Welcome to a bonus video generously contributed by the Association for Psychological Science. What you're about to see is a conversation with Elliot Aronson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz—a wonderful school. Professor Aronson is a world renowned social psychologist and cognitive dissonance researcher who was once a graduate student of Leon Festinger's, and who went on to become the only psychologist who's ever received the American Psychological Association's top awards in all three major academic categories: teaching, research, and writing. In the video, Professor Aronson is interviewed by two other well known social psychologists: his son Josh who is also a professor, and Carol Tavris, with whom he coauthored the award-winning book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). Among other things, you'll hear Elliot Aronson describe how he first got interested in social psychology, what it was like to work with Leon Festinger, and how the famous $1/$20 cognitive dissonance experiment by Leon Festinger and Merrill Carlsmith almost ended up failing. I hope you enjoy this piece of social psychology history. >> I grew up in a town called Revere, Massachusetts, about 20 miles northeast of Boston. We are Jewish, and my family was really Orthodox, and we lived in a neighborhood that was virulently anti-Semitic. And in order to get to the Hebrew school, I would have to walk through neighborhoods clustered with teenagers who would frequently shout anti-Semitic slogans at me. And sometimes they'd push me around, and sometimes they'd even rough me up. And one of my earliest vivid memories is around the time I was 9 years old after one of these beatings, when I was sitting on a curb stone nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, and wondering why these people hated Jews so much. Were they born hating Jews, or did somebody teach them to hate Jews? And wondering why they hated me so much when they didn't even know me, and wondering, if they got to know me better and discovered what a sweet and charming little boy I was, would they like me more? And if they liked me more, would they hate other Jews less? Now, I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but these are profound social psychological questions. And ten years later, when I was a sophomore at Brandeis University, I wandered quite by accident into a class being taught by Abraham Maslow. Now, I didn't, at that time, I didn't know he was Abraham Maslow; I thought he was, you know, Professor Maslow. But suddenly Maslow started to talk about the psychology of prejudice, and he was raising some of the very same questions that I had raised when I was 9 years old sitting on that curb in Revere, Massachusetts. I immediately began taking notes, and the next day I switched my major from economics to psychology because I discovered, oh my goodness, there is a whole area of study dedicated to these very important questions. I hadn't known that before, and I switched. I became a protege of Maslow's. He was an inspirational figure, and he encouraged me to go on to graduate school. >> Well, well except that it's interesting, Brandeis' psychology department was not exactly typical of what mainstream psychology was doing. And there you go from studying with Maslow at Brandeis to working with Leon Festinger at Stanford. Would you like to talk about that transition? >> Oh, it was quite a transition. I didn't go to Stanford in order to work with Leon Festinger. I, I had never heard of him, and I assumed he had never heard of me either. We both arrived at Stanford at the same time in 1956, Leon as a brilliant young professor with a reputation for being a genius, and me as a very insecure first-year graduate student. Now, Leon came with a reputation for being a genius, but he also had a reputation for being a very harsh, even cruel, taskmaster. And he assigned a term paper, and I wrote the term paper and handed it in, and then a few days later he called me. He said, "Aronson!" He had a stack of papers on his desk, and he pulls one out. And he, he held it up like this, like, by the, his thumb and forefinger, >> [LAUGH] >> turning his head away, and said, "I believe this is yours." >> [LAUGH] >> And, as if he was holding a particularly smelly piece of garbage. So, I said, "I guess you didn't like it very much." And then there was a long silence, and then he gave me a look that was unique to him. I've never seen that look on anyone else. It was a mixture of contempt and pity. >> [LAUGH] >> It was sort of like, like a look like that, and the contempt was obvious, the reason for the contempt. The pity was—it looked like he was feeling sorry for me because I had been born brain damaged, >> [LAUGH] >> and, and he said, "Yeah, that's right; I didn't like it very much." So, I took the paper, and I slunk down the corridor to my own desk, and then I just, you know, didn't know if I could take it. And finally, I opened the paper, and there wasn't a mark on it. And so, I gathered up all my courage, and I took my paper, and I walked back into Leon's office, and I said, "Dr. Festinger, there must be some mistake. You forgot to tell me what I did wrong. How am I supposed to know what I did wrong?" And he went, "What?" >> [LAUGH]. >> He said, "You don't have enough respect for your own thinking, for your own ideas, to follow them through to their logical conclusion, and you expect me to do that? This is graduate school— this isn't kindergarten." So I took the paper, and I walked back to my office, and I sat there for a while. And it was an incredible moment of choice. My first impulse was to say, "Screw him. Who needs him? I'll drop this course, and I can work with someone— you know, and I don't need him. " And, my other impulse was to say, "You know, he is a very
