Donald T. Campbell, who died May 6, 1996 following a short illness, was acclaimed as a social psychologist and widely acknowledged as an important contributor to many other disciplines, including anthropology, biology, and philosophy. However, no field in the social sciences is more indebted to this intellectual giant than cross-cultural psychology. His teachings on methodology, on research design, and on various theoretical and empirical domains spawned ideas that have become bywords (e.g., quasi-experimental design, multitrait/multimethod matrix, carpentered world, the unconfounding function of cross-cultural research, evolutionary epistemology) and yielded findings (e.g., cultural differences and similarities in visual perception and in intergroup relations) that helped establish cross-cultural psychology in the 1950s, even before a few, and later many more, psychologists chose to identify themselves as cross-culturalists.
He turned students into colleagues (I was his student at Northwestern University when he made me senior author of a cross-cultural study of visual perception) and he turned colleagues into students. Years later, during his tenure as Schweitzer Professor in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, his seminar on diverse meta-social scientific concerns drew weekly crowds of faculty sociologists, philosophers and physicists, among others.
Professor Campbell, an Honorary Fellow of the IACCP, was also the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (which he also served as President), and he was an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The American Educational Research Association gave Campbell its award for Distinguished Contribution to Research in Education, and the Universities of Michigan, Florida, Chicago, and Southern California awarded him honorary degrees.
His Ph. D. was earned in 1947 at Berkeley and for the nearly fifty years thereafter, he published scores of articles, chapters, and books, many with colleagues whose own careers were enriched by their association with him. Among the publications of particular relevance to cross-cultural psychology were works on ethnocentrism (in 1951, with McCandless, in 1968 with Robert LeVine, and in 1976 with Marilyn Brewer) on the interrelated methodologies of anthropology and psychology (in 1961 alone and in a revised edition with Raoul Naroll), on optical illusion susceptibility (with Marshall Segall and Melville Herskovits in 1963 and 1966), on unobtrusive measuring techniques (in 1966 with E. J. Webb, Richard Schwartz, and Lee Sechrest) and on field research techniques (with Thomas Cook in 1979)). He also wrote on epistemology, sociobiology, and on conflicts between biological and social evolution as these related to psychology and morality.
Donald Campbell, trained in the laboratory-based tradition of American social psychology, believed early on in the need to take his research skills into the real world. He admired the late nineteenth-century efforts of the Cambridge University interdisciplinary team that carried out an expedition to the Torres Straits, and Campbell himself did some field work in East Africa. My own field experience in that part of the world was arranged by Campbell, as was that of Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen.
When he died much too early at the age of 79, Donald Campbell was survived by his wife, the anthropologist Barbara Frankel, two sons, and grandchildren. He also left numerous intellectual sons, daughters and grandchildren, as his students handed down to their students a Campbellian view of the world. Consequently, as many of us in cross-cultural psychology gratefully acknowledge, Donald Campbell shaped a field of scientific endeavor powerfully enriched by his creative ideas. Now, any comparison between only two societies is inherently uninterpretable!
About forty years ago, I met Donald Campbell at Yale, where he was a visiting professor in Psychology. When he returned to Northwestern, I followed him there and like many others who were entranced by his intellect and charmed by his personality, I tried to become as much like him as my own limitations permitted. I was his student, then his colleague and always his disciple. He was always my teacher, my inspiration, and, best of all, my friend. I thank him for giving me his friendship and for giving me my career. I praise him for creating the foundations of what we have come to know as cross-cultural psychology.