Merton was the son of a prominent Columbia University social scientist, Robert K. Merton, who had studied the behavior of scientists. Shortly after his son was born, Merton pere coined the idea of the "self-fulfilling prophecy," a phenomenon, he suggested, that was illustrated by depositors who made a run on a bank out of fear of a default-for his son, a prophetic illustration. The younger Merton, who grew up in Hastings-on-hudson, outside New York City, showed a knack for devising systematic approaches to whatever he tackled. A devotee of baseball and cars, he studiously memorized first the batting averages of players and then the engine specs of virtually every American automobile.' Later, when he played poker, he would stare at a lightbulb to contract his pupils and throw off opponents. As if to emulate the scientists his father studied, he was already the person of whom a later writer would say that he "looked for order all around him.”