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45 - Meetings with Remarkable Men: A Fortunate Journey in Social Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

By
Miles Hewstone
Edited by
Saul Kassin
Saul Kassin
Affiliation:
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
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Summary

Intrepid European students of my generation (1970s) were drawn to travel overland to Katmandu, as I did in 1978, just after completing my Bachelor’s degree. A popular book was G. I. Gurdjieff’s (1963) Meetings with Remarkable Men. The author, a spiritualist, set out as a young man in search of wisdom, traveling in remote regions of Central Asia to meet “Seekers of Truth” and recording their influence on him. Setting out on this chapter, I have become very aware of my own meetings with remarkable men, a series of scholars, brilliant and influential in their own distinctive ways, who guided my career, implicitly or explicitly. While writing I also came across the notion of “unusual attitudes,” a certification obtained by air pilots, which teaches them what to do in the event of, for example, inadvertently flying upside down or going into a tail spin. In this chapter I record the huge debt of gratitude to those who taught me to face our field’s challenges. I follow the conventional chronology of an academic career, touching on the three main areas where I hope I have made significant contributions (attribution, social influence, and intergroup relations) and some of the key people and places which are most significant to this work.

Type
Chapter
Information
Pillars of Social Psychology
Stories and Retrospectives
 , pp. 386 - 394
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Suggested Reading

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