Robert Johnson sheds light on human behavior

A Real People Person

obert Johnson is a people watcher. Always has been. So the Minnesota native did what most parents tell their children to do when they grow up—he took what he loved to do and turned it into a career.

Just over a year ago, Johnson was settling into his sunlit Merrick Building office as professor and chair of the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences. It’s a stark contrast to the dark, chilly basement of the physics building at St. Olaf College in Minnesota (“You know, the town where Rose on the Golden Girls was from”), where he spent many of his own college days. A physics major, Johnson learned all the theories and formulas Einstein, Newton, and his professors required of him in less than two years. Needing credits in other subjects in order to graduate, Johnson decided to enroll in a sociology class.

“It was a course on deviant behavior,” he recalls.

His final paper was on the history of hobos—how they went from being romanticized in Shirley Temple movies, songs, and poems to being ostracized by society. By the end of the class, Johnson had fallen in love.

“Plus,” he adds, “the physics labs were in the basement because many experiments were sensitive to the elements, whereas all the sociology classes were held in this building that looked like a Norman castle.”

Johnson hasn’t yet explored the effect of class environment on choice of major, but now his main interest is life stages, which he has studied extensively throughout his career as a medical sociologist. He has held faculty positions at the University of Utah, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas A&M, and Kent State. It was at Kent, after 9/11, where he decided to collaborate with Israel’s University of Haifa to study the effect of terrorism on post-traumatic stress disorder. In a sample of over 1,000 Israelis—approximately 35 percent Palestinian and 65 percent Jewish—Johnson observed that terrorism did result in PTSD, as well as a secondary increase in authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. The findings are useful, Johnson says, in identifying populations vulnerable to these thoughts and behaviors. Doing so may help prevent future catastrophic terrorist events like 9/11.

Johnson has since shifted gears from the stress of terrorism to the stress of aging. He studies, for example, the similarities in the experiences of a 65-year-old and an 85-year-old, both of whom could be at the end of life. Do people start acting different when they enter this stage? The concept intrigues Johnson, but while he studies and analyzes social behavior, he tries not to observe details of his own life too much.

“I’m not an introspective person—introspective people become psychologists,” he jokes. “I think I’ll stick to people watching.”

– Jessica Sick, B.S.C. ’00