Anthony Greenwald

Anthony Galt Greenwald is a social psychologist who, since 1986, has been a professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

In 1959, Greenwald received a B.A. from Yale University. In 1961, he received a M.A. from Harvard University, and in 1963, he completed his PhD, also at Harvard. After that, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship that lasted from 1963 to 1965 at the Educational Testing Service.

Greenwald started teaching in 1965 as an assistant professor in the psychology department at Ohio State University, which continued until 1986. During that time, he was an associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, from 1972 to 1976, before becoming the editor in 1977. From 2001 to 2005, Greenwald was the associate editor of Experimental Psychology.

Awards Greenwald has been recognized with a variety of significant awards, including the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 1994, Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health from 1998 to 2004, and the Thomas M. Ostrom Award from Person Memory Interest Group in 2001. In 2006, Greenwald received the Distinguished Scientist Award from Society of Experimental Social Psychology and in 2017 the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Greenwald was honored alongside Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with a 2018 Golden Goose Award for their work on implicit bias. For 2024 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Social Sciences".

Research interests

Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, Brian Nosek, and others, have conducted extensive research on cognition and have collaborated to create the implicit association test (IAT). This test measures the extent to which an individual will associate two individual concepts. Between October 1998 and October 2006, more than 4.5 million IAT tests were completed on the IAT website.

Greenwald has studied and advanced the theory of a central route to persuasion; he and his colleagues agree a third step of elaboration is needed. The concept of elaboration allows the argument to be extended and, for the receiver of the conversation to process information that he or she is being given more effectively. This helps individuals to determine the strength of the contents in the article and gives way to the idea that "strong arguments are persuasive, and weak arguments are not".