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Homage to Psychologist Donn Byrne (1931-2014)

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Donn Byrne, an American
psychologist, famous for his
similarity-attraction paradigm,
repression-sensitization scale,
and social psychological
perspective on human sexuality
among many other contributions
to management and psychology,
died on August 10, 2014 in New
York, USA. Ramadhar Singh,
[Byrnes former doctoral student
at Purdue University (1970-1973)
and currently a Distinguished
Professor at the Indian Institute
of Management Bangalore], looks
back at his illustrious mentors
life and career, and describes how
Byrne mentored him.
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Kabir (1440-1518), the Indian
mystic, asked, Given both Guru [teacher]
and God standing in front of you, whom
should you bow to first? Kabir
counselled, All the glory should go to
your Guru for showing the path to God.
I then unreservedly bow to one of
my esteemed Gurus, Donn Byrne, Ph. D.
(Stanford, 1958; Supervisor: Clarence L.
Winder). During his more than four
decade of academic career at the
University of Texas (1959-69), Purdue
University (1969-79), and the University
at Albany, SUNY (1979-2001), Byrne
initiated 52 doctoral students from
several countries to Psychology as a
Science. We fondly remember his advice
to make only one difference between
experiments on an issue and to continue
research only if you enjoy doing it.
Donn, born on December 19, 1931,
in Austin, Texas to Bernard and Rebecca
Singleton Byrne, died peacefully at his
home on Sunday, August 10, 2014 at
Feura Bush, New York. He is survived by
three daughters (Robin Lynn Byrne,
Donn Byrne
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Lindsey Kelley Byrne, and Rebecka Byrne
Kelley) and a grand-daughter (Teagan
McLaughlin), and was predeceased by a
son, Keven Singleton Byrne.
Byrne is perhaps best known for
his research on attitude similarity and
interpersonal attraction. People have long
suggested that birds of a feather flock
together. Byrne (1961a) translated this
adage into a testable hypothesis that the
greater the similarity between attitudes
of two strangers, the greater is the
attraction between them. The regression
equation of Y = 5.44X + 6.62 (Y: attraction
response measured on a scale of 2
[lowest] to 14 [highest]; X: proportion of
similar attitudes between the participant
and the partner manipulated by the
experimenter in a study; and the
empirical coefficients of 5.44 and 6.62 are
the respective slope and intercept of the
regression line) represented the positive
linear relationship between proportion of
similar attitudes and attraction that
Byrne identified early in his research.
Byrne was so attached to this law of
attraction that he often queried me
during our 44 years of contact as to how
well his equation fit each new set of data!
Byrnes doctoral students at
Purdue University continued the
attraction research he had initiated at the
University of Texas. The outcome was The
Attraction Paradigm by Byrne (1971).
The foci of this book were the way in
which research is conducted and the
way in which both theoretical and applied
may be seen to grow out of a base
relationship [i.e., the law of attraction]
(p. 414). Byrne further noted, the
attraction paradigm represents a
continuing research program which may
constitute a useful model for other
research, and, if it has anything to offer,
should continue to grow and to change
(p. 415). Of his nearly 20,000 citations in
Google Scholar as of August 29, 2014,
Byrnes (1961a) article in the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology and his
1971 book were cited 1,325 and 4,945
times, respectively. The affective and
cognitive mechanisms underlying the
attitude similarity-attraction relationship
and their sequential orders continue to be
actively researched even today in social
psychology (e.g., Montoya & Horton,
2013; Singh, Wegener, Sankaran, Singh,
Lin, Seow, Teng, & Shuli, 2014).

