ABSTRACT
In this interview conducted by Agnes Szokolszky in 1997 Reuben Baron begins his recollection with his undergraduate education in the 1950s with Harold Proshansky, founder of environmental psychology, and his unusually broad-based graduate studies at the social psychology program at New York University. Through his employment and research history, he gives an account of the major trends and shifts in social psychology in the 1960s. As already an accomplished and cognitively oriented scholar he was later recruited to the University of Connecticut. He recounts how under Turvey's and Shaws's influence he got acquainted with ecological psychology and how and why he grew to be the first advocate of that approach in social psychology. He describes how after that, he worked towards establishing ecological social psychology and assesses the impact he and his collaborators had on the field. He explains why he moved on to incorporate dynamical systems theory in his ecological approach to social psychology. In the concluding part of the interview, he reviews tasks ahead. In his 2021 reflection, he acknowledges his broad network of collaborators during the two-decade-long period since he gave the original interview and how progress was made on those research problems that he identified earlier.
