Gustav Jahoda, my father, passed away at the age of 96, leaving a legacy of pioneering research in cross-cultural psychology. In 1963, he was among the five initial professors at Strathclyde University and was a founding member of the European Society of Experimental and Social Psychology.
In 1952, my father moved to the University College of the Gold Coast (now Ghana University), which set him on the path of becoming ‘perhaps the first modern cross-cultural psychologist’, according to the Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Earlier research had focused on the attitudes of white people to black people, but Gustav’s book, White Man (1961), explored the attitudes of black Africans towards white Europeans in pre-independence Ghana.
Before the 1956 legislative elections in Ghana, Gustav and economist Walter Birmingham conducted a poll and predicted the results with great accuracy; they were even accused of sorcery. Nonetheless, my father attributed their success to careful sampling.
Born in Vienna, Gustav was the son of Leopold Jahoda, a lawyer, and Olga Barany, his wife. He was unaware of his Jewish heritage until his teenage years when the rise of fascism expelled him from Vienna Academic grammar school. He fled to Paris and began a university engineering course.
As the second world war began, he was initially interned and later enrolled in the French army. However, he was forced to flee when the Germans began advancing. He cycled to St Nazaire, on the coast of Brittany, where he was able to join the last of the British expeditionary forces in France. He arrived in the UK in 1940, unaware of his family’s whereabouts until three years later when the Red Cross found them in New York.
After the war, he pursued part-time psychology studies at the London School of Economics while working as a photographer. He eventually became a lecturer at Manchester University, where he met Jean Buchanan, a social worker who he married in 1950. After obtaining his doctorate in 1952, they moved to west Africa.
In 1956, Gustav took a lectureship at the University of Glasgow, and later moved to Strathclyde, where he remained after retiring in 1985 as an emeritus professor. My father published numerous papers and several books throughout his career, including The Psychology of Superstition (1970), Crossroads Between Culture and Mind (1993), Images of Savages (1999), and A History of Social Psychology (2007).
My father was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1988 and the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1993. After Jean’s passing in 1991, he met Andrea Jack, a teacher. Gustav enjoyed outdoor activities such as fishing, wood-chopping and beachcombing, and he loved the outdoors near his home in Cardross, Argyll.
He is survived by Andrea, his second wife, his children Andrew, Colin, Catherine, and myself, along with six grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
