And if your hypothesis is that the situation causes the guards to behave brutally, which that's what it was. That was the hypothesis. You don't tell them to behave brutally, because then then your independent variable becomes your dependent variable. You are instructing them to behave the way you're predicting they're going to behave. It's not good research.
Today.
It's an absolute pleasure and honor to have the legendary social psychologists Joshua and Elliott Aronson on the podcast. Elliot Aronson, who is Joshua's father, is ninety three years old and originator of the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative learning technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. Doctor Elliott Aronson is the only person in American Psychological Association history who have won all all three of its major awards
for writing, for teaching, and for research. In two thousand and seven, he received the William James Award for a Lifetime Achievement from the APA, in which he was cited as the scientist who quote fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life. Elliott's son, Joshua is also a prominent social psychologist, conducting pioneering research on stereotype threat with
his colleagues. Joshua is an Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU and directs the Mindful Education Lab, a group of psychologists and neuroscientists dedicated to using research to improve the environments and psychological functioning and learning of people confronted with stress. Both Elliott and Joshua are co authors of the book The Social Animal, which is a classic textbook within psychology. It was a real honor and delight to chat with them about their life and work. So that
further ado I bring you doctors Elliott and Joshua Aaronson. So, Elliott and josh so great to have you on this podcast on A long time admirer of both of your research. And you all are related, is that right?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, we are related. I'm the sun. I know he looks much younger than me, but I am.
Yeah. How does that work? Yeah, Ellie, you agree. It's so great to have you on. And you guys have spent your whole lives, you'd build your whole lives to the field of social psychology. Can you just explain a little bit to our listeners, like what is social psycho what are the parameters around that?
What is social psychology? It's the way people relate to each other. And the center of social psychology is social influence. How we influence each other? Uh and ways of influence. Even historical figures influence us. Parents influence us, teachers influence us. The media certainly influences us. And it determines prejudice, It determines love, it determines hate, It determines all the major aspects of human life and existence. And that's why I
love it. I love doing research in this area because it's enlightening. How do people relate to each other? What causes prejudice? Can prejudice be reduced by any interventions? Can education help? These are really vital issues throughout history and certainly as vital today as they've ever been.
Oh.
I might add to that that at the center of social psychology has always been considered to be social influence. But I think that it also embodies if you look at all the research that just the question of what is the experience of being a human being in a social context? What did it feel like to walk into a room and be of a different race. What does it feel like to be to have everybody think you
have a learning disability? What is it that kind of experience, whether whether the people are actually in the room with you or not. It's social psychology deals with the experience of that.
It really also tells us a lot about how the human mind works. By studying social psychology, we understand how people think, how they feel, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, how they justify their own behavior, they justify their mistakes, how a great many people, especially those in politics, tend to justify their mistakes, and how that
leads them to make deeper and deeper mistakes. The notion of staying the course sounds attractive, but the notion of digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole cognitively doesn't sound attractive. But it's the same process.
Yes, and you wrote you put a lot of this research into the seminal book called The Social Animal. When was the first edition of The Social Animal, Eliot, you were.
The nineteen seventy two it came out. I wrote it in seventy and seventy one, and it's now we're working on the thirteenth edition. Wow, it was a great experience to write it, and just a terrific experience to see how how long it's been a major text in the field.
Yeah, it really has been. And you're both co author. When you said we, it's the both of you are now co authors on it. Is that right?
Yeah, Well, Josh has been helping with me with it over the past, I don't know, fifteen twenty years or so.
I think I started when it was yellow. The cover changes color. That's the only thing that changes about the outside of the appearance of the book. There's no same picture, just changes color. So what when did the yellow one come out? That was the first one I help editing.
I think it came out when you were an undergraduate. That was the first.
Yeah, this book has been sort of in my This was the first. My first introduction to social psychology was hearing random words at the dinner table that didn't make any sense. Bestinger was a common for high frequency word dissonance, things like that. But then I when I got into college, I took his course and I got the book and it was like, Wow, this is what he's been up to all these years. This is really interesting, and it was Yeah, so that was what that was nineteen eighty.
Wow, well you mentioned Leon Festerer. There are a bunch of influences and mentors for both of you. From I have a little list here from Abraham Maslow, who's you know, influence on me too, fil Loombardo and mayhe rest in peace? Ram Das? How's Ramdas influenced you? Guys?
Ramdas was a very close friend of mine. We were in graduate school together at Stanford. He was studying developmental psychology and I was studying social psychology. He was a couple of years ahead of me, and we became very close friends at Stanford, and then he got a job. His first job was teaching at Harvard, and two years later when I got my PhD, I also was offered a job at Harvard in social psychology, and we renewed
our friendship at that time, and I was there. I started in nineteen fifty nine and I was there until sixty two or sixty three, right around the time that Ramdas, whose name was Dick Alfred at that time, hooked up with Tim Leary and they were supposedly doing a lot of research on psychedelics, mostly psilocybin and LSD, but they were having a very good time with it, and I was actually helping them design experiments on the effectiveness of
those psychedelics. But Tim Leary and I didn't get along very well because he was hell bent on departing from the science. If they had done some really good research in the early days, we would have been a lot further along in the use of psychedelics for psychotherapy and things like that.
