From Princeton, Abelson went to Yale, where he stayed for the subsequent five decades of his career. Arriving during the
Yale Communication Project, Abelson contributed to the foundation of attitudes studies as co-author of
Attitude Organization and Change: An Analysis of Consistency Among Attitude Component, (1960, with Rosenberg, Hovland, McGuire, & Brehm). While at Yale, Abelson was briefly a bass in the
Yale Russian Chorus. Abelson also played an instrumental role in the founding of
computer science at Yale, chairing a 1967 University Committee that recommended establishing a computer science department. With
Milton J. Rosenberg, he developed the notion of “symbolic psycho-logic," an early attempt, using an idiosyncratic kind of
adjacency matrix of a
signed graph, at a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) psychological organization of attitudes and attitude consistency, which was key to the development of the field of
social cognition. The notion that beliefs, attitudes, and ideology were deeply connected knowledge structures was contained in
Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (1977, with
Roger Schank), a work that has collected several thousand citations, and led to the first interdisciplinary graduate program in cognitive science at Yale. His work on voting behavior in the 1960 and 1964 elections, and the creation of a computer program modeling ideology (the “Goldwater machine”) helped define and build the field of political psychology. He was the author of
Statistics As Principled Argument which includes prescriptions for how statistical analyses should proceed, as well as a description of what statistical analysis is, why we should do it, and how to differentiate good from bad statistical arguments. He was a co-author of several other books in psychology, statistics, and political science. In 1959, Abelson published a paper to elucidate different ways in which an individual tends to resolve his "belief dilemmas" (Abelson «Modes of Resolution of Belief Dilemmas» Journal of conflict Resolution 1959). == Awards ==