After working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he enrolled in graduate school in social psychology at the University of Colorado in 1962.

], he began to investigate questions of cognitive organization and social information processing, establishing the themes that have guided his scholarship throughout his career.

During that time, he began to develop a full-fledged social-cognitive perspective on topics such as attitudes, attribution, and impression formation and became recognized as one of the most prolific scholars in the history of social psychology.

[7] He has published at least one article or book chapter in each of the 55 years since receiving his Ph.D. and has been the director of 46 doctoral dissertations at UI, HKUST, and CUHK.

He is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Special Research Prize for Distinguished Scientists in 1981, the Thomas M. Ostrom Award for Distinguished Contributions to Person Memory and Social Cognition in 1998, and Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2008 and the Society for Consumer Psychology in 2011 and was elected as a Fellow of the latter society in 2016.