They really got in the way.
It's going to be a lot of science now though, you know, John.
Really starting right now, but there was a lot of negativity around that.
Yeah, I was going to answer the Romdos question because I actually met him once in person, but I knew him through his books and stuff. But I got a taste of what he was like before I was born when I came across some of his papers. I was living in the Stanford Prison, not as a prisoner, but as Phil Dimbardo's research assistant at the time, and my office was in the Stanford Prison, and instead of commuting
home sometimes I would I just there. It gave me a real insight into how awful those guys must have had it when they were locked up in that prison, because it was dreadful, and this was before you had a cell phone or a smartphone to entertain you, and
the lights were hard. So one day there was a desk in there, and out of sheer boredom in the middle of the night, I ripped open one of the drawers and there was a stack of letters, and it was like, why would they save these letters written by this I would call him like a brown nosing student, And I was like, God, by halfway through the letter,
I did not like the writer of the letter. And then I looked at the signature and it was Richard Alpert no Way, who turned into Ramdas, who had really introduced me into meditation, and he kind of took me into that whole world which I now study in my lab. But to see that he had made this dramatic transfer in terms of his the way he looked at the world was just It was something I'll never forget.
Incredible. What about Kinky Friedman? Uh? You know, how do you know him?
Well? Kinky Friedman was my camp counselor when I was sent away to Jewish Boys camp in Curville, Texas. To be a jeer in Texas meant to be in a real minority. And so we all went away to camp in the summer, and this my camp counselor, was this guitar playing really charismatic fun to be a round guy. And everybody was calling him Kinky and his real name was Ritchie and he used to tell us stories at night. He was the first person outside of my family where
there was somebody like my dad. It was like the first kars Madic jew in Texas that I ever encountered, and I saw. I just think he's influenced me because I think a big part of educating people is to be excellent around them, and he was just excellent, you know, exposed kids to excellent. That's one of the big problems with the achievement gap that I see is that kids don't meet people they want to be like. And I
wanted to be like Kinky. And I ask students, how many of your teachers in school would you like to be like? And the answer is diminishingly small. It's going down. And so that to me is a real focus and built in creating schools.
People are excellent, completely agree and yeah and inspired. Yeah, I think that's the big key. I know we're jumping around topics a bit, but I want to return to the field of social psychology. Second, you know, there are a lot of topics that there are perennial favorites within any social psychology course. What would you say are some things that really haven't replicated over the years that you think we really should not include a staples anymore in a social psychology class.
That's you know, that's a good question for us, because we revise every five years and we have to decide what is true, you know, what is currently considered true, And it's been wrenching to pull some of those great studies out.
Some of the experiments can't be replicated for ethical reasons, like, for example, Stanley Milgrim's experiment on obedience. Nobody could replicate it the way Stanley did it, but somebody did do a version of that. But it's very hard to do ethically.
But it is a great experiment. I mean, it was really a terrific It's not a great demonstration, but then evolved into an experimental procedure, and I think the results really do hold up because Milgrim himself did it a number of times while he could still get away with
doing that. But another one is Phil Zimbardo's the Stanford prison experiment that Josh already mentioned, and that's I think that was an interesting idea, very very difficult to pull off experimentally, and it wasn't pulled off well, so that there are some serious methodological flaws in that experiment, and of course the ethics of it were extremely difficult because
most experiments in social psychology. Even every once in a while, students are made uncomfortable in a social psychological experiment, but they only last for an hour, and then after the experiment is over, we explain to them exactly what was going on, and we spend a lot of time with the participants helping them feel good about it. And in the prison experiment it lasted for six days and six nights.
You really can't do that to people, so ethically, it's uh, it should it has been forbidden, and it should be forbidden, and we don't do that in our textbook anymore because the results are very very shaky. Yeah, yeah, we.
In fact, I think that we had a tug of war about it, because I mean, I think that you know, some of the what you these are my dad's close friends in many cases, and to pull their study out of the narrative of the social animal was really really hard. Especially something that began the book. Phil s Embarno's book was it was that this is the power of the situation.
But then when you find out that it wasn't it, you have to you have to take it out, and then the question is do you mention it with regard to ethics? And I just didn't think there was enough learned by the experiment. It was just that it was sort of a it was such a mess methodologically that it's not clear it's telling us anything human nature.
