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Leon Festinger Leon Festinger Leon Festinger (8 May 1919 – 11 February 1989) was an American social psychologist, perhaps best known Leon Festinger for cognitive dissonanceand social comparison theory. His theories and research are credited with renouncing the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior.[1] Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology,[2] although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations,[3] a principle Born May 8, 1919 he perhaps most famously practiced when personally New York City infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social Died February 11, 1989(aged 69) network theory for the proximity New York City effect (or propinquity).[4] Alma mater City College of New York Festinger studied psychology under Kurt Lewin, an University of Iowa important figure in modern social psychology, at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1941;[5] however, Known for Cognitive dissonance he did not develop an interest in social psychology until Effort justification after joining the faculty at Lewin's Research Center for Social comparison theory Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945.[6]Despite his preeminence in social Scientific career psychology, Festinger turned to visual perception Fields Psychology research in 1964 and then archaeology and history in 1979 until his death in 1989.[7] Following B. F. Institutions Massachusetts Institute of Skinner, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Technology Bandura, Festinger was the fifth most cited psychologist University of Michigan of the 20th century.[8] University of Minnesota Stanford University Contents The New School Life Doctoral Kurt Lewin Early life and education advisor Career Doctoral Bertram Raven Later life students Work Influenced Stanley Schachter Proximity effect Elliot Aronson Informal social communication Social comparison theory When Prophecy Fails Cognitive dissonance Legacy Works See also Notes References External links Life Early life and education Festinger was born in Brooklyn New York on May 8, 1919 to Russian-Jewish immigrants Alex Festinger and Sara Solomon Festinger. His father, an embroidery manufacturer, had "left Russia a radical and atheist and remained faithful to these views throughout his life."[9] Festinger attended Boys' High Schoolin Brooklyn, and received his BS degree in psychology from the City College of New York in 1939.[10] He proceeded to study under Kurt Lewin at the University of Iowa, where Festinger received his MA in 1940 and PhD in 1942 in the field of child behavior.[11] By his own admission, he was not interested in social psychology when he arrived at Iowa, and did not take a single course in social psychology during his entire time there; instead, he was interested in Lewin's earlier work on tension systems, but Lewin's focus had shifted to social psychology by the time Festinger arrived at Iowa.[12] However, Festinger continued to pursue his original interests, studying level of aspiration,[13] working on statistics,[14][15]developing a quantitative model of decision making,[16] and even publishing a laboratory study on rats.[17] Explaining his lack of interest in social psychology at the time, Festinger stated, "The looser methodology of the social psychology studies, and the vagueness of relation of the data to Lewinian concepts and theories, all seemed unappealing to me in my youthful penchant for rigor."[18] After graduating, Festinger worked as a research associate at Iowa from 1941 to 1943, and then as a statistician for the Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots at the University of Rochesterfrom 1943 to 1945 during World War II. In 1943, Festinger married Mary Oliver Ballou, a pianist,[19]with whom he had three children, Catherine, Richard, and Kurt.[20] Festinger and Ballou were later divorced, and Festinger married Trudy Bradley, currently a professor of social work at New York University,[21] in 1968.[22] Career In 1945, Festinger joined Lewin's newly formed Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. It was at MIT that Festinger, in his own words, "became, by fiat, a social psychologist, and immersed myself in the field with all its difficulties, vaguenesses, and challenges."[23] It was also at MIT that Festinger began his foray into social communication and pressures in groups that marked a turning point in his own research. As Festinger himself recalls, "the years at M.I.T. [sic] seemed to us all to be momentous, ground breaking, the new beginning of something important."[24] Indeed, Stanley Schachter, Festinger's student and research assistant at the time, states, "I was lucky enough to work with Festinger at this time, and I think of it as one of the high points of my scientific life."[25] Yet, this endeavor "started as almost an accident"[26] while Festinger was conducting a study on the impact of architectural and ecological factors on student housing satisfaction for the university. Although the proximity effect (or propinquity) was an important direct finding from the study, Festinger and his collaborators also noticed correlations between the degree of friendship within a group of residents and the similarity of opinions within the group,[27] thus raising unexpected questions regarding communication within social groups and the development of group standards of attitudes and behaviors.[28] Indeed, Festinger's seminal 1950 paper on informal social communication as a function of pressures toward attitude uniformity within a group cites findings from this seemingly unrelated housing satisfaction study multiple times.[29] After Lewin's death in 1947, Festinger moved with the research center to the University of Michigan in 1948. He then moved to the University of Minnesota in 1951, and then on to Stanford University in 1955. During this time, Festinger published his highly influential paper on social comparison theory, extending his prior theory regarding the evaluation of attitudes in social groups to the evaluation of abilities in social groups.[30] Following this, in 1957, Festinger published his theory of cognitive dissonance, arguably his most famous and influential contribution to the field of social psychology.[31] Some also view this as an extension of Festinger's prior work on group pressures toward resolving discrepancies in attitudes and abilities within social groups to how the individual resolves discrepancies at the cognitive level.[32] Festinger also received considerable recognition during this time for his work, both from within the field, being awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1959,[33] and outside of the field, being named as one of America's ten most promising scientists by Fortune magazine shortly after publishing social comparison theory.[34] Despite such recognition, Festinger left the field of social psychology in 1964, attributing his decision to "a conviction that had been growing in me at the time that I, personally, was in a rut and needed an injection of intellectual stimulation from new sources to continue to be productive."[35] He turned his attention to the visual system, focusing on human eye movement and color perception. In 1968, Festinger returned to his native New York City, continuing his perception research at The New School, then known as the New School for Social Research. In 1979, he closed his laboratory, citing dissatisfaction with working "on narrower and narrower technical problems."[36] Later life Writing in 1983, four years after closing his laboratory, Festinger expressed a sense of disappointment with what he and his field had accomplished: Forty years in my own life seems like a long time to me and while some things have been learned about human beings and human behavior during this time, progress has not been rapid enough; nor has the new knowledge been impressive enough. And even worse, from a broader point of view we do not seem to have been working on many of the important problems.[37] Festinger subsequently began exploring prehistoric archaeological data, meeting with Stephen Jay Gouldto discuss ideas and visiting archaeological sites to investigate primitive toolmaking firsthand.[38] His efforts eventually culminated in the book, The Human Legacy, which examined how humans evolved and developed complex societies.[39] Although seemingly the product of a disillusioned, wholesale abandonment of the field of psychology, Festinger considered this research as a return to the fundamental concerns of psychology. He described the goal of his new research interests as “see[ing] what can be inferred from different vantage points, from different data realms, about the nature, the characteristics, of this species we call human,”[40] and felt bemused when fellow psychologists asked him how his new research interests were related to psychology.[41] Festinger's next and final enterprise was to understand why an idea is accepted or rejected by a culture, and he decided that examining why new technology was adopted quickly in the West but not in the Eastern Byzantine Empire would illuminate the issue.[42] However, Festinger was diagnosed with cancer before he was able to publish this material. He decided not to pursue treatment, and died on February 11, 1989.[43] Work Proximity effect Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back examined the choice of friends among college students living in married student housing at MIT. The team showed that the formation of ties was predicted by propinquity, the physical proximity between where students lived, and not just by similar tastes or beliefs as conventional wisdom assumed. In other words, people simply tend to befriend their neighbors. They also found that functional distance predicted social ties as well. For example, in a two- storey apartment building, people living on the lower floor next to a stairway are functionally closer to upper-floor residents than are others living on the same lower floor.
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