The Legacy of Ellen Berscheid, UMN Regents Professor Emerita

Ellen Berscheid is an internationally celebrated leader in the field of psychology, known for her work in founding and guiding the scientific study of interpersonal relationships.  When Berscheid began as a student of psychology in the 1950s, few psychologists were focused on the significance of relationships in seeking to understand human behavior; the predominant emphasis was instead on the individual as a subject of study separate from their roles within a family, a marriage, or a community.  In partnership with colleagues such as Ellen Hatfield, Eliot Aronson, and Harold Kelley, Berscheid pioneered the importance of studying human relationships as key to understanding human behavior.  Ellen Berscheid passed away on May 22, 2025, at the age of 88.  We would like to honor her achievements by recounting her legacy.

Just a few years ago, in 2022, Berscheid was asked to write a brief narrative of her life as one of the 'pillars' of social psychology for a collection of essays published by Cambridge University Press.  In her typical wry tone, Bersheid began by recounting how she stumbled on the study of psychology while hoping for a class on ESP as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Despite the mismatch, Paul Secord, her professor and a social psychologist, engaged Berscheid by discussing Fritz Heider on social psychology and interpersonal relationships.  Berscheid earned a BA and MA in Psychology while working as a research assistant in Secord's Lab. On completing her MA, Berscheid moved to Minnesota as her new husband had decided to attend graduate school at the University of Minnesota.  

On moving to Minnesota, Berscheid met Elaine Hatfield, who would become a friend and colleague. Together, they would strike new ground both as women in a field dominated by men and as scientists opening up the discipline to new perspectives.  As women in academia in the 1960s, Berscheid and Hatfield began by working in student services and as adjunct instructors in the Business School. In 1966, Hatfield obtained a faculty position at the University of Rochester in New York and went on to have a successful academic career.  After a stint at Pillsbury in Research & Development, Berscheid landed a position as research assistant for Elliot Aronson, a University of Minnesota social psychologist who at that time was focused on the psychology of attraction.  In 1965, with Aronson as her adviser, Berscheid completed her PhD, and in 1969 Jack Darley, then chair of the University of Minnesota Psychology Department, appointed her to a faculty position.

During their years in Minnesota, Berscheid and Hatfield published an important monograph on interpersonal attraction, thereby making their first significant contribution to the field.  Although their initial research conclusions have gone through numerous revisions, how they framed their research– questions on interpersonal familiarity and similarity, reciprocity of feelings, and physical attractiveness– remains salient today.  During the 1970s and 1980s, Berscheid and Hatfield broadened their attention to include love.  Indeed, Berscheid would recognize the inattention to 'love' that then defined the field of Psychology.  Berscheid and Hatfield began by distinguishing between passionate and compassionate love, romantic versus paternal love or love shared between friends.  Hatfield would develop a scale on how to measure passionate love, while Berscheid began to focus on how attachments formed between adults in romantic relations.  Despite some initial skepticism they encountered in the field regarding their line of research, Berscheid and Hatfield ultimately constructed a means of how to study love, how to ask the questions which could provide answers that could be measured and described across individuals, between cultures and over time. In this way the study of love matured.

In essence, Berscheid's particular genius was in recognizing that context, specifically relational context,  was key to understanding attraction, love and all interpersonal relationships, an insight she would build on for the rest of her career.  For those unaware of the history of psychology as a discipline, it seems odd that the study of human emotion could or would be studied outside of the context of interpersonal relationships.  The impact that the work Berscheid and Hatfield accomplished on their own, as well as together, is captured in a 2013 retrospective on Berscheid and Hatfield:   

Berscheid later built on this work by turning her attention to questions of equity, the distribution of resources within relationships and how such distributions impacted the ongoing stability of those relationships.

Ellen Berscheid once told her young advisee, Jeff Simpson, who is now a leading researcher in the field of interpersonal relationships and the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Minnesota, that she knew as a woman that she would always have to be the toughest one in the room if she was going to be taken seriously as a scientist.  And Berscheid was tough, as well as funny and successful.  In 1988 Berscheid became the first woman to become a Regent's Professor at the University of Minnesota.  Ten years later in 1998 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In the field of psychology, Berscheid remained a thought leader throughout her life.  As her influential 1999 article "The Greening of Relationship Science" and the ongoing saliency of her work attest, some of her articles now over 50 years old are continuing to be cited in contemporary studies, such as those on the attractiveness of AI, the equitable distribution of resources in relationships, and multiple cross-cultural studies on love.  And her work even makes the occasional appearance in popular culture. We honor Ellen Berscheid, both as a successful woman in academia and a leading scholar in the field of psychology.