John A. Meacham (October 4, 1944) is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo—the State University of New York. Meacham initiated the study of prospective memory, a research subject in cognitive psychology, in the early 1970s. He also argued that wisdom is a balance between knowing and doubting and that most people lose their wisdom as they grow older. Meacham edited the international journal Human Development on theory in developmental psychology; was elected a Fellow in the American Psychological Association; served as President of the Jean Piaget Society; and taught in the Fulbright program in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Earlier publications were authored as John, more recent ones as Jack.
John A. Meacham, also known as Jack, graduated from Stanford University (1966) and the University of Michigan with a doctorate in developmental psychology (1972). Before completing his doctorate, Meacham served in the Peace Corps in Turkey (1967–69). From 1980-82, Meacham was a member of the Center for the Study of Youth Development, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He was elected a Fellow in the American Psychological Association in 1984. From 1990 to 1992, he was Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education while the University at Buffalo was engaged in extensive revision of its general education program. Meacham served as President of the Jean Piaget Society from 1991 to 1993. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chair of the Department of Psychology.[1] Meacham taught as a Fulbright scholar in the Fulbright program at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2003.[2]
Meacham taught 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students in courses on developmental psychology, childhood and adolescence, adult development and aging, history and systems of psychology, introductory psychology, American pluralism, race and racism, and world civilizations. He was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (1993) and the University at Buffalo Undergraduate Student Association’s Milton Plesur Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999). Meacham was promoted by the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York from Professor of Psychology to SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in 1999.[3]
Meacham initiated the study of prospective memory, a research subject in cognitive psychology and other fields, in the early 1970s. Prospective memory is information with implications for actions to be performed in the future, such as stopping at the store on the way home, and can be distinguished from retrospective memory, concerned solely with recall of information from the past. Meacham was the first to introduce this distinction, along with the term prospective memory, at a University of Rochester colloquium in December 1974 and subsequently at the Chicago meeting of the American Psychological Association in September 1975.[4] Prospective memory received wide attention when Ulric Neisser included the APA paper in his 1982 edited volume, Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts.[5][6]
Meacham argued that the essence of wisdom is holding the attitude that knowledge is fallible and striving for a balance between knowing and doubting. In a chapter published in Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development (1990) Meacham wrote, "To be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness. Wisdom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a corpus of knowledge or information in some specialized area, or a set of special abilities or skills. Wisdom is an attitude taken by persons toward the beliefs, values, knowledge, information, abilities, and skills that are held, a tendency to doubt that these are necessarily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaustive set of those things that could be known."[7]