G. William Domhoff

G. William Domhoff
Born (1936-08-06) August 6, 1936 (age 90)
Youngstown, Ohio, US
EducationDuke University (BA Psychology, 1958)
Kent State University (MA Psychology, 1959)
University of Miami (PhD Psychology, 1962)
Known forWho Rules America?
Scientific career
Fields
WorkplacesUniversity of California, Santa Cruz (1965-1994)

George William "Bill" Domhoff (born August 6, 1936) is is an American psychologist and sociologist who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College.

Domhoff is the author of Who Rules America? (1967), a widely cited analysis of political and economic power in the United States that has appeared in eight editions and has been used extensively in sociology courses.

Early life and education

Domhoff was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and raised in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland. In high school, Domhoff was a three-sport athlete (in baseball, basketball, and football), wrote for his school newspaper's sports section, served on student council, and won a contest to be the batboy for the Cleveland Indians. He graduated as co-valedictorian.

Domhoff received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology at Duke University (1958), where he finished freshman year tenth in his class, wrote for the Duke Chronicle, played baseball as an outfielder, and tutored the student athletes. As an undergraduate, he also wrote for The Durham Sun and received his Phi Beta Kappa key. He later earned a Master of Arts degree in psychology at Kent State University (1959), and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology at the University of Miami (1962).

Career

Domhoff was an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, from 1962 to 1965. In 1965, he joined the founding faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), as an assistant professor at Cowell College, where he was affiliated with both the Department of Psychology and the Department of Sociology . He became an associate professor in 1969, a professor in 1976, and a Distinguished Professor in 1993. After his retirement in 1994, he continued to publish and teach classes as a research professor until 2019. Since 2020 he has focused on research and writing, along with invited lectures.

During his tenure at UCSC, he served in a number of leadership roles, including chair of the Sociology Department, chair of the Academic Senate, acting dean of the Division of Social Sciences, and chair of several university and statewide committees. In 2007, he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award from the University of California, recognizing sustained post‑retirement scholarly contributions. In 2024, he was awarded a Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship, which provided financial support for his research in the 2024-2025 academic year.

Research and scholarship

Power structure research

Domhoff's early work focused on the study of elite networks, corporate power, and governance in the United States. His first book, Who Rules America?, argued that a relatively cohesive corporate‑based power elite plays a central role in shaping policy through control of major corporations, policy‑planning organizations, foundations, and think tanks.

The book built on earlier elite theorists such as C. Wright Mills, E. Digby Baltzell, and Floyd Hunter, and contributed to ongoing debates between elite theory and pluralist theory in political sociology. Subsequent editions updated the analysis to reflect changes in party politics, corporate organization, and policy‑planning networks. Domhoff later extended this line of research through archival and network‑based studies of corporations, foundations, and policy‑planning groups, as well as collaborative work on class, race, gender, and elite recruitment. His work has been discussed in sociology reference works, peer‑reviewed journals, and teaching literature. Four of his books were on the list of the top 50 "best sellers" in sociology for the years 1950-1995: Who Rules America? (1967, #12); The Higher Circles (1970, #39); The Powers That Be (1979, #47); and Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43).

Who Rules was followed by a series of sociology and power structure books including C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968), Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1974), The Higher Circles (1970), The Powers That Be (1979), and Who Rules America Now? (1983). Domhoff and his research assistant, Adam Schneider, maintain a website dedicated to power structure research, WhoRulesAmerica.net.

Dream research and psychology

Beginning in the 1960s, Domhoff collaborated with psychologist Calvin S. Hall on the quantitative analysis of dream content. He later became a leading proponent of treating dreams as a form of imaginative cognitive activity that is continuous with waking thought rather than as symbolic expressions requiring clinical interpretation.

Domhoff's later work developed the neurocognitive theory of dreaming, which integrates dream content analysis with findings from developmental psychology, lesion studies, and functional neuroimaging. According to this theory, dreaming depends on the activation of portions of the brain's default network and related systems, while higher‑order executive networks are relatively deactivated. Dreaming is said to be an intensified form of mind-wandering and daydreaming, which by now have been shown to be very similar in many ways to dreaming.

