Warren T. Norman (1930–1998): An Appreciation

Abstract

A noted social psychologist, who was carrying out a type of meta-analysis of past studies on personality structure, remarked to me about the wealth of relevant information in each of the reports of studies conducted by a particular personality psychologist, in contrast to the frustrating lack of such information in the reports of his colleagues in social psychology. He attributed the difference to failures in the quantitative training of social psychologists. I did not disabuse him, but inwardly chortled over the happy selection of Warren Norman as his representative of personality psychology. Warren Norman will not be remembered for the quantity of his scientific publications. He will long be remembered for their extraordinary quality. During his 37-year career at Michigan, in addition to a number of book reviews and test reviews, he published about a baker’s dozen scientific reports, each a sparkling jewel of creativity and rigor. He helped set the research agenda for the field of personality assessment, and his contributions have been among the most widely appreciated of any of his scientific peers. In his first major publication (Norman, 1959), he demonstrated the magnificent craftsmanship that would characterize all his later ones. In but four short pages, he (a) provided a compelling rationale for the need to assess the test–retest stability and interjudge consensus of judgments of affective meaning derived from Osgood’s Semantic Differential technique; (b) devised a novel procedure for assessing such stability and clearly conveyed its rationale; (c) showed the expected value of the new procedure when responses are random; (d) used both his new metric, plus the more usual correlational metric, to demonstrate: