Donn wanted his mentees not only to get a job but also to contribute responsibly to the organization where they worked and to the country in which they lived. He wanted me to start my career at a research-intensive institution in India. Therefore, in 1972, a year before I received my degree, he contacted Kamta Prasad, who at that time was head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and recommended that he hire me as an assistant professor. That I was offered the job without any interview suggests how supportive Donn was of my appointment!
Of his numerous scholarly contributions to social psychology, personality, and human sexuality, Donn is perhaps most renowned for his classic similarity–attraction research. People had long suggested that “birds of a feather flock together,” but it was Donn who translated this adage into a testable hypothesis: The greater the similarity between the attitudes of two persons, he demonstrated, the greater the attraction between them. He was so attached to this “Law of Attraction” (Y = 5.44X + 6.62, where Y is attraction on a scale of 2 to 14, X is the proportion of similar attitudes, and 5.44 and 6.62 are empirical coefficients for the respective slope and intercept of the regression line) that he always queried me as to how well his equation fit each new set of data my students or I collected!
Byrne died on August 10. 2014