Scott, that's a really good example of Josh influencing me, and he really did because I loved the idea of the experiment. I loved it what the hypothesis was, and I think it's the hype ofthesis is true, but the experiment didn't demonstrate that because it was deeply flawed. Because it's a very hard experiment to do. Phil Zimbardo was a very very close friend of mine, as you know, he died recently, just a few months ago, and it was difficult for me to see to see that the
experiment should be taken out of our textbooks. But Josh convinced me of it, and I'm glad we did. It's not a good representative study, not because Phil is a bad researcher. He's done some excellent research, but this was a very difficult one to do, and I don't think anyone could have done it well. So Phil has done great research, but the prison experiment for which he became very famous was not one of his good research.
Yeah, fair enough. Javan Bevel and Dominic Packer and their substact recently had a whole thing to stand for prison Experiment de bunking a pop war psychology myth. And what was really interesting to me is that they shared some of the audio recordings which we can now listen to and we can sort of try to make up our
own mind about things. And I think one key key aspect that a lot of it was good acting, you know, which the which even full the experimenters, you know, uh, you know, like not only full the experiments, the experimenters also asked them to act in certain ways, so they influenced the produce. You know, here's a quote, act as you picture the pigs reacting, you know, So there is that's social influence on the part of the experimenter right.
Now, it's it's it just shifted into becoming the Milgrim experiment. It's like, well, well these prisoners people do what Phil Dimbardo tells them to do, even if that it's not the right thing. I mean, it just shifted over into becoming an algur experiment.
That's right. And yeah, if your hypothesis is that the situation causes the guards to behave brutally, which that's what it was. That was the hypothesis. You don't tell them to behave brutally because you're independent variable becomes your dependent variable. You are you are instructing them to behave the way you're predicting they're going to behave. It's not good research.
Phil, you know. I was Phil Lombardo's TA and and and research assistant at at Stanford for a year and it's it's a little bit of a shame to me that he's known for the prison experiment, because there was a brilliance in his approach to doing experiments that I took to my graduate work and it helped me, like the things that were never written down about how to do a cognitive dissonance research experiment. Phil Limbardo was a master of that stuff and I think he got hot
the I think he got ambitious. He wanted to be he wanted to do something like Milgram and so, and they had their space in the basement, and he said, well why not. Yeah, yes, but I think that if you look at if you want to appreciate how great he was, read the research that experiments he was doing in the nineteen sixties, prior to the prior to the prison experiment. It's absolutely brilliant experiment experimentation. It really is absolutely brilliant.
And after I mean his work on evil, just his thoughts and his writings, his book wrote more recently and on heroes. I just I find that work incredibly fascinating and rich. Yeah, what about research replications that hit more closer to home in terms of it's your actual research, Josh, So what about research?
And yeah, yeah, So if I were still teaching, I always brought into my class the latest critique of my of stereotype threat because well, I would say, that's my That's one thing I'd really attribute to my dad, which is, you don't treat your projects or your theories like children. You make a clear distinction that these are not your children,
to be protected at all costs from all directions. And I met psychology who treated their theories that way, and they're like in the latest rally between them and it's like spen ten years and they're defending this thing. No, you've got it all wrong and this meta analysis is right, and you left out this variable. And I saw that and I was just like, I'm not going to be this way. I'm going to be more like Dad, which is to say, oh, I'm curious about what your criticism
is and not to fight. And so I bring that to my students because they need to have. That's the mindset I want to have. That's the growth mindset. In fact, in its best form is to say, give me the negative stuff about my work. So I don't If we're getting closer to the truth, I'm happy. If we're getting farther from the truth, I'm not happy. And I don't know if we're getting closer than the truth. I think that a lot of this is scholarly brinksmanship and it's
hard to see exactly where the truth lies. So this, for me, the replication crisis. For me, it underscored the importance of doing applied work because that's where it really matters. Does my understanding stereotype threat help me help that kid over there. It's either useful or not. And what I So, there are some senses in which the gender gap study is just totally not replicated, and I don't know what that means. And that's really a better question for the people that want the gender gaps.
Tell people what the gender gap study is.
Yeah, so it made it. It was sensational. It was It showed that if you just described a test as not showing gender differences, magically the gender gap would disappear. Even when we were at Stanford and looking at that data before is published, we had Claude, had a bunch of students trying to replicate it all over and I would get lots of calls, this just doesn't work. And I didn't know what to say because it wasn't my research that but I noticed that from the very beginning.
I think the race one is supposedly stronger. You know that it's more robust, it's held up, But I don't. I don't know. I just don't know. And I'm curious about if we're getting closer to the truth or not. And what I do know for sure is that people going into schools like Jeffrey Cohen, I don't know if you've had him on your podcast.
I know him. Yeah I know, but yeah.
So he he does, he doesn't what it's called an affirmation in thing. So basically the idea is you write about really central values to you and that bolsters you against the little threats that you may suffer in that context. What he's found in study after study is that kids that do that score better in grades, they feel better in the classroom, they feel their self esteem is more well grounded in that situation. But it mainly works when you measure stereotype threat and you find out that it's
a threatening environment. So I don't know what we mean by does the stereotype threat effect work. Maybe it doesn't work in all the experiments, but it's provided wisdom that now unlocks this other situation. So it brings me back to the value of a theory is like, the theory is useful if it helps you understand and remediate different situations, even though one of the studies or two of the studies that it involved in creating that theory may be
flawed and not replicate. That's how I would say it.
