Research Methods

Michael W. Passer is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Washington. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he entered the University of Rochester fully expecting to be a physics or chemistry major, but he became hooked on psychological science after taking introductory psychology and a seminar course on the nature of the mind. He got his start as an undergraduate researcher under the mentorship of Dr. Harold Sigall, was a volunteer undergraduate introductory psychology Teaching Assistant, and received a Danforth Foundation Fellowship that partly funded his graduate studies and exposed him to highly enriching national conferences on college teaching.

 Dr. Passer received his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he conducted laboratory research on attribution theory under the primary mentorship of Dr. Harold Kelley and gained several years of field research experience studying competitive stress, self-esteem, and attributional processes among boys and girls playing youth sports, mainly working with Dr. Tara Scanlan in the Department of Kinesiology. At the University of Washington he has conducted hypothesistesting field research on competitive stress with youth sport participants, collaborated on several applied research projects in the fi eld of industrial-organizational psychology, and for the past 20 years has been a Senior Lecturer and faculty coordinator of U.W.'s introductory psychology courses. In this role, he annually teaches courses in introductory psychology and research methods, developed a graduate course on the teaching of psychology, and is a U.W. Distinguished Teaching Award nominee. With his colleague Ronald Smith, he has coauthored five editions of the introductory textbook Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behavior (McGraw-Hill), and has published more than 20 scientific articles and chapters, mostly on attribution theory and competitive stress.