He married Patricia Enderson in 1950, and they raised five children. He received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1954 from the University of Southern California. His dissertation was entitled "The Prediction of Accident Rates from Basic Design Features of USAF Aircraft." His first job after graduation was with Douglas Aircraft Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he developed computerized methods for statistical forecasting of labor costs for building newly designed airplanes. He began work in 1955 at RAND Corporation and continued in 1957 at its offshoot, the System Development Corporation (SDC), also in Santa Monica, where he was head of the Language Processing Research Program until 1968.

Believability of characters has been an objective in literature, theater, film, and animation. We argue that believable robot characters are important in human-robot interaction, as well. In particular, we contend that believable characters evoke users' social responses that, for some tasks, lead to more natural interactions and are associated with improved task performance. In a dialogue-capable robot, a key to such believability is the integration of a consistent story line, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and sociocultural context. We describe our work in this area and present empirical results from three robot receptionist test beds that operate "in the wild."