Robert S. Wyer
Robert S. Wyer Jr. is a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Colorado. Wyer Jr.'s research interests cover various aspects of social information processing, including:
- knowledge accessibility,
- comprehension,
- memory,
- social inference,
- the impact of affect on judgment and decisions,
- attitude formation and change,
- and consumer judgment and decision-making.
Personal life
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 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he enrolled in graduate school in social psychology at the University of Colorado 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.
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 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