It's a wisdom that's well put by the way, I just want to disagree a little bit about one of the things you said. I agree with everything you said. You said the really important part of it is if it's applied research. I agree that that's really important, but I don't think it's any more important than research, basic research about replication and about getting it right, because if you get it wrong and it looks good, then you're leading other people down a wrong path, and you you
really can't do that. Now. I love what you tell your students about the importance of getting at the truth and how important it is not to get too wedded to your own theory or your own hypothesis in a particular experiment. But what I used to do with my students in addition to that, is put the fear of God in them by saying, Okay, let's really look at this procedure, and let's look at how we carried it out, and let's find whatever flaws we can find before we
write it out. Yeah, Because and the bottom line was, would you rather discover things wrong with it? Or would you rather somebody who doesn't like you will discover something that's wrong with it after it's published? And then that is I think that keeps people it keeps honest people even more honest, because that's the negative aspect of it.
You don't want to lead people astray. And I'm very pleased that I've been doing research I don't know for fifty years and I've done maybe one hundred and fifty experiments, and one or two were difficult to replicate, and a couple of times I didn't replicate. But for the most part, almost everything I've done where people have tried to replicate
it have been replicated. And for me, that's a tribute to the students I've had, the training I had on experimentation with Leon Festinger, who was a master and by the way, is somebody I disagreed with in terms of the theory and actually revised it a little. And Leon, to his credit, early on, was a nose at me because he felt I was narrowing his theory a little
too much. But sooner or later he came around, but it took him four or five years, but he came around and said it was a good change, it was a valuable change, and that was high phrase coming.
I think you need a lot of humility, especially in social psychology, because you have the stack. It's stacked against you, the odds are stacked against you compared to personality psychology. And let me explain what I mean by that. With psychology you get a lot of chances at it, it's called reliability analysis. Social psychology you get like one hour chance to find an effect, you know, in some in a lot of cases. And so you really need to
be humble and not. I mean, and and there are some psychologist I mean, I have deep respect for John Barges, but bar you know, at Yale, and but you know, and you know some of that research, you know, touching the hot coffee, you know, and and how he claimed it affects you, it hasn't really replicated that well. And it's not really his fault. I mean, it's not like
it's not personal. It's just it's hard to it's hard to find long lasting generalizable effects when individual differences matter as well, you know, And.
I want to I want to. I think that that John Barges and that style of research is a really good example of why it was great to be able to work with my dad on the on the social animal, because I bring him a study like that and I go, Dad, if you just hold a cup of coffee and it's warm, your your view of human nature changes, and and and he was like what it was just it set off
his bullshit to get there. And and I really feel like that he was vindicated by the fact that most of that stuff fell away, like it just shattered like cheap glass when when put to the test. And I'm not saying John Barge's stuff in particular, there was just a wave of that story. It was it was who can out cute each other with a with a cute finding if there's an American flag in the room, you'll you'll you know it does this. It was very seductive for a while to find the minimal and.
Mind you were not saying that John Barges or anyone else intentionally. Uh no, I mean these things can happen by accident. Happened doing the experiment in a way that
is not airtight and allows bias to come in. I remember when Chud Mills and I did the experiment showing that if people go through a severe initiation in order to get into a group, they liked that group better than the people who the control condition, that where people were randomly assigned to a condition where they only went through a mild initiation, because people are reducing distance by convincing themselves that the fact that they went through hell
and high water makes them want to like the group better in order to demonstrate that they weren't foolish or stupid by having done that. Now that experiment, In that experiment I did, I ran the subject, put them through the initiation, and then jud Mills interviewed them and gave them a question in to fill out without knowing what
condition the subjects were in. And after each subject, I asked him to guess which condition the subjects were in, and he was worse than chance, not significantly worse than chance, but slightly worse than chance. He couldn't figure out whether they were in the mild condition or the severe condition. And then we knew that we had a firewall between the independent variable, which is the manipulation, the important manipulation, and the dependent variable, which is how much they liked
the group. So he couldn't buy his tone of voice or the way he asked the questions. He couldn't possibly influence subjects in the direction of the hypothesis because he didn't know which condition they were in. That is fundamental experimentation one oh one but a lot of people neglect to do that, and that isn't out of uh, out of trying to make the day to come out the way you wanted to, just because people tend not to dot every I in crusts every T unless they're well trained to do that.
