“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. Eric Roman Beining Photography

A new UW study shows why letting stereotypes inform our judgments of unfamiliar people can be such a hard habit to break. It found that stereotypes self-perpetuate in our minds, growing stronger with use.

“Think back to when you were in grade school learning your multiplication tables, and you would repeat them in your mind,” says William Cox MS’08, PhD’15, a UW scientist who studies prejudice. “Going through the world making assumptions about other people with stereotypes we’ve learned is another form of mental practice. With more rehearsal, those assumptions get stronger over time, even when we have no real evidence to back them up.”

Cox, Xizhou Xie ’16, and UW–Madison psychology professor Patricia Devine put more than 1,000 people to work on a stereotyping task that involved reading social media profiles (some of them seeded with stereotypical information) and deciding whether the men in the profiles were gay or straight. Some received feedback about whether they were correct or incorrect, and others received no feedback. Then they read more profiles so researchers could see how the previous feedback affected their answers.

When the feedback mostly confirmed stereotypes, people stereotyped even more over time. Meanwhile, people who received feedback countering stereotypes didn’t seem to learn from it, continuing to stereotype at the same rate. Even more distressing, the people who received no feedback showed learning patterns like the people whose stereotypes were confirmed.

For Cox, the results support the theories behind the neuroscience of learning.

When an uncertain prediction is confirmed — like successfully guessing which number will come up on a roll of dice — that confirmation activates reward processes in our brains. The result is a pleasant little chemical release that reinforces the value of the prediction. In Cox’s new studies, this neural-reward process made stereotyping more appealing than accuracy. Participants continued relying on stereotypes even when the feedback said that they were inaccurate.

“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. “Because of that reward engagement, we can start becoming addicted, in a way, to stereotyping. Simply understanding that this happens is an important way to check those assumptions and not let them influence your judgment.”

Both television and social media had the strongest positive relationships with emotional suffering. Danielle Lawry

Anxiety and fear went hand in hand for Americans trying to learn more about COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic — and the most distressed people were turning on the television and scrolling through social media, according to UW–Madison research.

“Higher media consumption — seeking out the news — was associated with more emotional distress,” according to UW psychology professor Markus Brauer.

Brauer and collaborators in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication surveyed more than 2,200 people throughout the United States in March and April of 2020.

They asked respondents if they felt “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” or “afraid about what might happen,” as well as how often they were seeking out pandemic information via different types of news media.

Younger respondents and women were more likely to be emotionally distressed, as were people with liberal political views and, naturally, people who felt they were likely to catch the virus. But the findings held even when controlling for age and gender.

“We sort of expected that with social media consumers,” says Brauer, who partnered with journalism professor Dhavan Shah ’89 on the study. “Negative news gets more clicks and is shared more often, so people who get their news from social media are disproportionately exposed to distressing content.”

However, the negative impact wasn’t limited to consumers of social media.

“What really surprised us was the association between emotional distress on the one hand and frequency of getting news from print media and television on the other hand,” says Brauer.

Both television and social media had the strongest positive relationships with emotional suffering. The association was smaller for print media consumption, but still significant.

The study doesn’t allow for causal conclusions. While it is likely that seeking out news updates about the pandemic led to emotional distress, according to Brauer, it is also possible that people who are distressed try to manage their emotions by checking the news more often.

“So many of us are connected what feels like constantly throughout the day, and there’s certainly a point where continued attention isn’t a benefit,” Brauer says. “Would nine hours a day checking the news for COVID information make you more informed than five hours a day? Probably not. Our results tell us you’re just more likely to feel worse.”

UW–Madison psychology professor Paula Niedenthal ’81 recalls a conversation with a Russian journalist who had called to discuss her research. He remarked that wide, expressive American smiles are fake, unlike the smiles of other cultures.

This was during the 14-year stretch when she lived in France, working for the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Comments of this nature were common during her time abroad, and they never ceased to rankle her.

“It became clear that many people believe American smiles are inauthentic and manipulative, as well as deeply embedded in capitalism,” Niedenthal says.

How did these assumptions develop? Why are they so prevalent? What might help change them? She set out to answer these questions in 2011, when she joined UW–Madison’s faculty and founded the Niedenthal Emotions Lab. She and a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers study the relationship between migration patterns and societal rules about expressing emotion. These unstated rules are key components of something known as emotion culture.

