Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.
Bonus Video 2.1: A Conversation with Elliot Aronson
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Social Psychology
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WEEK 2: The Psychology of Self-Presentation and Persuasion
This week's goals are to: (1) learn how people explain their behavior and the behavior of others; (2) explore the link between attitudes and behavior; (3) understand what cognitive dissonance is and why it matters; and (4) gain some practical tips from the science of persuasion and social influence.
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Scott PlousProfessor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology
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.
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