Joel Best

Joel Gordon Best is an American sociologist and criminologist. He is Professor Emeritus and a Francis Alison award winner in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He specialized in topics such as social problems and deviance. His most recent research focused on awards, prizes, and honors in American culture.

Best earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and psychology in 1967, before studying sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he earned a Master of Arts (MA) in 1968 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1971. In 1979, he earned an MA in United States history from the University of Minnesota.

He taught at Concordia College (1969-70), California State University, Fresno (1970–91), Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1991–99), and University of Delaware (1999–2006).

He was a source cast member on the critically acclaimed show Adam Ruins Everything. Best provided evidence supporting the fact that strangers, contrary to popular belief, do not (with a single rare exception of an estranged father-son situation) and have never tampered with or poisoned the candy given to a trick-or-treater as far as records can provide.

Books As author

Winner Brian McConnell Book Award, International Society for Contemporary Legend Research

Joel Best, Just the Facts: Why We Don’t Always Agree, Oakland: University of California Press, forthcoming in 2015

Winner, Charles Horton Cooley Award, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 1991

As editor

Images of Issues