In addition to promoting understanding and a sense of what to expect from others, a shared emotion culture can help people from different ethnic, religious, or linguistic backgrounds find common ground. But there’s also a dark side. Outsiders may misinterpret another group’s emotion culture, breeding stereotypes, confusion, and cross-cultural conflict.

This is how a smile’s good intentions get lost in translation.

Niedenthal studies the relationship between migration patterns and societal rules about expressing emotion.

Smiling to Survive

“I don’t think some people are more emotionally expressive than others because they’re stupid or manipulative,” Niedenthal says. “There’s something else going on.”

Niedenthal’s research suggests that this special something involves the history of cross-cultural interactions in a particular place. How these interactions happened, how often they happened, and how long ago they began all matter.

In regions where people from different cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds have had to communicate and adapt generation after generation, a preference for big, clear expressions of emotion tends to develop. The process can take hundreds of years.

Niedenthal and her team have found that this attribute — historical heterogeneity — predicts how often people smile across different countries and U.S. states. They’ve also found that people from places with a long history of cross-cultural contact use smiles that signal friendliness more often than people from places where most of the population relies on the same language and customs.

Examples of this phenomenon abound in the upper Midwest, including Wisconsin, which received immigrants from a wide range of cultures in the 1800s. The influx of immigrants led to numerous cross-cultural interactions, especially in the context of farming. Trade and collaboration were vital. If the farmhand you hired didn’t speak your language, or if you needed help extinguishing a barn fire, you had to find a way to communicate your needs.

“Being more expressive with your face can help establish trust when language isn’t doing the job,” Niedenthal says. “If I know you want wheat to be unloaded at the grain elevator, but I don’t know your language well, I’m going to smile at you to show that I’m cooperative, and that I’m not a threat to you or your lifestyle.”

Ivette Colón PhDx’25 demonstrates a facial recognition study conducted by the Niedenthal Emotions Lab.

In situations like these, smiling isn’t about joy. It’s about survival.

This framework for understanding emotion culture explains why a person in present-day Norway typically wouldn’t smile at a stranger, but a Norwegian who emigrated to Wisconsin in the 1850s would have smiled at his new neighbors from Germany, Ireland, and Poland. It also explains why the immigrant’s great-great-grandchildren probably smile at strangers on American streets. Heightened emotional expressiveness became a part of Wisconsin’s regional culture because its value persisted as immigration continued, and because it began to feel familiar.

Back in Norway, people rarely needed to communicate across cultural or linguistic divides. As a result, they didn’t need to adopt big, clear facial expressions — and the thought of doing so still feels weird today.

Challenging Assumptions

Many people — especially motivational speakers and curators of inspirational Pinterest boards — would be shocked to learn that smiling isn’t a universal language or an unmistakable sign of happiness.

First of all, smiling isn’t always about joy, as much as we might want it to be. Second, assuming that all smiles are happy ones can lead to logical errors. If genuine smiles are assumed to reflect joy and someone smiles a great deal, this person would appear to be in a state of constant bliss. This just isn’t possible, even for the most devoted optimist.

Instead of concluding that the person is delusional or dishonest, we need to examine our assumptions, Niedenthal argues.

“Smiles can show a range of emotions and intentions,” she says. “You might smile because you feel superior to someone else, which is what we call a dominant smile, or you might smile to show approval, which is a type of reward smile. These two smiles look different from each other, and neither one is inauthentic.”

On the flip side, a culture that frowns upon grins isn’t necessarily dour. It’s most likely operating with a different set of rules. Learning about these rules and appreciating why they emerged can help correct misguided assumptions, Niedenthal explains.

“My lab’s research doesn’t show that a particular culture is smarter or better than another one,” she says. “It’s more helpful to think of culture as a solution to the pressures people face in their environment. Understanding that these pressures result in different cultural practices can be humbling, and that humility can help us be far less judgmental.”

Culture, in other words, is a product of adaptation. We must adapt when we enter a new environment or when our current environment changes. Certain kinds of change come easier to some of us because our culture has trained us to endure the discomfort. One of the newest findings from Niedenthal’s lab suggests why this might be.

