William J. McGuire is among the most original and influential thinkers of psychology's first century. He began his career at Yale University in the 1950s where he studied with Carl Hovland, completing his first research within the dominant tradition of learning theory. Even in his earliest papers, there is evidence of a master experimenter at work: aesthetic designs, meticulous analyses, and complex interactions predicted with precision, revealed that his use of learning theory was a tool to study the issues that most excited him concerning human thought and its complex functioning in social contexts.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Minnesota with Leon Festinger, Bill spent the next several years at other great universities. At University of Illinois, he entered into a bet (with a colleague who was perpetually anxious about tenure) that he would not publish a paper until he was tenured. The evidence is in his curriculum vitae: Ten papers appeared in 1961, the year after he received tenure. Among the most notable of these contributions is a highly influential and counterintuitive idea concerning attitude change. Using the metaphor of medical immunization, Bill's genius was to suggest that small doses of a persuasive message would increase resistance to further attitude change instead of reducing it. His programmatic research on immunization against persuasion remains a model of a creative idea flawlessly executed. Bill demonstrated that ephemeral human thought processes can be described by the same laws previously considered to be true of physical and biological systems.