Robert “Bob” S. Wyer, Jr. passed away on February 3 at the age of 90. An intellectual giant in the fields of social psychology and consumer behavior, Bob Wyer spent most of his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the Department of Psychology and later in the Gies College of Business. His career spanned several decades and chapters. At Illinois, in the Psychology Department, Bob pioneered the field of person memory through countless seminal articles and books. His work focused on developing a general theoretical formulation of social cognition that specified the factors shaping each stage of social information processing, including encoding, organization in memory, retrieval, and judgment. On the Illinois campus and around the world, Bob was a mentor and champion to many scholars across disciplines who were interested in social cognition.
Early in his career, Bob was a frequent visiting professor at the University of Mannheim, Germany, where his mentorship was crucial for the development of an early generation of European social cognition researchers. After his ostensible retirement from UIUC in 1995, Bob served on the faculty of the business schools of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and ultimately the University of Cincinnati, making major contributions to consumer research. He was Associate Editor (1974-1976) and Editor-in-Chief (1977-1979) of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and instrumental in turning JESP into the premier outlet of the developing field of social cognition. He later served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consumer Psychology (2002-2005), which developed into a premier outlet of consumer psychology under his editorship.
One of the most prolific scholars in his fields, Bob authored four books, more than 300 articles and chapters, and edited the field-defining Handbook of Social Cognition (1984, 1994) and the Advances in Social Cognition (1988-1999). A bibliometric analysis of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from 1965-2000 revealed that Bob was by far the most prolific contributor to social psychology’s flagship journal (Quiñones-Vidal et al., 2004). Bob came by his penchant for productivity honestly: He was the son of an upstate New York newspaper photographer whose donated archives included over 150,000 photos, and he was a distant relative of Benjamin Franklin.
Bob received several major awards for his contributions to psychological science and consumer research, including the German Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize (1981), the Thomas Ostrom Award of the Person Memory Group (1998), the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2008), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology (2011).
Bob was widely known for being an exceptionally supportive mentor, advisor, editor, and colleague. He was enthusiastic about every person’s ideas, while giving input that vastly improved their thinking. Perhaps Bob’s greatest academic legacy is the many scholars he mentored throughout his life — around the world and across disciplines—who remained devoted to him and deeply grateful for his support.
Bob is survived by Rashmi Adaval, whom he married in 1995; his children, Mikul, Natalie, and Kathy; his grandson, Colin; his brother, Peter (Judith); and his mother-in-law, Sally. For more reflections and to leave a remembrance, please see this personal obituary prepared by his son that captures some of Bob’s irrepressible spirit.