Woelfel obtained his BA in Sociology from Canisius College in 1962, and an MA in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology, also from the University of Wisconsin, in 1968. Throughout his studies he minored in philosophy. After acting as an instructor at Canisius College and as a research associate at University of Wisconsin during his studies, Woelfel began work as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1968. In 1972 he moved to Michigan State University as an associate professor. Then in 1978 he moved to University at Albany, SUNY as a visiting professor, where he was then hired as an associate professor in 1979. In 1981 he was promoted to professor and in 1982 acted as chair of the Department of Communication. In 1988 he was director of research and founding fellow of the Institute for the Study of Information Science. Finally, he moved to University at Buffalo as professor and chair of the Department of Communication and has remained as professor. Woelfel was also senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, a Fulbright scholar in the former Yugoslavia, and Senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York. He received the Alise-Bohdan Wynar Research Paper Award from the Association for Library and Information Science Education in December 2001 and the Jesse M. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research in 2003. In 2011 he and co-editor in chief Ed Fink launched the RAH Press online journalCommunication and Science, in 2013 he published The Culture of Science: Is Social Science Science? and in 2018 he published Galileo and its applications: Tools for the study of cognitive and cultural processes.
Ideas
Woelfel's early work focused on attitude formation and change. At the University of Wisconsin he worked with and on the "Significant Other Project," a project originated by Haller as part of the larger "Wisconsin model" of status attainment. The Wisconsin Model is differentiated from other models of status attainment by its focus on intervening social psychological and communication variables. Rather than assuming that individuals all seek high status and are helped or impeded in their quest by access to resources, the Wisconsin model suggests that different individuals aspire to different levels of educational and occupational attainment, and that these aspirations themselves are formed by a communication process whereby "significant others" communicate their expectations for the individual to him or her in various ways. Although the role of significant others' expectations in influencing the attitudes of individuals had been long theorized, the Wisconsin Significant Other project was the first research to identify the specific significant others for a set of individuals, measure their expectations directly, and calculate the effect of those expectations on the aspirations of the individuals. In the process, the project developed the Wisconsin Significant Other Battery to identify specific significant others for any individual and to measure their educational and occupational expectations for him or her. This research later developed into a more general theory of attitude formation called Galileo theory. Woelfel was instrumental in developing computer software such as CATPAC, a neural network that analyzes text, and the Galileo suite of programs used to measure beliefs and attitudes. The Rand Corporation surveyed numerous social science approaches for measuring attitudes and indicated in a 2009 report that "One of the more interesting approaches to communication and attitude change we found was Joseph Woelfel’s metric multidimensional scaling approach, which is called Galileo. In many ways, Woelfel’s theory was the closest that any social science approach came to providing the basis for an end-to-end engineering solution for planning, conducting, and assessing the impact of communications on attitudes and behaviors." Tracing scientific thought via two ancient Greek networks, Woelfel's 2013 book further considers how concepts are formed first by the collective and then communicated to individual minds through interaction among individuals. In this book he argues the lack of progress exhibited in the social sciences is due to inadequacy of the underlying Athenian philosophy that continues to pervade the social sciences; he then shows how human processes can successfully be studied using the same methods used to study physical phenomena.
