Wednesday, November 23, 2011

ROBERT K. MERTON – A MASTER ATTRACTOR

Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) joined Columbia University in 1941.  He became there a University Professor and later a Special Service Professor at the Department of Sociology.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and a Mac Arthur Fellowship in 1983.  In 1994 he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science for his life work.  Professor Merton received 20 honorary doctoral degrees for his pioneering contributions. 
Robert K. Merton a pioneer in the social sciences and social psychology contributed among other things to the understanding of what is publicly known today as the Law of Attraction and the mechanisms of the human mind and human thought processes that promote the transformation of thought into reality. 
Professor Merton made three contributions that help us understand the Law of attraction.
·        He created and defined the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that causes itself to manifest as true by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to feedback between the belief and the person’s behavior.  (1968).
·        While working for the U.S. Bureau for Applied Social Research he introduced the instrument of the Focus Group into research, marketing and advertisement.  The focus group is a modification variant of a similar concept known as the master-mind alliance.  In a focus group the participants are asked for their frank opinion, perception, or feelings towards a given idea, goal, product or service. 
·        Professor Robert K. Merton book The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity was published posthumously in 2004 by Princeton University Press.  This is the only authoritative text on the phenomenon of Serendipity.  Every curious scholar and practitioner of the Law of Attraction is aways expectant of manifesting via the good fortunes of serendipity.
Robert K. Merton intuitively observed the Key Concepts and framework of the Law of Attraction as it is popularly called today.  He used those concepts in his original research, writings and applied scientific observations and theories.
His son Robert C. Merton is 1997 Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

(C) 2011 Mandy Lender, MD