Mac Runyan: Essential Scholar and Invaluable Friend

I joined Berkeley Social Welfare’s faculty slightly before Mac and became aware of his scholarship when he applied for an open position. The position’s responsibilities included teaching a required but previously unsuccessful course called Human Behavior in the Social Environment, and Mac’s life course orientation seemed well-suited to filling this need. But what really appealed to me was his 1977 paper, “How should treatment recommendations be made? Three studies in the logical and empirical bases of clinical decision-making,” probing the logic of clinical decision-making and appearing in one of psychology’s leading outlets. It presented insightful, clear, and economical probing—entirely free of jargon or pretense—of the structure of a core task of psychological practice. More than psychological theory, the author would bring thinking about the foundations of psychological explanation to our interdisciplinary faculty.

Mac and I became good friends over the years due not only to mutual devotion to college basketball, celebrating the opening day of practice and our passage through career stages together. We commiserated about roadblocks and celebrated rising through the ranks. But, even more, we were both committed readers deeply interested in ideas and committed to intellectual progress. We shared psychological, philosophical, historical, and biographical knowledge and exchanged book titles in lengthy discussions, which I always found extremely stimulating and informative.

Upon reflection, I realize that I found our discussions very satisfying partly because we engaged with real issues and avoided fashionable, but I think misguided, debates. Understanding individual lives often emphasize methods deemed qualitative. Most of my research is quantitative—not from allegiance to the “scientific method” but because the work is often best served when approached from a framework of statistical theory. However, when understanding people’s irreducible personal perspectives is necessary or learning about established policy, naturally, I use open-

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ended interviews or engage in close study of documents. To my recollection, Mac and I never discussed “quantitative vs. qualitative methods”—a murky topic that’s opposition mired, I think, in disciplinary politics.

Our mutual admiration for Donald T. Campbell illustrates mutual commitments and understandings. He’s best known for his classic account of experimental design with Julian Stanley titled “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research” (1996), which inadvertently contributed to a sometimes-dogmatic embrace of powerful but quite limited experimental methods. We discussed Campbell as a sophisticated philosopher of social science and his contributions to scholarly debates far removed from his methodological contributions; this deep understanding enabled him to write insightful non-technical accounts of research methods. Campbell and Stanley’s book really is a logical treatise on causal inference by considering various methodological options facing many investigators. Their approach was hardly inevitable: economists cover identical ground from statistical theory, conceiving it as avoiding “endogeneity” and “biased estimation.” (Tip: When brokering a meeting between a psychologist and an economist, if the economist says “endogeneity,” you say to the psychologist “confounds.”) Mac was not surprised when I expressed an opinion that Campbell’s early discussion of time-series methods, which I have used, is the best description of them I have encountered. Campbell explained exactly where the advantage lay and why time-series were not used more without dwelling on their weird and off-putting technical details.

What continues to distinguish Mac’s work is his insistence on an individual human being’s life courses as a perspective—indeed, a level of analysis—demanding its own line of critical investigation. This turns out sometimes to find a skeptical audience in academia, especially in social science departments, not because it is unworthy—it really is inescapable—but because it conflicts with unspoken institutional and professional biases. My much-less formidable but frustrating version of this problem is persuading individually oriented theorists and researchers to think at community and state levels of analysis. (This bias even has a name: “atomistic fallacy.”)

Mac’s higher hurdle is some academics’ unwillingness to accept that the life course is indeed a level of analysis. Many seem to believe that understanding individual lives can be reduced to a

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handful of general behavioral principles which, if rigorously established, are almost self-evident in their application. Mac’s work challenges this as fallacious thinking as it invites open-ended, disciplined scholarly inquiry of individual lives using whatever methods the problem demands. Thus, even when general principles apply, which principles, when they’re applied, and how—and to the behavior defined how as it unfolds in continuing sequences—requires its own investigation. Mac partially characterizes this as sequences of person x situation interactions in “A stage–state analysis of the life course” (which was published in 1980 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

Put another way, no “magic bullet” from cognitive neuroscience or social or personality psychology, even when understood in “context,” can explain the course of a particular individual’s life; this undertaking requires investigation of the facts of that life occurring in sequence, and testing of alternative possibilities, to assemble a trustworthy and coherent account. No biologist would claim that ecology reduces to principles of cellular functioning, but many psychologists seem to believe that understanding an individual life reduces to knowing the “right” principles of psychological functioning applied to behavior at the “right” moment in time.

Mac’s deep curiosity paired with his extensive reading and probing serves him well as he continues to advance the study of individual lives. The importance of his field always has been and will continue to be evident, and he deserves great credit for moving forward such an important field. His enduring influence is evident in updates (e.g., John Barresi revisiting Mac’s van Gogh piece in 2019) and continuing recognition of his landmark Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method (1982). His insistence that institutional and intellectual barriers should not bar advancement speaks to his commitment and integrity. I am proud to have benefited from our many intense talks and to count him as a friend.

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