Ceci, Stephen J.

Stephen J. Ceci was born on March 22, 1950, the fourth of six children of working-class Italian parents, in Wilmington, Delaware. Ceci attended Catholic school, where he developed remarkably little interest in anything academic, preferring to spend his formative years playing sports and roaming the streets. Despite this early apathy, he nevertheless earned both high grades and a reputation among the nuns and priests that made them thankful he had no younger brothers. As a teenager, Ceci ran numbers for a local bookie and soon became known for his prodigious memory; he was capable of recalling many 3-digit numbers and the amounts of money wagered on each without relying on written records—a distinct advantage if stopped by police. An epiphany struck him in his late teens, when he realized that his cognitive strengths could be better actualized in a classroom than on the street. Ceci applied for and received a scholarship to the University of Delaware, where he completed his BA in 1973. He later went on to receive a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Exeter, England, where he worked with the late Michael J. A. Howe, who continued to serve as both mentor and friend until Howe's tragic death in 2002.

Ceci began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota in 1978. Teaming up with another assistant professor, Douglas Peters, Ceci began a tradition of research on topics many wished he had not pursued. By resubmitting already-published articles to the same journals that had recently published them, Peters and Ceci (1982) demonstrated that very few editors and reviewers recognized that these same articles had already appeared in their journals. Furthermore, most of the articles were rejected the second time around, indicating massive unreliability in the peer review process and creating substantial embarrassment for the editors. This study won Ceci considerable notoriety, and in 1980, he left North Dakota for a position at Cornell University. He has remained there since and now holds a lifetime-endowed chair, the Helen L. Carr Professorship of Developmental Psychology.

Ceci's research is broad, encompassing two interrelated topics: first, the nature of intelligence in everyday settings and, second, the nature of children's memory. Both lines of research focus on the role of context as a defining aspect of intelligence and memory in naturalistic settings. For example, in an early study on intelligence in context, Ceci and Liker (1986) showed that experts at the racetrack were more successful than men who attended the track equally [Page 214]often but failed to achieve the status of experts, because experts constructed more complex, intuitive models of horseracing, incorporating the complexities of multiple-interaction effects and nonlinearity. Ceci and Liker showed that the complexity of the experts' mental models was unrelated to their IQ scores, years of formal education, or social status. The complexity of their thinking predicted success at the track, but their IQs did not. This important study was one of the earliest to argue that general intelligence, or g, may be domain-specific. In other words, Ceci and Liker showed that being an expert at racetrack handicapping did not mean that a person was an expert in school or did well on tests of intelligence.

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