The psychologist behind cognitive dissonance once went undercover in a doomsday cult
Leon Festinger gave us cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding clashing beliefs, and he helped topple the stimulus-response model of human behaviour. He loved rigorous lab work but also insisted on studying real life, to the point of personally infiltrating a group convinced the world was about to end.
Festinger was born in Brooklyn in 1919 to Russian-Jewish immigrants; his father, an embroidery manufacturer, left Russia a radical and an atheist and stayed both. After a psychology degree from City College of New York in 1939, he went to Iowa to study under Kurt Lewin. Oddly, he took no social psychology courses there, finding the field's methods too loose for his taste. He worked on aspiration, statistics and decision models, and even published a study on rats.
During the Second World War he served as a statistician on a committee selecting and training aircraft pilots. In 1945 he joined Lewin's new Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT and, as he put it, became a social psychologist by fiat. A university study of satisfaction in student housing turned up the proximity effect: people form friendships with those who live nearby. It also revealed that friends in a group tended to share opinions, which led to his 1950 paper on how groups press members towards uniform attitudes.
After Lewin died, Festinger moved with the centre to Michigan, then to Minnesota and Stanford. Social comparison theory extended his ideas from attitudes to how people judge their own abilities against others, and Fortune named him one of America's ten most promising scientists. His theory of cognitive dissonance followed in 1957, carrying the logic of group pressure inside the individual mind. The American Psychological Association honoured him in 1959.
Then he changed course entirely, turning to visual perception in 1964 and, from 1979, to archaeology, history and human evolution. He died in 1989. Only Skinner, Piaget, Freud and Albert Bandura were cited more among 20th-century psychologists.
Source: Leon Festinger
