My earliest recollection of thinking like a social psychologist took place long before I knew there was such a thing as social psychology. I grew up in an impoverished, blue-collar area of Revere, a small city a few miles northeast of Boston. Ours was one of the few Jewish families in a virulently anti-Semitic neighborhood. When I was nine years old, while walking home from Hebrew School one particularly dark night, I was waylaid and roughed up by a group of teenagers shouting anti-Semitic slurs. Verbal and physical aggression was not unusual in my childhood, but what made it uncommon for me was what happened immediately afterwards – an event that forms one of my most vivid childhood memories: I sat on a curb and began thinking about what had just happened to me. There I was, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, wondering why those kids hated Jews so much. Were they born hating Jews or did they learn it from their parents? I wondered how they could hate me so much when they didn’t even know me. If they got to know me better and discovered what a sweet and generous little boy I was, would they like me better? And if they began to like me better, would that lead them to hate other Jews less? I did not realize it at the time, of course, but these are profound social psychological questions.