Yes, yes, this is all true. But there's also a human human element to this. I mean, as researchers, we are still human, and we do get excited when we've got a significant finding. You know, we we take it personally, we say, well, God, look how cool that is. And I'm the experimenter here. We can't we can't ignore that. And you know, I think this is a nice segue into growth mindset theory I had. I had a really
wonderful chat with Carol dwek on my podcast. Our listeners can listen to the whole chat, and I went, you know, study by study, and I talked about some of the newer meta analysis the effects suggest that it's not as ground you know, groundbreaking or as you know, completely transformative of our entire lives as she has worded it in some of her books. And I asked, Carol, I said, you know, doctor dwek Uh, given these findings. I just
told you, do you still stand by this quote? And I quoted her saying, you know, growth mindset effects and pervades every aspect of your life and is the most important thing out of everything. She says, yes, I still stand by that, And I think it's interesting, you know, like I don't know what to do with that. I have deep, deep respect for her and her research, but what at what point do we start to kind of revise some of the narratives we have around the pervasiveness of our of our constructs.
I think, when I think, what point I think when you know, I don't, I don't. I can't account for Carol's maintaining that position or you know, despite all of that, except for the fact that I think all of us have difficulty letting go of ideas that we cherished. And that's why I say, you got to be really careful about distinguishing your ideas from your children, because you really should not mistake the two of them. And what I have found is that growth mindset is an interesting thing
to talk about, interesting language. I think I did a couple of really good studies on it, and I mostly left it behind because I tend to get bored, and I don't. I think I got tired of reviewing papers of people doing things that I had been planning to do. And so when you're in a big when you're in a field that's really hot, and both stereotype threat and growth mindset got really hot. And I have dyslexia and
I can't read quickly and stuff like that. It just sort of I realized that I couldn't follow every study that came out and be the person that knew all of it. What was more interesting to me was to go into schools and to see if I could use this and how what I what I feel like happened with that work is that and this also happened with the affirmation work too, is that the demonstration got confused for the concept, and so it'd be like if so
what what? I often found myself getting attacked for well, how dare you do this? And and I'm like, I'm not doing this in schools. I'm not the idea should be in school. So, for example, I don't believe that all because Jeff Cohen showed that writing down your strong values shows that affirmations can reduce stereotype threat, I don't believe that it's the answer to all of our educational problems.
That's such a far leap. What I do think it means is that the relationship between the teacher and the student matters greatly. And growth mindset and an affirming relationship and a relationship with the teacher who believes in your growth capability very important. But those are two very different things. What you want is an elegant solution that combines all
the things that kids need. And this is the way I think of my dad's Jigsaw work, which is, you know how I came up with the idea of the elegant solution because of Jigsaw, which is the elegant solution takes three or four problems and it solves them with one really neat trick, as they say on the Internet. And in the case of Jigsaw, you had kids beating each other up because you're mixing races together. You have the underachievement of the black and Latino kids who are
being now busted into nice white neighborhoods. They're really frustrated, and so the superintendent cries for help to his social psych professor, who was Elliot Arens and says, well, you bragged a lot about the power of social psychology and class can you help us out now that the kids are beating each other up? And they were mainly trying to get the kids to stop beating each other up.
He developed this cooperative education thing and it solved like three problems at once, and it didn't do it by saying, oh, self esteem is important, Let's give them self esteem boost. He said, let's build a system that increases self esteem, empathy, and achievement all in one thing. And I love that because education suffers from the same problem that nutrition does. They find out, oh, growth mindset is good, so let's focus all on this one little thing. It'd be like saying,
vitamin C is good, let's make a pill instead. There's an elegant solution. It's called an apple. You eat it and you get fiber and vitamin C and all of those things. That's the Jigsaw classroom. It gives a lot of nutrients to what kids need, and it's not that one little manipulation. It's a sort of an elegant solution. Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense. I love a systems approach, and I think that's what you're hinting at.
Yeah, Yeah. I think when you have ten different psychologists promoting what they found in the lab rushing in the schools, teachers are just confused. They're just confused.
You know.
It's like, well, I'm trying to address their learning style and induce a growth mindset, but not have too much comped. It's just very there's too many. It's like taking a bunch of different vitamin pills when what you should do is eat a good meal.
Yes, can tell me some more of the elements of this meal that you're doing with the school that you're starting. So what do you see some of the core elements and tell me a little bit about how you're incorporating them to this new school.
Josh, thank you for asking that, because I think I mentioned Jigsaw just in passing and what I grew up in that system of being in a school that was just frustrating all my needs, and Jigsaw came in and
made it good for some of the kids. I was kind of in the control group, so it was louthy in my in my control group, kids in the in Jigsaw were learning to like each other, learning to respect each other, see across racial lines and get along and interact even outside the classroom, and so that was like an entry into my ledger of Oh my god, if you just organize things differently, you can bring out much
nicer qualities in children. So my school it's a it's actually the oldest boarding school in America, and we bought it because it was struggling and the vision was to take the world's poorest children and mix them together with the world's wealthiest children. And this is my I have a billionaire friend who is making this all happen, and so he's asked me to help him design this school.
