David Myers

Introduction

David Guy Myers (born 20 September 1942) is an American social psychologist who has reached more students than almost anyone else in the discipline. His introductory textbook Psychology has gone through thirteen editions and has been used by several million students, and the Open Syllabus Project has identified him as the most frequently assigned author on college psychology syllabi. Alongside the textbooks, he built a research programme on two subjects: group polarization, the tendency of group discussion to move members toward a more extreme version of their initial inclination, and the psychology of happiness — what predicts it, what does not, and why prosperity has not delivered as much of it as people expect.

Myers has spent his entire academic career at a single liberal arts college, Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and he is unusual among prominent psychologists in publishing both a market-leading secular textbook and a series of books written explicitly from Christian conviction.

Early Life and Education

Myers was born in Seattle, Washington, and graduated from Queen Anne High School in 1960. He went to Whitworth University intending to become a physician, and took his BA in chemistry magna cum laude in 1964.

He changed direction in graduate school. At the University of Iowa he moved into social psychology, taking his MA in 1966 and his PhD the following year for a thesis titled Enhancement of Initial Risk Taking Tendencies in Social Situations, supervised by Sidney J. Arenson and Peter H. Murdoch. The thesis subject — how the mere presence of other people shifts an individual's appetite for risk — set the agenda for the decade of research that followed.

Academic and Professional Career

Myers joined Hope College as an assistant professor in 1967 and never left. He was promoted to associate professor in 1970 and to full professor in 1975, and later held the John Dirk Werkman chair. He spent two periods abroad as a visiting scholar, at the University of Mannheim in 1974 and at the University of St Andrews in 1985.

His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Science Foundation, and he is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His work on group polarization received the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from APA Division 9, and he has since received the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences' Honored Scientist award, an award for distinguished service to social-personality psychology, and a Presidential Citation from APA Division 2 for teaching. He holds three honorary doctorates. He has served as a consulting editor for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He has also served locally in ways that echo his research interests, chairing Holland's Human Relations Commission and helping found an assistance centre for low-income families in the city.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Group polarization

In the late 1960s the accepted finding in group research was the "risky shift": groups, it seemed, made bolder decisions than the individuals composing them. Working with Helmut Lamm and others, Myers helped establish that the phenomenon was both broader and more orderly than that. Group discussion does not push decisions toward risk specifically; it pushes them toward whichever pole the members were already leaning. A jury inclined toward leniency becomes more lenient after deliberation; a group mildly hostile toward an outgroup becomes more hostile.

Two mechanisms do most of the work: informational influence, since discussion exposes members to a larger pool of arguments favouring the dominant position, and normative influence, since learning where the group stands lets individuals reposition themselves slightly further along that direction and still be accepted. Group polarization remains a standard account of jury behaviour, political radicalization, and the dynamics of online discussion, where sorting into like-minded groups produces exactly the conditions that make it operate.

The psychology of happiness

From the late 1980s Myers turned to subjective well-being, and became one of the psychologists who made happiness a respectable research topic well before Martin Seligman launched positive psychology as a movement. His summary of the literature, set out in The Pursuit of Happiness (1992), argued that demography and circumstance predict far less than people assume: income above the point where basic needs are met buys little additional happiness, people adapt quickly to both good and bad fortune, and the reliable correlates of well-being are close relationships, a sense of purpose, religious involvement, and what he called the "happiness set point" that individuals return to after major life events.

That work placed him among the most cited sources in the field of well-being research, alongside Daniel Kahneman, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Shigehiro Oishi, and it fed directly into the positive psychology literature of the 2000s.

Intuition and the limits of judgement

In Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (2002) Myers assembled the case for a two-track view of cognition: fast, automatic, largely unconscious processing that handles most of daily life with impressive competence, sitting alongside slower deliberate reasoning that is easily overpowered. The book is a work of synthesis rather than original experiment, but it did for the dual-process literature what his textbooks did for the discipline as a whole — gave it a form that non-specialists could use.

