15 Facts About Alex Bavelas

Alexander Bavelas was an American psychosociologist credited as the first to define closeness centrality.

Alex Bavelas's work was influential in using mathematics in developing the concept of centralization and in formalizing fundamental concepts of network structure.

Alex Bavelas suggested to Lewin a method of training people to be democratic, which would become the germ of extending autocracy-democracy studies to the field of industrial relations.

At Lewin's suggestion, Alex Bavelas sought to directly apply small group dynamics theory to labor-management relations by conducting small-group experiments at the Harwood Manufacturing Company in Virginia, known as Harwood research.

Alex Bavelas used the Echo approach in studying Mennonite children.

In 1948, Alex Bavelas obtained his PhD from MIT with Some Mathematical Properties of Psychological Space as his doctoral thesis with Dorwin Cartwright as his adviser.

Alex Bavelas founded the Group Networks Laboratory at MIT in 1948, which included mathematician R Duncan Luce and social psychologist Leon Festinger.

Alex Bavelas designed studies focused on information diffusion within a small group and on network structures that affect the speed and efficiency of this information diffusion.

In 1950, Alex Bavelas defined closeness as the reciprocal of the farness, that is, the sum of distance from all actors.

Alex Bavelas looked at the development of theories, where experiments showed that the complexity of theories grow until a revolution throws it all away.

Alex Bavelas left MIT in 1956 and worked for Bell Telephone Labs for four years.

Alex Bavelas then joined Stanford University's business school as a professor of psychology.

Alex Bavelas was a fellow for Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1954 to 1955.

Alex Bavelas was at Stanford until 1970 and he taught at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Alex Bavelas died in Sidney, British Columbia on August 16,1993.