And it's really a school based on social psychological principles, and Jigsaw gave me the confidence that it would work. So in social psyche, I think of there being a bunch of social motives and we all see them in front of us. It's like, you want to belong, you want to understand what's going on and have an understanding
with people. You want to be in control of your environment, so you don't want to be pushed around, and you want to be able to trust the people around you, and you want to have a sense that you matter that if you weren't there, people would miss you. All of those things and the work you're doing makes a difference. Most schools frustrate most of those motives, and that's why
we're seeing a lot of the problems. You go into a school where everybody feels like they belong, they understand what the work they're doing, and they understand why they're doing it. In other words, they understand the importance of what they're doing. If they feel like they trust their teachers, they get some autonomy but also connectedness to other people.
In this one school I worked with, the school went from the absolute bottom of the test score distribution to the top in about four years because they got a new principal who had been trained in psychology. Wow, and it just and I mean, these were dirt poor kids. So that's I gave a talk about this, and the billionaire heard the talk and he brought me in to help build this school. That that model, I think is
really important. So what it's the elegant solution to that problem is like Jigsaw, is that you get kids working together on not just learning some material, but by producing a three dimensional something that serves another human being. So in the in the case of the school that I was studying, kids learn math by raising chickens and there is so much math involved in raising a chicken that
you wouldn't get from a worksheet. You have to figure out how much the feed costs, how much hues can sell the eggs for repairs, and then at the end of it, you deliver eggs to poor people. So kids are learning math, but they're also learning that they matter in the world, and they understand why they're doing it, why math is important. And this is the kids that get the highest test scores and go on to be go to college. And the chicken now they keep the
chickens as pets, and the chickens lay the eggs. I have lots of pictures of kids. Anytime in this school that you're upset, you can go out into the place around and pick up a chicken and hold it. And there's other animals too, and and so that that's what's truly exciting, is that the when I said before that theories are really great, and when our theories are challenged by replications, that's when I want to go into the schools and say, hey, does growth my if I really
believe in this kid, will it really help them? Because that's where that's where I think that's the final arbiter of whether something's useful or not.
Yeah, that's very good. And I think that a big message of a lot of the growth mindset research, which I talked about with doctor deuec All my podcast, is that the greatest effects happen in the kids who need it the most. And I think that a big message of yours as well, Josh. You know, if you if you average out, you know, in the general population, and you find a small effect, it's it's covering up some of the most important nuance, you know, like underprivileged kids,
kids in poor neighborhoods. I mean growth, you know, developing, cultivating growth and mindset in face in the face of challenges, and that's particularly important.
Yeah, absolutely, Scott. And you're talking you're not You're kind of talking about children too, of the sort that I'm used to working with. And a lot of these kids learn from their parents will tell them that they're stupid. You know. One of the reasons that this school in Appalachia was so successful is that they their teachers had so much influence on them because their parents were so dysfunctional.
It's I've never seen poverty be such an advantage in my life, but it was because the teachers were just such stable characters that believed in the kids, and often the parents were in jail and telling the kids that they're stupid, and so growth mindset for these kids is a revelation, you know, like I can really be something that that I think is the beautiful side of it.
That is beautiful. And Josh, you know, one of the things that I got out of your the description as you told it, she's really quite beautiful, is the importance of having a billionaire sit in one of your lange. Yeah, and I was so envious, Like, I think, how come I never had a billionaire. And the reason it's so important for education is that, as you know as well as I do, schools are very slow to change, very
slow to innovate. Maybe it's prob because there's so many people out there with innovations to sell or to give away that they get overwhelmed by that. But they're very conservative places.
And change slow.
But they have a billionaire building with school for you where you can do things like that. It's marvelous.
It's even if it's even slow then though, because you're you're turning around, trying to turn around a culture and trying to change people who've been you know, all of us have been indoctrinated into a model of schooling that we'd be very afraid to depart from. So what in in my search is to build the perfect school. I've visited hundreds of them, and some of the most the best working schools you most parents, most parents would never
put their kids in because they're so radical. But those are the schools that have changed my mind about education because they're so radical. Yeah, so I can tell I could go on forever about it, but this is really I this is really what. So I know you wanted to talk about the science of this stuff, and so.
Oh no too, this is great too, because well you have a whole lab on the mindful. Mindfulness is the particular focus of yours as well in the schools, Is that right, Josh?
It is because you know, you just you travel through schools and you wait for a certain feeling. So you know that. I don't know if this is published, but somebody did a study that most people can tell whether they'd want their kid in a school within like ten seconds of entering the school. You know, like, we're very attuned to what's good for our kids and what safety and things like that. So I looked around to find a certain feeling, and the feeling is God, I wish
my kids could go to school here. This is just so nice. And I'd often find that feeling in the most unlikely places, you know, like in Appalachia, for example, where the kids are really poor, or but the coolest was the school where the kids don't have any classes. My favorite student that I've ever met in my life all my years of teaching, had one math class in her whole life and one English class in her whole life. She was self taught in everything, and meeting her changed
everything about my ideas about education. And so I'm glad I had that. I couldn't recreate her experience, because nobody wants to go to send their kids to a school where there's no classes. But we have to open our minds to the fact that we may have gotten human nature wrong.
