My father, Gustav Jahoda, who has died aged 96, carried out pioneering research into cross-cultural psychology. He was one of five inaugural professors at Strathclyde University when it opened in 1963 and a founder member of the European Society of Experimental and Social Psychology.
It was a move to University College of the Gold Coast (now Ghana University) in 1952 that set my father on the path to becoming “perhaps the first modern cross-cultural psychologist”, as he was described in the Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Most earlier research had considered the attitudes of white people to black, but for his book White Man (1961), Gustav researched attitudes of black Africans to white Europeans in pre-independence Ghana.
Before the 1956 legislative election of the soon-to-be Ghana, Gustav and the economist Walter Birmingham conducted a poll, and they predicted the result with such accuracy that they were accused of sorcery. My father credited careful sampling.
Born in Vienna, Gustav was the son of Leopold Jahoda, a lawyer, and his wife, Olga (nee Barany). He did not have much awareness of his Jewish heritage until his teens, when the rise of fascism led to his expulsion from the Vienna Academic grammar school. He fled to Paris before the Anschluss in 1938, and embarked on a university engineering course.
When the second world war started, he was initially interned, but opted to enroll in the French army. With the German advance, though, he absconded and cycled to St Nazaire, on the coast of Brittany, where he was able to join the last of the British expeditionary force, evacuating from France. Gustav arrived in Britain in 1940. He did not know the whereabouts of his parents and younger brother until three years later, when the Red Cross found them in New York.
After the war, he enrolled at the London School of Economics to study psychology part-time while also working as a photographer. He then began a lectureship at Manchester University, where he met Jean Buchanan, a social worker, whom he married in 1950. Following his doctorate in 1952, they moved to west Africa.
The family returned to the UK in 1956 when Gustav took up a a lectureship at the University of Glasgow, and then Strathclyde, where he stayed after his retirement in 1985, becoming emeritus professor. He published hundreds of papers and several books, including The Psychology of Superstition (1970), Crossroads between Culture and Mind (1993), Images of Savages (1999) and A History of Social Psychology (2007). He was elected a fellow of the British Academy (1988) and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1993).
After Jean died in 1991, Gustav met Andrea Jack, a teacher. My father loved the outdoors near their home in Cardross, Argyll, and, between his academic pursuits, enjoyed fishing, wood-chopping and beachcombing.
He is survived by Andrea; by Andrew, Colin, Catherine and me, the children of his marriage to Jean; and by six grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
