About the Author

BRETT PELHAM grew up as the second of six children near the small town of Rossville, Georgia. Brett received his B.S. from Berry College in 1983 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. He wrote the first edition of this book while working as an associate professor at UCLA, and he is currently a program officer in social psychology at the National Science Foundation. The bulk of his research focuses on automatic social judgment and self-evaluation. He teaches courses in social psychology, research methods, statistics, social cognition, and the self-concept. In his spare time, he enjoys juggling, sculpting, listening to alternative rock music, cooking, and traveling. His two favorite activities while completing the latest revision of this textbook (in late July of 2011) were spending time with his 2.9-year-old daughter Brooklyn and his 8.5-year-old son Lincoln. Along with his wife LJ Pelham, he is co-inventor of the recently released card game PRIME. Along with his son Lincoln, he is co-inventor of the soon-to-be released card game Cliff-Hanger. Along with his daughter Brooklyn, he is coinventor of the not-so-soon-to-be-released card game It's a Hat. You Like It? His most recent writing project is a novel tentatively entitled Elvis 2.0, which focuses on problems associated with the apparent resurrection of Elvis Presley. HART BLANTON grew up as the second of three children in a small town in Appalachian Virginia. Hart received his B.A. from Virginia Tech in 1990 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1994. He worked on the second edition of this book while at SUNY, Albany, and the third edition while at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the fourth edition while at the University of Connecticut. The bulk of his research is on social influence and social communication. He has taught courses in research methods, social psychology, statistics, the self, social comparison, and social influence. Most recently, he has become interested in what he terms "negative psychology." This he conceptualizes as the formal study of social structural and individual emotional factors that lead people to die before their time. He hopes to finish his work on this new research area very quickly because, well, one never knows.