I love that. Well, your lab is called the mindful Educational Lab. Yes, why do you think mindfulness is so important for kids?
Well, so it's not called the It's called the mindful education Lab. So mindfulness is part of what we do, but it's really in the broadest sense, we approach educational problems mindfully. So what we do free of charge for any school who calls me up with a problem. I put my students to work on it. We figure out can this problem be solved by looking at the literature
and saying, yep, you've got an X problem. We're going to give you X solution, or is it a problem that we need to do research on And so that it's a sort of need driven, service driven laboratory. And it's been wonderful because my students and the needs of the community determine what we work on. We have a research agenda that sort of trots along in the background. But the really exciting things are when I get a call from the school and they say, doctor Aaronson, thirty
percent of our boys are suicidal. What can we do? And then we go in and talk to the boys and figure out what's going on with them and my students and I learn an incredible amount that way. It's so much better than when I had a research agenda like confirm growth mindset right, Yeah, you know that it's it doesn't It didn't. That didn't produce the happiness or
the understanding that I was looking for. Sure, But we do teach children mindfulness because it's the the best classroom I ever saw in my life, was it must have been. There were kids from every different background. It was a magnet school in New Haven. There were black kids from the ghetto. There were kids girls and he jobs. There were Chinese kids, Japanese kids, and they were lovely to each other, and just I was like, what is going
on here? And they were doing mindfulness and I remember just to drop my jaw and I was just like, this is Martin Luther King's dream. These kids are being so supportive. And I remember them talking about the awful things that happened to them in their daily life, like at home in New Haven, and they'd bring it in. Here were eleven year olds like acting like they were in some kind of support group. And it was all
because they did this mindfulness stuff together. And so you know, I've been I helped schools put in mindfulness programs by getting to know what works. And so that's what we do, is we mindfully approach their educational problem. And sometimes I tell them don't do mindfulness. That's the mindful solution is to say don't do mindfulness. It's not going to work.
It's not the answer in all situations. I'm really glad you said no, I'm really good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it was Maslow who said, wasn't it. Maslow said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah, that's so. That's so describes academic academics who want to go into the field, have theory, will travel, have intervention, will travel. I just don't. I don't think our kids deserve that.
They don't. I want to now just transition a little into what makes a good teacher because both of you have won teaching awards and are considered very esteemed wonderful teachers. So I think you're in a good position to kind of inspire other teachers out there. So what do you think makes a good teacher?
Well? Teaching at a university, there are I think three kinds of teaching that we do, and they all require They each require a different set of skills. Their stand up teaching when you're lecturing to a group primarily, and I used to do a lot of that. Like at the University of Texas, I taught an introductory social psychology class that had six hundred students in him and I
taught that year after year. Then there's what I call sit down teaching, which is a seminar where the skill involved is mostly shutting up, not talking, and asking good questions and helping a student hone their answer to the question to bring them closer and closer to a full understanding of all of the ramifications of the question that was asked. So the first one is you have to be an interesting person if you want to hold the attention of six hundred people. And there's a lot of
aspects to that. And it's not a matter of standing up and telling jokes like a stand up comedian. It's a matter of talking about something that you think would be interesting to those students. This story. It could be funny, but not a joke just to warm up the audience.
I love that. I think what you what you would talk about is a story about real life that you think might grab their attention, but is about something that you're going to lecture on some social psychological principles and research that will stand as the underpinning to that story, so that when they leave the lecture hall, and in many cases twenty or thirty or forty years later, when I get letters from former students of mine, they'll remember
the story and will remember the principles of social psychology that undergirded the story. The linkage of the complex abstract idea with research to the story is what is what helps it become embedded in their consciousness. And I love that notion because my aim for students who are taking a large introductory class with me is not just to teach them some social psychology, not just to hope they all get a's in the cost because they really know
that stuff. To teach them something about themselves and about life that may stay with them for their entire lives. And that that is a very ambitious goal, but it's one that I have and I still have, and I get information from my students that that in many cases
I've achieved that. Now. The sit down kind of teaching, or when it's a seminar, is to bring out ideas from students and to help them hone their ideas so that they may it may be kind of a somewhat sloppy idea to begin with, but if you continue to ask the right questions, you can get them to create
the answers. And the third kind of teaching, of course, is being a mentor to taking a graduate student under your wing and really training him to do the things and to be excited about stuff that you yourself think is important, and that you reach a common interest with the students so that it's something that he or she finds important and it's something that you yourself are excited about. And those three skills are very different and yet very important and require sensitivity to the student.
