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Robert Merton
Mar 13th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Robert King Merton, inventor of the focus group, died on February 23rd, aged 9
2
BY THE 1940s almost every home in the United States had a radio; sometimes the
re were several. The industry was getting rich from advertising linked to popu
lar programmes. What it sought was a reliable way of measuring popularity to e
nsure that advertisers were paying enough. In 1941 Paul Lazarsfeld, a statisti
cian at Columbia University in New York, got together a group of people repres
enting a typical radio audience and gave them some buttons to press as they li
stened to various programmes. He was then able to work out which programmes ha
d the most appeal. Helping him at these sessions was Robert Merton, who had re
cently joined Columbia. At the end of each session Mr Merton asked any in the
group who did not need to dash away to stay behind and discuss the radio shows
in some detail: they should focus on why they had liked this bit of the show,
and not that.
Although it is risky to claim that anyone invented anything, it is generally a
ccepted by sociologists that Mr Merton's were the world's first focus groups,
a research tool now used widely in commerce and increasingly in politics. Nor
have focus groups changed much since the Merton model. A typical group will ha
ve six to nine people, enough to keep the discussion flowing over a period of
perhaps two hours, but not unwieldy. It will be managed by an expert who will
encourage flexibility but keep in mind the information that the group has been
set up to provide.
Crimetheory.com offers a walk-through of Mr Merton's 1938 article, “Social St
ructure and Anomie.” Robert C. Merton (son of Robert K.) is a professor of fi
nance at Harvard Business School.
Mr Merton said wryly he wished he could have collected royalties on focus grou
ps, but he never saw them as the highlight of his life's work. His great achie
vement in a career of some 70 years was to help to establish sociology as a ma
jor scientific discipline. By posing the question, “How does this come to be
so?” he sought to examine human behaviour without prejudice. The benefit he o
ffered to the world was new thinking on criminality, racism, the mass media, s
ocial cohesion, power, fame, rewards, class, bureaucracy...it is a long list.
He also wrote well and composed a number of memorable phrases. Every time you
speak of “role models” you are quoting Mr Merton.
Culture of the streets
He was the son of immigrant parents from Eastern Europe who had settled in a r
undown district of Philadelphia. In a lecture in 1994 he recalled how “that s
eemingly deprived south Philadelphia slum” provided him with a good start in
life. He had friendships in a youth gang, and access to culture in the local l
ibraries, schools and orchestras, “every sort of capital” except money. This
problem he met by performing conjuring tricks at parties, calling himself Rob
ert Merlin after King Arthur's magician. But he had his own sort of magic that
lifted the lad from the slums through the American educational system to even
tually a scholarship to Harvard, where he gained a doctorate. In the 1930s he
taught at a number of colleges before coming to Columbia, where he stayed for
44 years, much of the time working on ways to apply sociology commercially wit
h Paul Lazarsfeld, who died in 1976.
Several of Mr Merton's students who later made important careers in sociology
have written about his presence in the lecture room. Asked to estimate his hei
ght, students would guess up to 6ft 4in. In fact Mr Merton was tall, 6ft 1in,
but not a giant, except in the minds of his awed students. He certainly discip
lined himself, usually starting work shortly after four in the morning, surrou
nded by those of his numerous cats that had woken up. But although it helped a
teacher to have an easy command over his pupils, Mr Merton was suspicious of
authority; and indeed of the nature of fame.
He wrote that many scientists, such as Newton and Galileo, were famous partly
because they had been portrayed as rebels, but in fact their genius had been a
dapted to the needs of their time. He approved of the aphorism that progress i
s made by standing “on the shoulders of giants” (which became the title of o
ne of Mr Merton's 20 or so books) but said the author was a 12th-century theol
ogian, Bernard of Chartres, not Isaac Newton, who usually gets the credit.
Mr Merton noted that lots of people miss out on credit or other socially-appro
ved prizes such as wealth, power and status. In writing about what he called “
strain theory” he examined the problems of an unequal society, particularly t
he rise of the “innovators”, those who turned to crime to achieve “social g
oals” denied them by legitimate means. The solution Mr Merton offered was a p
rogramme to help the “disadvantaged”, which had a run of popularity in Ameri
can and some European countries in the 1960s onwards, but is less fashionable
now.
In Mr Merton's own academic world, he favoured the idea of a “41st chair” to
symbolise talented scientists who should have been awarded a Nobel prize (the
Acadｅmie Française, Mr Merton noted, limits the number of its “immor
tals” to 40). But he rejected the idea that he should occupy the chair, altho
ugh had there been a Nobel for sociology, Mr Merton would probably have added
it to his many honours. He was a modest man. His son, also called Robert, won
the Nobel for economics in 1997. Merton senior sometimes signed his letters “
father of the economist”.
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