The Life of Dan Wegner: A Meeting Place for Joy and Intelligence

Scientific American:

Dan Wegner published his last paper here in this edition of Scientific American. It marked the end of a prolific, decades-long career in social psychology—one studded by every major award in the field, over 100 articles, seven books and an endowed professorship at Harvard University. But what the public record does not reveal is how Dan approached science and how that approach influenced his academic progeny. A mere inspection of his CV also misses why it meant so much to him that his final paper would appear here in Scientific American.

For me, as his graduate student, and later a colleague and friend, the metrics of his academic success do not capture what Dan meant to the field. To Dan, science was about noticing something hiding in plain sight. It meant taking a simple observation of human behavior and wondering, “Why is it like that? Why does it happen this way?” He would then show us how to play around with that phenomenon in our heads, in conversation, in the lab and in our writing until we deeply understood it.

Read the whole story: Scientific American