Stress-Fighting Superpowers

Expressive displays of emotion can be exhausting to produce — and to observe. Big smiles and sustained eye contact use substantial amounts of energy, and these behaviors put us in a state of emotional arousal. The discomfort that arises when we’re surrounded by people we consider different also produces this state. And now there’s evidence that regions with a long history of cross-cultural contact confer a superpower of sorts: conserving energy by keeping this type of stress in check. Niedenthal suspected that people from such places would be better equipped to handle emotional arousal. To test this hypothesis, her team looked at vagal tone, a measure of pulse-rate variability associated with breathing. People with high vagal tone can relax faster than people with low vagal tone after a stressful event.

As predicted, the researchers found that people from Wisconsin and other ancestrally diverse U.S. states had the highest levels of vagal tone. This suggests that the residents of ancestrally diverse places are likely to find big smiles more appealing — or at least less exhausting — than residents of places where cross-cultural contact has been minimal. Plus, they’re less likely to feel overwhelmed in the presence of cultural diversity.

But how did people develop this type of post-stress resilience in the first place? Once again, Niedenthal points to adaptation.

“If you grew up in an ancestrally diverse place, you’d have to confront differences without attacking other people and interpret facial expressions without becoming too emotionally aroused,” she says.

Learning to regulate that emotional response would help you adapt to the demands of frequent cross-cultural contact. Over time, as that skill was practiced again and again, it could evolve into an automatic response.

These conclusions aren’t just fascinating to think about. They’re making a mark on the real world. People who teach others how to regulate their emotions — a list that includes psychologists, occupational therapists, and kindergarten teachers — can find all sorts of practical applications for Niedenthal’s research. So can immigration lawyers, English as a second language instructors, and other professionals who serve a diverse set of clients.

Bridging Cultural Divides

Many psychotherapists are eager to tailor their craft to the needs of clients who don’t share their cultural background. Understanding a client’s native emotion culture and applying its rules appropriately can bring a valuable new dimension to psychotherapy while strengthening trust and motivation.

May Han, a marriage and family therapist who offers cross-cultural counseling for children of immigrants and transracial adoptees, says all mental health clinicians can benefit from learning about cultural differences in emotional expressiveness.

“This gives clinicians a general idea of the rules for displaying emotions so they can meet clients where they are at and help them facilitate a better relationship with their emotions,” she says.

Han says research like Niedenthal’s matters because it acknowledges how big emotions can live inside anyone, including people from cultures that prefer stone-faced stares to smiles.

“Just because someone seems to have less intense emotions on the outside, it doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing something deep inside,” she says.

Niedenthal agrees that it’s crucial to acknowledge what may lie beneath the surface. This is especially important in international commerce and foreign affairs, where faulty assumptions can derail business deals, peace treaties, and more. Facial expressions form a wordless language that requires skillful interpretation. Gaining this skill takes time and practice, and a conscious effort to withhold judgment.

“The type of [cross-cultural] training that’s popular in the business world often relies on value-laden clichés that are wrong and have damaging effects,” Niedenthal says. “Removing those value judgments can help us establish common ground in a way that doesn’t seem superficial or fake to someone from another culture. It helps us build mutual trust and respect — and ultimately, strong relationships.” •

Maslow’s work was built on the premise that people have positive qualities and an inner strength to grow and heal. Bettmann / Contributor

What motivates us as human beings? Abraham Maslow ’30, MA’31, PhD’34 saw a “gaping hole in psychology” when approaching this question, believing that his field of study wrongly focused on abnormality and illness, rather than exploring human potential.

“Where was goodness? Where was nobility? Where was reason? Where was loyalty? Where was courage?” he asked.

Raised by a stern father and a cruel mother, Maslow became one of the 20th century’s most cited psychologists. “He’s the kind of person we want to understand when we want to understand human psychology,” said historian and author Jessica Grogan.

As a graduate student at the UW, Maslow studied dominance hierarchies in primates. In time, he turned away from behaviorist theories that held that human actions and attitudes are determined primarily by an individual’s environment and past experiences. He found his calling with humanistic psychology, built on the premise that people have positive qualities and an inner strength to grow and heal.

Maslow introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, his most famous theory, in the 1940s and ’50s. Human beings, he said, must fulfill innate needs, beginning with the physiological — food, water, shelter, sleep — and culminating with self-actualization. Between those two levels on the hierarchy come needs representing safety, love and belonging, and esteem.

He taught that the path to self-actualization or reaching one’s full potential varies. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself,” he said. “What a man can be, he must be.”

