Scientific inquiry on how groups decide: The Davisonian approach

Abstract

was born on August 6, 1932, in the small town of Effingham, Illinois. Besides exhibiting the usual interests of a bright youngster, Jim, who was a tall boy (eventually growing to be 6'3"), became an enthusiastic and skilled basketball player in a region (southern Illinois and nearby Indiana) where the sport is followed with a nearly religious passion. By the time he graduated from high school in 1950, he had developed into an all-conference athlete. He would remain an avid amateur athlete for the rest of his life, first at tennis and later at golf.As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Jim studied social science (viz. psychology and sociology) and natural science (viz. chemistry and biology). The year 1954 was an eventful one for him-graduating from the university, marrying his childhood sweetheart Elisabeth (Betty) Bachman, and beginning a two-year term of service as an officer in the US Army. After his stint in the military, which included commands in the Aleutian Islands and the Arctic, he began graduate work in social and quantitative psychology at Michigan State University, where Frank Restle was his primary academic advisor. He received his PhD in 1961 and launched his professional career at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.Jim flourished at Miami and was soon promoted, but he itched to be in a more researchfocused environment, so in 1966 he made an unusual and professionally risky decision-he would resign his tenured position, uproot his young family, and take a one-year temporary post at Yale University. A year later he moved with Betty and his three children (Kris, Steven, AbstractThis special issue of GPIR is a tribute to the many contributions to the scientific study of group processes made by James H. Davis, who died on November 16, 2010. In this brief introductory piece, we will provide a bit of background on Jim's life and work, describe his characteristic method of inquiry, which we might term the Davisonian approach, and preview the papers in this issue, each of which illustrate aspects of that Davisonian approach and make an original contribution to our understanding of group behavior.

Suggested do's and don'ts for future jury research: A swan song.

“…the scientific study of juries is a relatively new enterprise, but from my perspective (of a swan waddling down an exit ramp), we have gotten more "bang for our buck" from such formal theories than from less well-formalized theories and still less from atheoretical empirical work. the yield of 40-plus years of research using davis's formal SdS model (e.g., Kerr, Stasser, & davis, 1979;Kerr & tindale, 2012;Levine, 1999;Parks & Kerr, 1999;Stasser et al, 1982Stasser et al, , 1989tindale et al, 2004) can serve as one persuasive illustration.…”

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I became involved in my first jury study (davis, Kerr, atkin, holt, & Meek, 1975) over 40 years ago, in 1972, working as a greenhorn research assistant in the lab of the late James h. davis (whose many significant contributions to our understanding of juries and other interesting groups are worthy of special note and praise; e.g., see Kerr & tindale, 2012). Like many young scholars, I got turned on to the study of juror and jury behavior and to the possibility that such work might contribute to an ideal of justice.

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