The book, which became a classic text in psychology, traced the links between children’s upbringing and their prejudice in adulthood. While it focused on anti-Semitism, the book also showed that people who were prejudiced against one ethnic, racial, or religious group tended to be prejudiced against others.

Dr. Sanford was among the first to study the interaction between social systems and personality. He wrote about how social conditions could encourage people with dogmatic biases to persecute groups they were prejudiced against.

His work was inspired by trying to understand the hatred that caused the Holocaust, said Dr. Susan Fiske, a personality and social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts. His ideas were seminal, a main taproot of all the later research on prejudice, as well as the field of social psychology.

Dr. Sanford, who was named a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1940, became part of a cause célèbre in the McCarthy era when the university dismissed him and 11 other professors for refusing to sign a loyalty oath in 1950. After leaving Berkeley, he was a research affiliate at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London for a year, and then joined the faculty of Vassar College.

A decision by the California Supreme Court in 1959 resulted in Dr. Sanford’s reinstatement at Berkeley. He left Berkeley in 1961 to become a professor at Stanford University.

In the 1950s and early 60s he headed a major study of higher education publishing The American College in 1962 and Where Colleges Fail in 1967. He wrote that an overemphasis on academic publishing in evaluating professors often called the publish or perish syndrome was leading to a deterioration in their teaching abilities.

Dr. Sanford was also an early critic of I.Q. tests, saying they were biased in favor of the white middle class. He was also a champion of making college education more accessible to minority students.

He left Stanford to found the Wright Institute in 1968.

Dr. Sanford thought that graduate schools had become too narrow in their thinking, the problems they approached, and the student body, said Peter Dybwad, President of the Institute.

The son and grandson of Baptist ministers, Nevitt Sanford was born in Chatham, VA. in 1909. He attended the University of Richmond, received a master’s degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University, where he was on the staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic from 1935 to 1940.

He was the author or co-author of nearly 200 scholarly articles and more than a dozen books.

Excerpted from Daniel Goleman’s article, The New York Times, July 11, 1995.