Although Maslow did not use a pyramid diagram to explain his hierarchy, it has become an iconic representation in psychology textbooks and articles that describe his work. The pyramid’s lessons live on, influencing topics ranging from history to economics to classroom teaching. (School lunch programs argue that hungry students can’t concentrate enough to learn.) And it’s a ubiquitous tool for managers who seek to understand what motivates their employees.

As he taught us about human motivation, Maslow also urged continual growth. “If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim,” he said. “And I’d despise the one who gave up.”

Strength in numbers: a women-led UW faculty group meets in 1975 for the formation of what has become the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. UW Archives S17032

Before the 1970s, to study the history of the world was largely to learn of men fighting wars. Modern literature meant reading the best male authors. Insert any academic discipline, and a woman’s experience or perspective was scarcely to be found.

“Teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant, and the other half doesn’t exist,” said the late Gerda Lerner, a UW–Madison historian and women’s studies pioneer.

For nearly a half century, the UW–Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies has set out to shift that traditional paradigm in education and research. It’s grown into one of the most respected and robust programs in the nation, conferring an undergraduate major and certificate, an LGBTQ+ studies certificate, a master’s degree, and a doctoral minor.

Today, more than 400 undergraduates are enrolled in either the certificate or degree program. The department offers some 25 courses per semester, with 100 more cross-listed with other departments. Fifteen faculty members and nearly 50 affiliated instructors teach courses in a wide range of fields: from biology and psychology to law and politics; from literature and languages to history and religious studies. Increasingly, courses are exploring the intersections of gender identity, sexuality, race, and disability.

“We’ve always been strongly interdisciplinary across the humanities, the social sciences, and even the biological sciences,” says Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and gender and women’s studies, whose research has debunked myths of biological differences between men and women related to personality and cognitive ability.

The field of women’s studies rose alongside the larger women’s movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. On the UW campus, groups of female faculty connected demands for fair pay and hiring with a desire for a centralized women’s studies program. Following an effort across the UW System, a UW–Madison committee appointed by Chancellor Edwin Young MA’42, PhD’50 established a framework for what would officially become the Women’s Studies Program in 1975.

The program began with less than a handful of courses and faculty members who held joint appointments on campus. In 2008, the program became a full academic department, with the ability to hire faculty of its own and independently offer tenure. It’s currently in the process of establishing a PhD program, which would finish rounding out its academic offerings and no doubt please the foremothers of women’s studies.

“I want women’s history to be legitimate,” Lerner once wrote. “To be part of every curriculum on every level.”

Regina Miller, Origin Photo

Breath. Purpose. Compassion.

For many people who have lost a loved one or are experiencing other profound challenges in life, simple words such as these are helping them heal — one page at a time.

Inspired by her personal recovery, professional grief and bereavement counselor Deborah Derman MA’76 created Colors of Loss and Healing: An Adult Coloring Book for Getting through Tough Times.

More than 40 ideas and images fill the book, each accompanied by dedicated pages for journaling. Derman’s art-therapy approach invites people to fill in the detailed spaces with color and written thoughts, offering much-needed focus and contemplation during the grieving process. Each word, embedded in illustrator Lisa Powell Braun’s intricate designs, draws meaning from Derman’s own experiences with tragedy and recovery.

After college, Derman lost a former boyfriend to suicide; 10 years later, she and her toddler son witnessed her parents’ death in a small-plane crash. She had two children under the age of four and was pregnant with a third when her husband died following a heart attack. And, a decade ago, Derman began the years-long treatment that would help her beat a rare form of breast cancer.

“I did know when I was writing my book that it was authentic, it was true,” she says. “No matter who you are, or where you live, or who you’ve lost, these are the feelings that you have, and these are the things you need in order to move through.”

Derman channeled her experiences into earning a PhD focused on grief and bereavement, and she’s open about her history as she counsels others. She’s worked with families of firefighters who died on 9/11, and today she guides grief-support groups near her private practice in Dresher, Pennsylvania.

With the release of her book’s second edition, Derman is surprised to hear from people all over the world. “How did my little book get to New Zealand? I don’t know!” But the wonder comes along with joy, knowing that her work supports people across cultures who are undergoing the universal phenomenon of loss.

“Healing from profound grief is a process that can take a lifetime,” she says. “The experience hopefully will change you for the better. We never forget who we love.”