Most recently, he published Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness in April, 2026, which interweaves his neurocognitive theory of dreaming with a new theory of sleep, developed by a sleep researcher, and a new theory of consciousness, developed by a psychologist who studied emotions for several decades before turning to the issue of consciousness. The new theory of sleep, the adaptive inactivity theory of sleep, explains why all mammals sleep in varying amounts, and best explains why dreaming occurs during the sleep-onset process, in the several REM periods during the night, and in the NREM 2 (N2) sleep that occurs in the 1-1.5 hours before the spontaneous morning awakening. The new theory of consciousness, the multistate hierarchical model of consciousness, makes it possible to explain how and why fact-knowing ("noetic") dreaming consciousness differs from self-knowing ("autonoetic") waking consciousness.

In psychology and cognitive science, Domhoff's work on dreams is frequently cited in journals including Dreaming, Consciousness and Cognition, and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and is discussed in handbooks and monographs on imagination and consciousness.. His 2022 book on The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming won the American Association of Publishers' 2023 PROSE Award for the best book relevant to the "Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry" category.

He and his research assistant, Adam Schneider, maintain two websites dedicated to quantitative dream research: DreamResearch.net and DreamBank.net.

Selected bibliography

Who Rules America?

Dreams

References

  1. ↑ "Psychology Faculty". University of California, Santa Cruz. Retrieved 16 December 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Domhoff, G. William (February 13, 2014). "G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power". eScholarship.
  3. ↑ Gans, H. (1997). "Best-sellers by sociologists: An exploratory study". Contemporary Sociology. 26 (2): 131–135. doi:10.2307/2076741. JSTOR 2076741.
  4. ↑ Seidman, Derek (14 December 2017). ""Who Rules America?" After 50 Years: An Interview with Professor G. William Domhoff". Eyes on the Ties (LittleSis). Retrieved 16 December 2019.
  5. ↑ Domhoff, p.209 in Class in America: An Encyclopedia. by Robert E. Weir ABC-CLIO, 2007
  6. ↑ "G. William (Bill) Domhoff, founding faculty, and psychologist Calvin S. Hall, at the Cowell College fountain". UCSC. 1968. Archived from the original on 2017-09-16. Retrieved 2017-06-12.
  7. ↑ Domhoff, G. William. "G. William Domhoff: Power Structure Research retrospective (1994)." YouTube.
  8. ↑ Heilbroner, Robert L. (1968-01-04). "Who's Running This Show?". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 9, no. 12. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2026-06-25.
  9. ↑ Gans, Herbert J. (March 1997). "Best-Sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study". Contemporary Sociology. 26 (2): 131–135. doi:10.2307/2076741. JSTOR 2076741.
  10. ↑ Kirberg, Manuela; Windt, Jennifer (January 2026). "The kaleidoscope of bizarreness: The analysis of first-person-reports shows the relationship between dreaming and mind wandering to be complex". Consciousness and Cognition. 137 103965. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2025.103965. PMID 41370982.
  11. ↑ Domhoff, G. William (2026). Dreams, sleep, and consciousness: interweaving the neurocognitive theory of dreaming with new theories of sleep and consciousness. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-003-73296-9.
  12. ↑ Siegel, Jerome M (October 2022). "Sleep function: an evolutionary perspective". The Lancet Neurology. 21 (10): 937–946. doi:10.1016/S1474-4422(22)00210-1. ISSN 1474-4422. PMC 9670796. PMID 36115365.
  13. ↑ LeDoux, Joseph E.; Sorrentino, Caio (2019). The deep history of ourselves: the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains. New York City: Viking. ISBN 978-0-7352-2383-7.
  14. ↑ "Keynote Speakers: 2017 Annual International Dream Conference". International Association for the Study of Dreams.
  15. ↑ King, Philip; Bulkeley, Kelly; Welt, Bernard (2011). Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education. SUNY Press. p. 245.
  16. ↑ Domhoff, G. William (2018). The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-067342-0.
  17. ↑ Domhoff, G. William (2022). The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-54421-4.
  18. ↑ Domhoff, G. William (2022). The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming: The Where, How, When, What, and Why of Dreams. The MIT Press. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-37088-2.
  19. ↑ "ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS ANNOUNCES FINALISTS AND CATEGORY WINNERS FOR 2023 PROSE AWARDS - AAP". 2023-02-08. Retrieved 2026-06-22.