Shelley E. Taylor

Introduction

Shelley E. Taylor (born 1946) is an American social psychologist whose work helped build two subfields — social cognition and health psychology — and who is best known outside academia for the tend-and-befriend model of the stress response. She is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has taught since 1979. Her 2000 Psychological Review paper arguing that the classic "fight-or-flight" framework described male stress responses better than female ones has been cited thousands of times and reshaped how stress physiology is taught. An earlier line of work, developed with Jonathon Brown, proposed that mildly unrealistic optimism and self-enhancement — "positive illusions" — are characteristic of mental health rather than symptoms of distortion. Taylor has published more than 350 journal articles, chapters and books, and her honours include the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1996) and Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement (2010), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Philosophical Society (2018), and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences (2020).

Early Life and Education

Taylor was born in 1946 in Mount Kisco, New York, and grew up in Chappaqua, about an hour north of New York City. She was the only child of a father who taught history and a mother who had been a pop and jazz pianist before becoming a piano teacher. Her father's biography was unusual: he had trained as a psychiatric nurse, was ineligible for military service in the Second World War because of polio, and volunteered instead with the Society of Friends, helping to build the first mental hospital in Eritrea. Taylor has credited his stories with steering her toward psychology.

A second accident of schooling cemented the choice. At Horace Greeley High School one of her history teachers received a grant to study psychology and began teaching the subject instead — an experience Taylor describes as life-changing. She entered Connecticut College in 1964 intending to become a clinician, and her first experiment examined how women evaluated other women who chose careers over traditional family roles. A summer spent with Volunteers in Service to America working with men diagnosed with schizophrenia persuaded her that research would suit her better than clinical practice. Her adviser was Sara Kiesler; weighing graduate offers, she chose Yale over Rochester.

At Yale she completed a dissertation in 1972 on attribution theory under John McConahay, testing Daryl Bem's self-perception theory and showing that false feedback about one's own behaviour is accepted as a basis for attitudes when it fits pre-existing views. She had wanted to work with Richard Nisbett, whose laboratory was full. Her graduate cohort included Mark Zanna, Michael Storms, Ellen Langer, Carol Dweck, Henry Roediger and Robert Kraut. Kenneth Keniston, a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine who rarely took psychology students, taught her and others how to use interviews to generate and test hypotheses. She was also active in the New Haven Women's Liberation Movement and was arrested once for storming Mory's, then a men-only Yale club.

Academic and Professional Career

Taylor was a visiting faculty member at Yale in 1971–72, then moved to Harvard University as assistant professor in 1972 and associate professor in 1977. At Harvard she began the interviews with breast cancer patients that produced her theory of cognitive adaptation, and she worked at the boundary between social and clinical questions at a time when that boundary was rarely crossed.

She joined UCLA in 1979 as an associate professor, became full professor in 1981, and has remained there ever since, helping to found one of the first major American programmes in health psychology. Her research programme moved through several phases: social cognition in the late 1970s and 1980s; adjustment to threatening events and positive illusions in the 1980s and 1990s; the tend-and-befriend model and biobehavioural stress research from the late 1990s; the "risky families" hypothesis linking harsh early family environments to later physical and mental health; cross-cultural work on social support; social neuroscience; and, more recently, psychological vulnerability to financial fraud in older adults.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Taylor was among the architects of social cognition, the study of how people encode, store and use information about the social world. Working with Susan Fiske and others she documented how limited-capacity perceivers rely on categories, salience and schematic shortcuts — the "cognitive miser" metaphor that dominated the field in its first decade. Their co-authored volume Social Cognition, later expanded as Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture, became a standard text and defines the field for many graduate students.

Positive illusions

Taylor's interviews with cancer patients, reported in her 1983 theory of cognitive adaptation, showed that most people recover a sense of mastery, meaning and self-worth after a traumatic diagnosis. With Jonathon Brown she generalised this in a highly cited 1988 Psychological Bulletin article arguing that three positively biased beliefs — inflated views of the self, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about the future — are typical of mentally healthy people rather than evidence of poor reality contact. The paper inverted the older assumption, running from Jahoda and Maslow, that accurate perception is a hallmark of mental health.