Photo Illustration: Barry Roal Carlsen

Joseph Jastrow, the feisty founder of Wisconsin’s psychology department, picked fights with everyone from Mark Twain to the UW president, but he was also a pioneer when it came to sharing science with the public.

December 1891 and Joseph Jastrow was finally, finally on vacation. True, he’d put it off until New Hampshire was icebound. But Jastrow, only twenty-eight years old and the founding head of the University of Wisconsin’s psychology department, had early earned his reputation for bullheadedness. He’d decided on a winter vacation in New England, planned out his route. He didn’t budge from his plans, as far as we know, until the day he idly picked up a copy of Harper’s magazine in a small-town library.

Psychology remained the bare dream of a profession that winter. The first psychology laboratory in the United States had been established just eight years earlier at Johns Hopkins University in 1883. Jastrow, a graduate of the program, was, in fact, the first person in the United States to have received a doctorate in psychology. His department at Wisconsin was barely three years old. The American Psychological Association didn’t exist. It would be founded in 1892 with exactly twenty-six members, including Jastrow.

So imagine the young psychologist’s dismay when he stopped at a New Hampshire library to check a map, picked up Harper’s, and discovered that one of the country’s most eminent novelists, Mark Twain, was making a mockery of the fledgling science. Or so Jastrow thought. Twain had considered his piece more positive. It hailed psychologists for their studies into telepathy and for making supernatural events valid research subjects.

Jastrow — as he later reported — read Twain’s article in a rising fury, tossed it down and rushed to the nearest telegraph office. He fired off a request to his own editor, at Scribner’s, to rebut the novelist’s claim. His article, which appeared the following month, dismissed Twain as a mere writer who had obviously been easily gulled by pseudoscientists. In regard to accepting telepathy — speaking for the view of mainstream psychology — “nothing could be further from the truth.”

—

That was Jastrow. Opinionated, arrogant, argumentative, irrepressible. A passionate public spokesman for his profession. A man who quarreled with everyone from his own university’s president to the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (another misguided believer in the supernatural). A loving husband, a loyal friend. A star on the national lecture circuit, a mind-numbingly boring lecturer in his own classroom. A complicated man, Jastrow, as the influential behaviorist Clark Hull once wrote, was both “a unique personality and a truly historic figure from American psychology.”

Hull received his PhD under Jastrow in 1918 and joined the UW faculty, staying on until 1929. In a tribute to his former professor, Hull recalled some of Jastrow’s best research: work with sensory perception, visual illusions, the psychology of deception, the subconscious, and Freudian theory. But the man’s real interest, Hull said, was “a desire to make available to the literate masses the substance of scientific psychology.” His efforts in that regard “flowed from his pen in an uninterrupted stream.”

This dapper, driven, difficult man believed, far ahead of his time, that science should be shared with the public. He insisted that the study of human behavior was not an abstract academic endeavor but the stuff of everyday life. After he retired from the UW in 1927, he pushed that idea further, writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Keeping Mentally Fit,” and becoming one of America’s first radio psychologists, hosting a show from the NBC studios in New York from 1935 to 1938.

Why didn’t he become a radio star in Wisconsin? Perhaps he wasn’t ready. More to the point, the university wasn’t ready. In the years before he left, Jastrow routinely complained that his pay was held below that of other professors. The dean of the College of Letters and Science replied that no additional money would be forthcoming to a professor who “had emphasized popularization at the expense of investigation.”

—

Above: Jastrow with his adopted son, Benno, who later died in World War I. Top: The Jastrows lived in two rooms in Ladies Hall when they first arrived on campus. State Historical Society.

Jastrow was born in Warsaw, Poland, on January 30, 1863. His parents, Marcus and Bertha Jastrow, moved the family to Philadelphia three years later. His father, a noted human rights activist while in Poland, flourished in the United States both as a congregational rabbi and an influential Talmudic scholar. Joe Jastrow — as he was known to his friends — preferred the explanations of science. He never lost, though, his respect for religion’s power to improve lives: “Fortunate are they who can use the path of prayer,” he wrote, adding that psychologists must also try to provide answers for “those who find their codes and creeds in other directions.”

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1882, when he was just nineteen, going on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins. While in Baltimore, he lived with a friend of his father’s, Rabbi Benjamin Szold and his large family, which included eight daughters. One of Szold’s daughters, Henrietta, later founded the Hadassah Society, a leading women’s Zionist organization. She and Jastrow maintained a lifetime friendship, one only occasionally stressed by their differing beliefs. “A godless Darwinian,” she described him angrily during one such dispute. However, he was never quite so detached as that. He’d married one of the younger Szold daughters, Rachel, herself a Jewish activist.

