, causality in language, music and moods, insights into the differences between novels and songs -- continues to influence cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, as well as psychology.

Roger and Richard Herrnstein published a landmark textbook in 1975. The chapters were based on an introductory psychology course they taught together. The book was not a great success in the marketplace. Although some said it was too hard for undergraduates, and indeed, it did plunge the student into difficult areas, the exposition was crystalline and simple. The opening words, written by Brown, are illustrative. "We may as well have the scandal out at once and get it over with: psychology cannot be defined. Unless this is the first introductory textbook you have ever looked into," he continued, "you are not at all scandalized." He then launched into a painless, illuminating discussion of the philosophy of language that brought the reader face-to- face with Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas. The book was read by instructors for their own edification, after which they assigned to their classes more elementary treatments of the discipline.

His many honors included election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association, and the international prize of the Fondation Fyssen.

Roger Brown was a witty, generous and cultured man. His brilliance seeped unpretentiously into his teaching, writing, and casual conversation. Yet, there was an ironic quality to his self-presentation, revealed in his autobiography and his last book, Against My Better Judgment, as if to warn people that his easy and accessible geniality was not the whole story of his character. In this twist, he taught that human personality resists an easy and entirely rational description.

Jerome Kagan
Ellen Langer
Sheldon H. White
Philip S. Holzman (Chair)