Harold Kelley (February 16, 1921 – January 29, 2003) was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[8] His family moved to the rural town of Delano, California when he was 10;[9] while there, Kelley met and married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy.
[8] As was the case for most social psychologists of his era, Kelley was hired by the Aviation Psychology Program of the army air force during World War II, where he worked on developing selection tests and analyzing the performance of aircrew members.
[9] Shortly thereafter, he enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Center for Group Dynamics then headed by Kurt Lewin.
[10] The center moved to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in 1949 after Lewin's death, and Kelley continued to work with them for a year.
[8] In 1950, Kelley accepted his first academic position as an assistant professor at Yale, where he worked with Carl Hovland and Irving Janis to write his first collaborative book "Communication and Persuasion".
Influenced by Solomon Asch's experiment, which was speculating "positive" or "negative" impressions were determined by central traits, like "hot" or "cold."
[2] In the 1998 Handbook of Social Psychology, it is said of Kelley & Thibaut's interdependence theory, "Given the elegance and profundity of this analysis… there is good reason that its impact will be durable.
"[15] Indeed, for over 50 years interdependence theory has influenced generations of scientists studying group dynamics, social comparison, attribution, self-presentation, self-regulation, love, commitment, and conflict, among other topics.
[1] Kelley used the economic terminology to defend the idea that people are maximizers of good outcomes (high rewards, low costs) in relationships just as they are with finances or other decision-making.
[1] Kelley liked to consider his main contribution to be his work on interdependence theory and the social psychology of personal relationships.
Having completed his PhD with Kurt Lewin, Kelley was educated with a Gestalt Psychology perspective, such that the group is identified as greater than the sum of its parts.
Kelley claimed that ordinary individuals ("naive psychologists" as they are often referred) and empirical scientists often were similarly accurate in making causal inferences.
[5] Well after his retirement, Kelley brought together another group of leading researchers to tackle the creation of a taxonomy of prototypical social situations derived abstractly from theoretically distinct patterns of interdependence.
[8] Kelley's interest in collaboration continued throughout his lifetime with other colleagues as well, as indicated by the extensive list of co-authors on his texts, Close Relationships,[5] and An Atlas of Interpersonal Situations.