Rachel had, rather practically, waited to accept Jastrow until he’d received his doctorate and landed a job (a starting salary of $2,000 from the University of Wisconsin). They were married in August 1888, shortly before moving to Madison. The Jastrows at first kept house in two rooms of Ladies Hall, an all-female dorm. A year later, they rented a house on Wilson Street and began making plans for building their own place.

When he first moved to Wisconsin, Jastrow blazed with research ideas. He invented an “automograph” — something like the planchette on a Ouija board — to make tracings of hand movements. He wanted to distinguish between voluntary movements and involuntary twitches. He studied hypnosis and introduced a course in the subject. He researched visual perception and invented optical illusions — known as Jastrow Objects — that can still trick eyes today. His neat, precise experiments gained respect from his peers; when William James published his seminal textbook, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, he cited Jastrow twenty-five times.

In 1892 Jastrow agreed to organize the psychology exhibit at the Columbia Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair scheduled to open a year later. He arranged to re-create famous psychology laboratories, borrowing brass instruments from Europe, charts from his fellow Americans, office furniture from one and all. He also used the exhibit to conduct experiments, running reaction-time tests on thousands of people who visited the pavilion. His reputation earned him a nickname from the UW’s literary magazine, the Aegis — “Psycho-Jastrow, the deep thinker.”

But trying to do everything brilliantly drove Jastrow to a breakdown. Depressed and ill, he received permission to take a leave of absence during the 1894–95 academic year. He would spend a good part of that time mulling over a choice. It seemed impossible to be both a dedicated academic and an advocate for public understanding of science. He didn’t have the time or the energy to do both.

He needed to decide which came first — or at least, which was more rewarding.

—

The Jastrows’ lavish home on Langdon Street included a secluded, ornate Moorish study in the attic.

For all his argumentative edge, Jastrow could be a charmer. He might argue with authority, but he was exceptionally kind to people who worked for him. He cheerfully participated in local theater groups. He had a dry sense of humor and an easy sense of self-mockery. “Will wear any kind of clothes and eat anything,” he once wrote about himself. “Requires to be introduced to all captains of boat and train conductors. Is a good deal of a nuisance but doesn’t mind being told so.”

He was a small, balding man with a soft voice and steady brown eyes in a rounded face, ornamented by gold-rimmed glasses. “He smiled readily but rarely laughed,” a colleague recalled. He read constantly and was so aware of the complexities inherent in science that he found it impossible to answer a simple question. Students and faculty alike complained that his responses contained such a thicket of ideas that they almost never understood what he was talking about.

For all of his interest in public awareness of science, Jastrow showed no real enthusiasm for the classroom. His lectures were “frequently dull and uninforming,” Hull wrote, acknowledging that Jastrow’s focus on his university activities had steadily waned over the years. When his classes shone, it was because he was able to bring some exceptional guest speakers, such as his friend, the magician Harry Houdini. The two men had bonded over a shared interest in debunking fraudulent claims by spiritualists, and Houdini would do magic tricks in Jastrow’s classes to illustrate the art of deception.

But bringing in notable speakers did not pacify UW officials, who complained about Jastrow’s indifference to their expectations and the decline in his experimental work. Led by university president Charles Kendall Adams, the administration kept Jastrow’s salary depressed, offering annual raises of no more than $100 per year, and took punitive actions against his extracurricular work. One of the reasons that Jastrow had become so worn out during the 1893 exhibition was that the UW refused to release him from any teaching duties during the fair’s run.

Critics often described President Adams as arrogant and high-handed, pretty much the same complaints leveled at Jastrow. Competition and hostility simmered between the two men. When Adams arrived in Madison in 1892, replacing the more tolerant campus executive who hired Jastrow, he began by remodeling the modest president’s home, adding an expansive library room and decorating with Oriental rugs, antiques and oil paintings, statues, and costly silver.

The Jastrows had purchased a lot on Langdon Street, and they went on to build a two-story Queen Anne-style house there. It appeared to many to be a keeping-up-with-the-Adamses project, and the house was so expensive that it forced the Jastrows into near bankruptcy. Eventually, the couple added two more floors to serve as an apartment for themselves and rented out rooms in the lower two floors to pay for upkeep.