Byrne also extended his similarity-
attraction theory to issues related to
management and organizational
behavior. For example, Byrne and
Neuman (1992) articulated the
implications of attraction research for
organizational issues in general, and
Pierce, Byrne, and Aguinis (1996) applied
it specifically to workplace romance. In
fact, similarity-attraction is one of the
Donn Byrne circa 2000
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theoretical approaches to understanding
the process effects of diversity in
contemporary organizations (Jackson &
Joshi, 2011).
Byrne is equally known for his
enduring contributions to personality
psychology and human sexuality. His
articles on the Repression-Sensitization
Scale (Byrne, 1961b) and on erotophobia
erotophilia as dimension of personality
(Fisher, Byrne, White, & Kelley, 1988), for
example, were cited 1,231 and 663 times,
respectively. His textbook An Introduction
to Personality: A Research Approach
(Byrne, 1966) changed the established
paradigm of teaching the grand theories
in personality courses to the scientific
study of the assessment, antecedents,
correlates, dynamics, and change of
dimensions of individual differences.
Donn Byrne authored/co-authored
140 research papers, 36 chapters in
edited volumes, and more than 30
textbooks. Among his textbooks, the
aforementioned personality textbook and
its subsequent two editions (2
nd
and 3
rd
in
1974 and 1981, respectively), and Social
Psychology: Understanding Human
Interaction (Baron, Byrne, & Griffitt, 1974,
and its subsequent 10 editions with
Baron and the 11-12
th
editions with
Baron and Branscombe) have been very
popular and influential. Byrne also co-
authored four editions of a textbook of
psychology with Henry C. Lindgren and
two editions of another textbook of
psychology with Robert A. Baron and
Barry H. Kantowitz.
Byrne was a member of the US
Presidents Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography (1969-1970). His paper in
the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin (Byrne, 1977) provided an
overview of the history of the scientific
study of human sexuality. It also offered a
new perspective on how the external
stimuli and the mediating processes
might determine human sexual behavior.
His textbook, Exploring Human Sexuality
coauthored with Kathryn Kelley, is widely
referred to and had two editions in 1977
and 1992.
Byrne served as the President of
the Midwestern Psychological Association
(1979-80) and the Society for the
Scientific Study of Sexuality (1991-92).
After his retirement from SUNY-Albany in
2001, Byrne continued there as a
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and
remained a Fellow in the Association of
Psychological Science, American
Psychological Association, Midwestern
Psychological Association, Society for
Experimental Social Psychology, Society
for Personality and Social Psychology, and
Society for the Scientific Study of
Sexuality. As much as being a man of
science and logic, he also had aesthetic
inclinations. He enjoyed music, painting,
reading, and writing as well as Chinese
and Indian food.
Byrne was an exceptional mentor
to his doctoral students and mentored 52
doctoral students. Way back in the late
70s, I was his 21
st
graduate student. He
trained his students not only for a degree
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Ramadhar Singh and Jeffrey D. Fisher (Byrnes
another doctoral student and currently a
Distinguished Professor at the University of
Connecticut) with Donn Byrne at his Feura
Bush Home on July 18, 2014.
to get a job but also to contribute
responsibly to the organization where
they worked and to the country in which
they lived. In my case, he encouraged and
supported my transfer from Ball State
University to Purdue University in 1970
for doctoral training. Byrne wanted me to
continue research in India for which
computer was necessary. Thus, he
contacted Kamta Prasad, the then-Head,
Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur, India, recommending that he hire
me as an Assistant Professor in 1972. His
training and mentoring laid the
foundation leading to where I have been
and am now. Our last meeting,
regrettably, was on July 18, 2014.
However, he will always remain an
inspiring Guru and well-wisher for me. I
am honored to express my admiration for
Donn Byrne and gratitude to him from
making me what I am today.

References
Baron, R. A., Byrne, D., & Griffitt, W.
(1974). Social psychology: Understanding
human interaction. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Byrne, D. (1961a). Interpersonal
attraction and attitude similarity. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62,
713-715.
Byrne, D. (1961b). The Repression-
Sensitization Scale: Rationale, reliability,
and validity. Journal of Personality, 29,
334-349.
Byrne, D. (1966). An introduction to
personality: A research approach.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction
paradigm. New York: Academic Press.
Byrne, D. (1977). Social psychology and
the study of sexual behavior. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 3-30.
Byrne, D., & Neuman, J. H. (1992). The
implications of attraction research for
organizational issues. In. K. Kelley (Ed.),
Issues, theory, and research in
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industrial/organizational psychology (pp.
29-70). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Jackson, S. E., & Joshi, A. (2011). Work
team diversity. I. S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA
handbook of industrial and organizational
psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 651-686).
Washington, DC: APA Books.
Pierce, C. A., Byrne, D., & Aguinis, H.
(1996). Attraction in organizations: A
model of workplace romance. Journal of
Organizational Behavior, 17, 5-32.
Fisher, W.A., Byrne, D. White, L.A., &
Kelley, K. (1988). Erotophobia-
erotophilia as a dimension of personality.
Journal of Sex Research, 25, 123-151.
Montoya, R. M., & Horton, R. S. (2013). A
meta-analytic investigation of the
processes underlying the similarity-
attraction effect. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships, 30, 64-94.
Singh, R., Wegener, D. T., Sankaran, K.,
Singh, S. Lin, P. K. F., Seow, M. X., Teng, J. S.
Q., & Shuli , S. (2014). On the importance
of trust in interpersonal attraction from
attitude similarity. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships, 32, in press.

Ramadhar Singh, Ph. D. (Purdue)
Distinguished Professor of Management
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India
Webpage: http://www.iimb.ernet.in/webpage/ramadhar-singh

Acknowledgment. I thank Krithiga Sankaran, my current Research Associate, for searching Donn Byrnes
citations as of August 29, 2014 and assisting me in the preparation of this document.