Harry C. Triandis (1926-2019)

Abstract

Presents an obituary for Harry C. Triandis (1926 -2019). Harry Charalambos Triandis, universally acknowledged as the father of cross-cultural social psychology as well as a leader of industrial/organizational and attitude research, passed away at his retirement home in Carlsbad, California, on June 1, 2019, in his 93rd year. Harry's academic career began in Montreal, Canada, where he enrolled in the Engineering Program at McGill University. Triandis received his master's degree in commerce from the University of Toronto, and then earned his doctorate in social psychology from Cornell University. He then joined the faculty at the University of Illinois where he remained until retirement in 1997. Early on, Harry realized that cross-cultural research had to employ different methods if the results were to be valid. Valid cross-cultural research, he reasoned, required the involvement of colleagues from the cultures being studied at every step in the process, including instrument design, hypothesis specification and analyses, joint publication, and so on. Thanks to Harry's untiring efforts to demonstrate their effectiveness, they have become standard procedure in cultural research. Harry was a prolific author, publishing over 200 papers, book chapters, and books. His work has been translated into Chinese, Farsi, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and spans 60 years (1955-2015). Harry also pursued three other major funded programs of research. The first led to the publication Variations in Black and White Perceptions of the Social Environment in 1976. In his second program of research, he examined differences between Hispanic and Anglo culture in the context of social concerns about integrating the Hispanic community in the 1980s. His last research program culminated in his book on self-deception that was published in 2009. Harry received numerous accolades and awards for his contributions to cross-cultural and social psychology, some including Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Psychology (1994) and the Otto Klineberg Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues to name a few. Harry served as president of six associations or societies of psychology, and his colleagues and students unanimously endorse his status as a world class scholar, but also a world class human being who will be deeply missed in the field of psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).