Tend-and-befriend

Taylor, Laura Cousino Klein, Brian Lewis and colleagues published "Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight" in Psychological Review in 2000. Their argument was that Walter Cannon's fight-or-flight model had been built largely on male animals and male human subjects, and that females — who in mammalian species usually carry and nurse offspring — cannot flee or fight as readily without jeopardising those offspring. They proposed an alternative pattern: protecting and calming offspring (tending) and seeking the social group for mutual defence (befriending), supported by oxytocin, whose effects are enhanced by oestrogen and dampened by androgens, together with endogenous opioid peptides. Taylor has consistently stressed that the sexes overlap and that men also affiliate under stress; the claim is one of average difference in emphasis, not of separate species.

Risky families and early environment

With Rena Repetti and Teresa Seeman, Taylor advanced the "risky families" model in a 2002 Psychological Bulletin article, proposing that family environments characterised by conflict and coldness produce offspring with deficits in emotion regulation and social competence and with chronically activated stress physiology, creating elevated risk for later mental and physical illness.

Later work

Subsequent research examined how culture shapes the costs and benefits of seeking support, and why older adults — despite accumulated experience — remain vulnerable to financial scams, a problem Taylor approached as a failure of the same socioemotional systems that normally protect against isolation.

Major Publications

Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161–1173.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1984). Social Cognition. McGraw-Hill. (2nd ed., 1991; later editions as Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture.)
Taylor, S. E. (1986). Health Psychology. Random House. (Subsequent editions through 2003.)
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
Taylor, S. E. (1989). Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind. Basic Books.
Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107, 411–429.
Repetti, R. L., Taylor, S. E., & Seeman, T. E. (2002). Risky families: Family social environments and the mental and physical health of offspring. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 330–366.
Taylor, S. E. (2002). The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential for Who We Are and How We Live. Times Books.
Taylor, S. E., Welch, W. T., Kim, H. S., & Sherman, D. K. (2007). Cultural differences in the impact of social support on psychological and biological stress responses. Psychological Science, 18, 831–837.

Impact and Legacy

Taylor's influence runs through three channels. Her textbooks and co-authored volumes trained several cohorts of social and health psychologists. Her 1988 argument launched a research programme on self-enhancement and adjustment that continues today. And tend-and-befriend has entered both the research literature on sex differences in stress physiology and the wider culture, routinely taught alongside Solomon Asch's conformity studies as a canonical correction to an androcentric psychology. Her honours include the Donald Campbell Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution to Social Psychology, the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2001), and election to the Institute of Medicine.

Each of her major claims, however, remains contested. Positive illusions. In 1994 C. Randall Colvin and Jack Block published "Do Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health? An Examination of the Taylor and Brown Formulation" in Psychological Bulletin, concluding that both the logic and the evidence linking illusions to mental health failed to substantiate the thesis and that "it remains unproven that positive illusions foster mental health." Taylor and Brown replied in the same issue, and Block and Colvin rejoined that the two positions "cannot be reconciled." The exchange has never been resolved, and critics including Joachim Krueger have further argued that the label "illusion" is unwarranted: if most people rate themselves above average, that may reflect subjective standards rather than a measurable distortion, so the inference from statistical impossibility to psychological error does not go through. Related evidence suggests self-enhancers make a good first impression that deteriorates with continued contact, raising the possibility that the benefit is short-term.

Tend-and-befriend. The model has been criticised as contradicting social-science evidence on how men and women behave in non-Western societies, and reference treatments of the theory have carried editorial warnings that it may overstate the case. Within gender theory, the framework of Hare-Mustin and Marecek would classify it as an alpha bias: it takes modest average differences and presents them as fundamental and biologically fixed, potentially essentialising the very distinction it was meant to correct — the original beta bias of studying only males. Critiques emerging from the wider oxytocin literature raise a second problem: many of the hormonal findings the model leans on come from non-human animals or small human samples, and the human oxytocin literature has proved difficult to replicate. More recent work indicates that attachment style predicts affiliative responses to stress at least as strongly as biological sex, suggesting the pattern is less sex-specific than the model's framing implies. Taylor's own writing is more cautious than her popular reputation, explicitly noting that both sexes use both patterns and that the difference is one of degree.

A third, more general criticism applies to the health-psychology work: much of the evidence connecting illusions, support and physical health is cross-sectional and self-reported, so the causal direction — do positive beliefs produce health, or does health produce positive beliefs? — is difficult to establish.

Learn More

Solomon Asch — conformity research that shaped the social psychology Taylor helped rebuild
John Bowlby — attachment theory, the framework behind tending and befriending
Martin Seligman — positive psychology, the neighbouring movement to Taylor's work on well-being

References

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411-429.