Robert Maclaughlin Farr

Rob Farr was born in Northern Ireland in 1936 where he gained a BSc (1957) and MSc (1959) in Psychology from Queen's University Belfast.[1] After this he studied for a period at Trinity College Dublin and then in 1962 returned to Queen's University as an Assistant Lecturer. In 1964 he took a post as researcher with the Royal Air Force before taking up a post as a Lecturer in Social Psychology at University College London in 1966. In 1977, he was awarded a PhD by Birkbeck, University of London for a thesis entitled The social psychology of selection: a theoretical model of man and a conceptual framework for research[2]

In 1979 he was appointed Chair of Psychology at the University of Glasgow but did not stay there for long. In 1983 he was appointed Chair of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and returned to London. His inaugural lecture was entitled Some reflections on the historical development of psychology as an experimental and social science (Farr, 1985). He remained at that institution until he retired in 2000.[3] [4]

He was active in the British Psychological Society of which he was elected president in 1986.[5] His Presidential address was entitled The Science of Mental Life: A social psychological analysis in which he championed the work of George Herbert Mead (Farr, 1987).

While he was at University College London he spent a sabbatical year in Paris working with Serge Moscovici. He returned enthused with the ideas of social representation theory and spent the remainder of his career developing and promoting these ideas (see Farr & Moscovici, 1984; Markova & Farr, 1995; Wagner, 2020).

He had a continuing interest in the development of social psychology and published a collection of his articles on this topic in 1996 (Farr, 1996). He planned to publish a book entitled A Social and Reflexive Model of Man: Theory and Evidence. The Wellcome Library contains his correspondence with Henri Tajfel about this book and a manuscript draft.[6]

• Farr, R.M. (1996). The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Farr, R.M. (1987). The Science of Mental Life: A social psychological analysis. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 40, 1-17.
• Farr, R.M. (1985). Some reflections on the historical development of psychology as an experimental and social science: Inaugural lecture. London: LSE.
• Farr, R.M., Moscovici, S. (Eds.). (1984). Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Markova, I., & Farr, R.M. (eds) (1995) Representations of Health and Illness and Handicap. Chur: Harwood Academic.

• 1986 - President, British Psychological Society