bright guy, and maybe he has something that he can teach me." And then I reread the paper, and I tried to reread it through his eyes, and it was a sloppy, incomplete, rather dumb piece of work. So, for the next three days—it seemed like 72 consecutive hours—I really reworked that paper. And then I brought it to him, put it on his desk, and I said, "Maybe you'll like this one better." And to his great credit, 20 minutes later —he must have read it immediately— 20 minutes later, he came into the room where I was sitting, put the paper in front of me, sat on the edge of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Now, this is worth criticizing!" >> [LAUGH] >> So, I mean, Elliot—I mean, you have this guy, this tough guy and that humanist Abe Maslow, both of them as your mentors— how did they see each other? >> It's amazing. They hated each other. They couldn't stand each other. When Leon found out, he asked me, "Well, you know, how did you get into psychology?" And I told him about Abe Maslow, and he said, "Maslow?" He said, "That guy's ideas are so bad they're not even wrong," which means that you can't really test them. You can't really see whether they're wrong or not. And so for Leon—as the really hard, hard-nosed scientist—then they're useless if you can't put them to the test. That summer I went back east to visit my mother, and I dropped into Maslow's, and we were having lunch together, and he said, "Oh, by the way, who are you working with at Stanford?" And I said, "Oh, Leon Festinger." He said, "Festinger? That bastard! How can you stand him?" >> [LAUGH] >> So, there you are. I mean I—they couldn't have been two more different people, and I loved them both, and loving them both created a great deal of dissonance because they hated each other so much. >> What did you take from each of those guys? >> Well, Maslow was inspirational. What I got from Maslow was excitement about the promise of psychology, especially the promise that psychology could do good in the world, could, could change the world, could change people in a better way, could make them less prejudiced, less aggressive, more loving, etc. There was an excitement about those ideas. From Festinger, not only did I learn to do research on an interesting theory— the theory of cognitive dissonance was extremely provocative, especially in the early days when everything was wide open, and they were, the hypotheses were dropping out of the trees, right in my lap. It was so easy to generate hypotheses. But more than that, what I learned from Festinger was how to do it, how to do experiments. It required very special skills and very special training. You had to be a playwright. You had to be a director. You had to be an actor, because you had to sell the procedure, because the laboratory, as everybody knows, is a very sterile place, and a person comes in to be the subject in an experiment, he's in a sterile environment. What our job was, to embed that person in a scenario where he's not stepping back and making decisions about what would a person normally do in this situation, but where he's so embedded in the scenario that we constructed that he's behaving the way he or she would behave in his or her real environment if it were happening. And for that, you needed those skills —actor, director, playwright— so, you wrote a scenario that was powerful. Now, I remember the very famous Festinger-Carlsmith experiment that most of you probably know about. That's the one where if you lie about, if you do a task that's really boring and then you tell somebody else it's interesting, and you tell him it's interesting for $1, you believe, you come to believe that it's interesting, where if you tell him it's interesting for $20, you don't come to believe that it's interesting. Classic dissonance experiment—one of the two or three earliest experiments done on dissonance theory. Now, Carlsmith, Merrill Carlsmith, was an undergraduate at Stanford, and Leon had him working on this experiment, and he was running pilot subjects. And he came to me one day after he ran seven or eight subjects, and says, "You know, this is never going to work. The subjects don't believe it. It's really boring." And so Leon said to me, "Train him." Now, Carlsmith was a genius. He was a really smart guy, but he was really wooden. And what I had to train him to do was to sell that experiment to the participants. So, the scenario is, you're the— if I'm the experimenter, and a person goes through the experiment doing these dull things like packing spools and turning screws for an hour (it's really awful—it's like an industrial assembly line type thing), and then he is supposed to tell the next person waiting to be in the experiment (who's really a stooge) how interesting it is, okay, for either $1 dollar or $20. Now, you don't just say that to the participant. You sweat, you strain, you say, "Oh, my God! I, I have hired a person to tell the next person in line that the experiment was interesting, and he hasn't shown up, and that person's been waiting out there for 10 minutes. I don't know what to do." And you pace up and down, and then you finally say to the guy, "Would you mind doing that for me, and I'll pay you $1/$20 for doing it?" And you have to sell it by being the actor, by sweating and straining. And it took me about a week—it was like actor's studio to get— >> [LAUGH] >> to get Merrill up to speed. And as soon as he got it, then he ran a few pilot subjects, and it was working, and then did the experiment. And the difference between simply sleepwalking through the instruction and doing it in a dramatic way is the difference between the hypothesis coming out and not coming out.
