David O. Sears
| David O’Keefe Sears | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 24, 1935 Urbana, Illinois |
| Residence | Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Doctoral advisor | Howard Leventhal |
| Other academic advisors | H. Stuart Hughes |
| Known for | |
| Influences | |
| Notable awards | |
David O. Sears (born June 24, 1935, Urbana, Illinois) is an eminent American psychologist who specializes in social and political psychology. He is a distinguished professor of psychology and political science and director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of California, Los Angeles where he has been teaching since 1961. He served as dean of social sciences at UCLA between 1983 and 1992. Best known for his theory of symbolic racism, Sears has published many articles and books about the political and psychological origins of race relations in America, as well as on political socialization and life cycle effects on attitudes, the role of self-interest in attitudes, and multiculturalism. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.
David Sears was born on June 24, 1935 in Urbana, Illinois, to the psychologists Pauline ("Pat") K. Snedden Sears and Robert Richardson Sears. He has a younger sister, Nancy Sears Barker. When he was one year old, the Sears family moved to New Haven, Connecticut as Robert Sears took up a position at Yale University, staying in there until 1942; due to this early move to New Haven from Urbana, David Sears considers the former as his home city. He further has also lived in Iowa City, Iowa, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Portola Valley, California during his childhood and youth as his parents moved to academic positions in different research universities.
Sears went to Belmont High School and graduated in 1953. He graduated from Stanford University in 1957 with an AB in history with a minor in psychology; he presented, under the H. Stuart Hughes' guidance, a thesis on the Nazi mobilization of the youth. He then received both a MS in 1959 and a PhD in psychology in 1962 from Yale University with the dissertation "Anticipated criticism, opinion structure, and opinion change" having Howard Leventhal as his advisor. At Yale, he also worked with and was mentored by political scientist Robert E. Lane serving as research assistant in Lane's research on political attitudes and behavior published in his book Political Ideology.
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