One of Jastrow’s research interests was visual perception, and he devised optical illusions known as Jastrow Objects that are still in use today. The top image can appear to be a rabbit or a duck, depending on how you look at it. In the bottom image, although the lower shape appears bigger, they are actually both the same size.

Jastrow — ever the popularizer — penned a story about their living quarters for House Beautiful in 1909. Each room in the apartment was decorated in a different style. The dining room was seventeenth-century Dutch with a pattern of antique Delft tile, the entry hall French Empire in style except for its Japanese gilt-cloth ceiling. In the attic, Jastrow had built an ornate Moorish study, hidden behind sliding panels and only accessible by a ladder. The study featured carved walnut walls, hanging lamps of pierced brass, a silver ceiling with a skylight glowing with amber and rose stained glass. (The house, which became the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house, was razed in 2009 after major destruction by a fire.)

He knew, of course, that the university would never provide the income to support his gorgeous home and growing art collection. Jastrow distanced himself even further from the campus, spending more and more of his time earning money by writing for popular magazines and by doing paid lectures around the country. On the lecture circuit, he proved that when he cared, he could be a lively and entertaining speaker, often drawing standing-room crowds.

In 1903, the UW downsized his title from professor of experimental and comparative psychology to professor of psychology. At that time, Jastrow was no longer doing any noticeable experimental work. He was, however, deliberately baiting Adams and his confreres, publishing article after article on the inadequacies of university administrators. In the Nation, Science, Century, the Educational Review, Jastrow repeatedly raised the question of whether college administrators really knew how to foster an intellectual environment. He warned especially against autocratic leaders, saying that the whole system was imperiled if it became undemocratic, if college presidents were allowed to become imperial presences on campus.

He would later publish a book, The Betrayal of Intelligence, that would encourage everyone — even college professors — to maintain an independent spirit: “Be critical — critical of what you accept, critical of whom you follow as authority.”

—

Of course, Jastrow was a born critic. It was one reason he became such a notable attack dog on the subject of supernatural research, taking on even his longtime friend and colleague, William James. James had become so fascinated with investigating the supernatural that he helped found the American Society for Psychical Research. Following James’s lead, Jastrow briefly joined the Society before quitting in a fit of exasperation.

He loathed the charlatanism of professional mediums with their séances held in the dark. He was contemptuous of people whose wide-eyed acceptance of floating tables and luminous ghosts fostered a lucrative trade. From his pen spilled a deluge of censorious articles, including his dismissal of Twain’s favorable review of telepathy. Years later, Jastrow summed up much of his writing on the subject in an article published in the intellectual review Forum, titled “Do the Dead Come Back? A Psychological Interpretation of Human Gullibility.”

But criticizing university administrators and combating spiritual credulity was only a small part of what Jastrow came to see as his public mission. He wrote books accessible to the general public: Fact and Fable in Psychology in 1900, The Subconscious in 1906, Character and Temperament in 1915. These were bookended by article after article for popular magazines, on comparative psychology, involuntary movements, animal intelligence, moral choice, the mental attributes of dictators, inherited intelligence, the criminal mind. In the latter, Jastrow directly took on the popular belief in genetic determinism. “The largest source of crime is misery,” he wrote in the North American Review.

In 1926, his wife, Rachel, died following a lingering illness. Jastrow did not stay in Madison long after. He retired from the university the following year, sold his beautiful house, and moved to New York. As he had once used the shock of his earlier depression to refocus his life, so again Jastrow moved to rebuild himself. Then in his mid-sixties, he took a job as a lecturer at The New School in New York City, where he stayed until 1932. “His health improved markedly and he threw himself completely into popular writing with a vigor unusual for a person his age,” Hull said.

Or any age. Jastrow published eight popular science books between 1928 and 1938, wrote his syndicated newspaper column, and broadcast a national radio show. At the time of his death on January 8, 1944, he was working on yet another book. As science historians have looked back at his life, many have remarked that he failed to live up to his promise as an outstanding researcher. They would be right, of course. But he gave his profession another gift, not well appreciated at the time, but equally enduring. He helped people see that the science of psychology mattered, that the science he loved could help illuminate the world in which we live.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-winning science writer and a professor of journalism at UW-Madison. Her latest book is The Poisoner’s Handbook (Penguin Press).