Communicating psychological science

Myers's largest practical contribution is the textbook itself. Psychology, Exploring Psychology, Psychology in Everyday Life and Social Psychology, the last now co-authored with Jean Twenge, are built around a principle he has stated repeatedly: that psychological science can be reported accurately without being reported drearily. The books are notable for their illustrations, their use of real studies rather than imagined examples, and their unusually extensive treatment of research methods for an introductory text.

The editions also record the discipline's changing preoccupations. The thirteenth edition of Psychology (of which more than 2,100 cited studies were dated 2015 or later) reflected the arrival of the replication debate in introductory teaching, and the most recent release of the Twenge collaboration adds a closing chapter applying social psychology to environmental sustainability — a subject that occupied no space in the textbook canon when Myers began writing and that now has one. Since 2008 he has written about psychological research for the public at TalkPsych.com.

Major Publications

Textbooks

Psychology, with C. Nathan DeWall (13th edition, 2021)
Exploring Psychology, with C. Nathan DeWall (11th edition, 2019)
Psychology in Everyday Life, with C. Nathan DeWall (6th edition, 2023)
Social Psychology, with Jean Twenge (14th edition, 2022; subsequent release 2025)
Exploring Social Psychology, with Jean Twenge (9th edition, 2020)

General and specialist books

The Human Puzzle: Psychological Research and Christian Belief (1978)
The Inflated Self: Human Illusions and the Biblical Call to Hope (1980)
The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy — And Why (1992)
A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000)
The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (2000)
Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (2002)
What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage, with Letha Dawson Scanzoni (2005)
A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists (2008)
How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind (2022)

Impact and Legacy

Myers's influence runs through teaching more than through theory. Generations of students who never took a course in social psychology encountered its findings through his prose, and he has been correspondingly active in defending the discipline's empirical standards — he has written candidly about the replication crisis and about textbook claims that later failed to reproduce.

His happiness work has stimulated the criticism as well as the research. The most consequential challenge concerns the claim at the centre of The American Paradox: that rising prosperity has not made people happier. In a widely discussed 2008 paper for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers re-analysed decades of survey data and found a clear positive association between GDP per capita and subjective well-being both across and within countries, with no evidence of a satiation point beyond which extra income stops mattering. Richard Easterlin, whose 1974 paper founded the paradox, defended his reading of the data, and the exchange has continued rather than settled. The current position in the economics of happiness is more favourable to income than the summary Myers popularised, though nobody in the field disputes his central point that relationships and purpose matter more than consumption.

His dual body of work has also drawn comment from both directions. Myers writes best-selling secular textbooks in which, as one reviewer of the psychology-and-Christianity literature put it, the influence of his faith remains implicit, and separately writes explicitly Christian books — Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith with Malcolm Jeeves, A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists, and a scriptural case for same-sex marriage that put him at odds with many in his own religious constituency. Secular critics have questioned whether the two enterprises can be kept as cleanly apart as that arrangement implies. Critics from the other direction, including the Christian-psychology and biblical-counselling contributors to Psychology and Christianity: Five Views, have argued the reverse — that his "levels of explanation" framework concedes far too much to mainstream science and leaves psychology's methods unchallenged by revelation. Myers's reply to that second group was uncompromising: he characterised their proposals as replacing psychological science with "the sages of the ages" and as transforming psychology into religion.

A Quiet World, his account of living with hearing loss, is the least typical and, by some accounts, the best of his general books — a first-person study of a sensory deficit written by someone who had spent his career explaining how perception and social context shape experience. The subject did not end with the book. Myers's hearing loss progressed to the point where he received a cochlear implant, and he has since campaigned for assistive listening infrastructure in the United States — notably hearing loop technology for public venues — arguing that the barrier is architectural rather than individual. That work has been recognised by the American Academy of Audiology and the Hearing Loss Association of America, bodies with no stake in his psychological writing; it is the clearest case of his research interests and his life converging, and it gives his accounts of perception an authority that few textbook writers can claim.

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References

Myers, D. G., & Diener, E. (1995). Who is happy? Psychological Science, 6(1), 10-19.