The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his son Michael said.
Stanford University, where he had taught since 1994. He previously had a long association with the University of Michigan.
At his death, Professor Zajonc (pronounced ZYE-unts) was emeritus professor of psychology atUntil the mid-20th century, social scientists seeking the impetus for human behavior tended to look reflexively to people’s environments. That, in an era when behavioral psychology reigned supreme, was precisely what they had been trained to do. Professor Zajonc, by contrast, also looked to the mind.
Published widely in professional journals and cited often in the news media, Professor Zajonc’s work ranged across the mental and social landscape. Among the subjects he investigated over five decades were the effect of birth order on intellectual performance; whether the mere presence of spectators can influence a performer for good or ill; and whether smiling can be a cause, as well as a consequence, of a good mood.
What united his diverse output was an abiding concern with the relationship between feeling and thought. Professor Zajonc repeatedly explored the place in the human mental makeup where emotion butts up against cognition, partly in an effort to determine which influences which more strongly. (On balance, he came down on the side of emotion.)
He was also consumed with the tacit, half-hidden patterns — of words, images, experiences and much else — that unconsciously inform the ways in which everyone navigates the social world.
Professor Zajonc was perhaps best known for discovering what he called the “mere exposure” effect. In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.
Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.