Leonard W. Doob

A self-described liberal social psychologist, Doob served as executive editor of The Journal of Social Psychology for over a third of a century, resigning shortly before his death in 2000. He joined the Yale faculty in 1934. In 1935 he published his first major, and most well-known work, Propaganda: Its Psychology and Techniques. A book widely used by students in American colleges and universities before World War II. The book represented an effort to illuminate the process by which propaganda changed attitudes, with a view toward helping to induce some resistance to the phenomenon, concluding with a survey of such leading propagandists as Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, and the Communist Party, and explored newspaper, radio, movies, and other channels of communication.

Doob died on March 29, 2000, in Hamden, Connecticut. Doob and his wife, Eveline Bates Doob, had three sons. Anthony Doob is a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. Christopher was a professor of sociology at Southern Connecticut State University from 1975 to 2012 and has written several textbooks. Nick is a documentary director, cinematographer, producer, and editor known for his work on Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl, Down from the Mountain, Simple as Water, Kings of Pastry, Al Franken: God Spoke, American Hollow, and others.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s several scholars of international relations developed conflict management training workshops, the purpose of which was to support a process towards peace in the context of intractable conflicts. Doob began experimenting with the application of human relations training methods to destructive conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, helping to pioneer a third-party intermediary approach to conflict resolution. John Burton, Doob, and Herbert Kelman, among others, conducted "controlled communication" or problem solving workshops with high-level representatives of groups involved in protracted communal disputes in these societies.

After the war, Doob returned to academic life, publishing many books including Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda in 1950. He also wrote articles on aggression and frustration, attitudes, communication, and persuasion, before moving into cross-cultural analyses of developing countries and investigating previously unexplored topics in psychology. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences in 1966, also served as chair of Yale's Council on African Studies and as director of the Division of Social Studies before retiring in 1977. He continued to teach and publish before resigning shortly before his death in 2000.

He defined propaganda in 1948 as "the attempt to affect the personalities and to control the behavior of individuals towards desired ends." He saw the objective of propaganda as action, not merely readiness to respond. Action, and just sentiment and attitudes, are the target. The learned attitude - the pre-action response - most affects behavior. Propaganda is concerned with learned attitudes insofar as they predispose and influence a desired response. The suggestive power of words depend on the primary and secondary meanings and upon the pre-existing attitudes which they arouse. His study of newspapers shed light on this definition, demonstrating how headlines have a pronounced influence on the way stories are perceived by readers. If individuals are controlled through the use of suggestion, then regardless of intention or source, the process may be called propaganda. In an essay he wrote in 1989, Doob came to believe a clear-cut definition of propaganda was neither possible nor desirable because of the complexity of issues related to behavior in society and differences in times and cultures.

He was an accomplished professor and scholar of Yale University from 1935 until resigning in 1999. In that time, he worked for the United States Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II, conducted several cross-cultural analyses and developed conflict resolution strategies in Africa and other conflict zones from the 1960s through the 80s, also publishing several compilations of African poetry during that time, and pioneered other works in psychology and philosophy up to the end of his long and prolific career. He was most active shortly before his death with his most recent book (Pursuing Perfection: People, Groups and Society) having been published in 1999.

Leonard William Doob (March 3, 1909 – March 29, 2000) was an American academic who worked as the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University and was a pioneering figure in the fields of cognitive and social psychology, propaganda and communication studies, as well as conflict resolution. He served as director of overseas intelligence for the United States Office of War Information in World War II and also wrote several works intersecting cognition, psychology and philosophy.

Born on March 3, 1909 in New York, Doob received a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1929 and an M.A. from Duke University the following year. From 1930 to 1933, he studied psychology and sociology at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, taught at Dartmouth, and then received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1934. His dissertation, started in Germany, was a study of news propaganda.