Introduction of Neil J. MacKinnon, 2021 Cooley-Mead Award Recipient

Abstract

We are honored to introduce Neil MacKinnon as the 2021 recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award. Neil has influenced sociological social psychology with pathbreaking theoretical and empirical work that has helped shape contemporary understandings of impression formation, emotions, identities and the self, social institutions, and culture. Neil grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and did his undergraduate work at the University of Windsor, graduating in just three years, with a double major in sociology and philosophy. He then began graduate studies in sociology at the University of Illinois, where he made intensive use of that university’s powerful computers and its faculty resources on multivariate analyses. In 1970, after just three years, Neil completed his doctoral dissertation on the structure of role expectations. He was Dr. MacKinnon just six years after graduating from high school! After two years at the University of Minnesota, Neil moved back to Canada and began working at the University of Guelph, where he spent the remainder of his career. During the early years of his career, he published social psychological work on role expectations and role strain and more macro-oriented studies of urban migration and educational attainment. In 1978, Neil used a sabbatical to go to the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina as a visiting scholar. He connected with all of the prominent scholars of advanced statistical methods that had attracted him there, but he soon concentrated his activities in the group working on affect control theory (ACT), led by David Heise with Lynn Smith-Lovin as a core graduate student. Results of a large National Institute of Mental Health study were pouring in, and Neil took on the task of analyzing perceived likelihoods of interpersonal events, the first comprehensive test of the theory’s predictions. A few years after his sabbatical, Neil initiated a massive cross-cultural replication of all the basic empirical work in ACT, including the development of Canadian impression-formation equations. He identified cross-cultural differences in impression-formation processes and laid the groundwork for other scholars to