I see why you Yeah, I see why you've won so many awards, Elliott. That was really well put. In fact, I do want to say you are the only I don't know if you know this, you're the only person in the one hundred and twenty year history of the APA to have won all three of its major awards for writing, for teaching, and for research. So if this was the NBA, you would be Michael Jordan.
I just do what I do, and it's so exciting for me. My mentor, Leon Festigo, when he wanted me to do a research project with him before I was leaving Stanford to take my first teaching job, and I said no, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I could use the money, but I really need to start preparing my course I'm teaching in the fall. He said, what you're going to prepare for teaching with your skills as a researcher, why you know, why do you want to
spend time preparing? And you know, that was one of the few things I disagreed with him on, and that was I took the teaching very seriously as a major part of my job, and I devoted a lot of time and energy to it. Leon didn't agree with that, but he wasn't perfect.
Yeah, finally comes out Lee infesting imperfect human.
But you are, but you are, You're perfect.
You're a perfect child of Maslow infesting her. If they could have gotten together and had a baby, it'd.
Be a well, that is a great compliment. And by the way, it's the Maslow influence in me that made me want to go into psychology. Maslow was my mentor when I was an undergraduate, and we really hit it off together, and he was an inspirational guy and his idea. He was a lousy scientist. He didn't know how to do science, and I didn't know at the time that he didn't know. He was a philosopher, more of a
philosopher and anything else. But he was inspirational and his belief was that psychology can and should be used to improve the human condition. And that's that's why I went into graduate school. When I was in graduate school, I met this guy, Leon Festinger, who didn't give a fig about applying what we know to the real world. What he was interested in, and only what he was interested in, was discovering how the human mind works and how you how you can how you can improve the how you
can improve experimentation. So I started laugh going into psychology because I wanted to do good. And then I met Festinger, and what I learned from him and got really excited about, was how to do good research, how to do good experiments. And then, Josh, when you talk about the jigsaw classroom, that to me is a combination of doing good and
doing good research. And I think what we discussed earlier, very early in this discussion, Scott, is why it's important to get it right when you're doing it, not to not to publish the damn thing and not to become famous, but to do the experiment in a very careful way and get it right so that people who want to follow up on the research you do can expand on it and to prove you wrong if you happen to be wrong with it, and that can happen to and then when you really know it's right, Yeah, to bring
it into the real world, to bring it.
Yeah, thank you for this wisdom, Josh. Do you want to add anything quickly about teaching? What makes a good teacher from your perspective?
Yeah, it was interesting listening to my dad talk about the three kinds of teaching, and I agree with that. I try to combine all of those into every course I teach because students need it. That I became a much better teacher. I was already pretty good, but when I started studying schools that worked and how they worked, I started applying some of these the lessons of kindergarten and first grade to my colleagues class and it started
working really well. And the thing that I learned about these great schools was that they try to learn everything they can about each student, and then knowing them makes a better teacher for them. And so I would I would get my students to fill out surveys with their favorite music and stuff like that, and I would listen to the songs that they were listening to. So I
felt like I was preparing for a role. You know, like I need to know, because, especially as I'm getting older, these students are getting more and more different, and so I ask them questions like what problems do you lie away at night thinking about? And what problems would you like to be able to solve with psychology? And so I I then I write my lectures around their concerns. Me harder because you know, half of my students think about why don't more people like K pop? You know?
And I don't know how to you know, empathize with that so much? How do you like? Okay, well, you're lucky to have such, you know, such problems to worry about. Yeah, I think it's really challenging now to teach. And what I try to do is provoke my students and model
the way to be as a human being. And I would say the most important thing I do is I try to get them to define what the good life is and then show and show them that social psychology has a tremendous amount to say about living a good life. Like you said, fame and fortune are not the answers to being happy. We know that because of social psychologists have studied that. So what should be the good life?
And what would you what. I asked them, what what reminder would you tattoo onto your body to remind you who you are and what your purpose is. And by the end of the course, I want you to have a well thought out tattoo.
I love that. And you're talking about economic fortune. I personally feel like I have so much social fortune in my life that is is just It's like it makes my life so meaningful, like I have. I just I love my friends like you like you guys.
Yeah to me, that that's what you were. Some people learn that too late in life, that it's not about the money.
Yeah. For For the last part of today's interview, I'd like talking about death a little bit. Josh. You had a year of living deathly, and I just talk a little bit about what that, what that means.
So I was invited to give advice about how to about the good life, and it was like a Janue thing, and so there were rabbis talking about, you know, reading a year of reading, and I thought living deathfully because I've studied. I studied with a Buddhist teacher who I caught just at the right time, right after Trump was elected. NYU was like you could have it was like a bomb had been dropped on the place and my students
didn't show up to class. I found myself in a Buddhism class that like the day after, and the Buddhist teacher goes, I understand how you were all feeling. I have felt this way in my life, but I don't feel that way now, even though I wanted a different outcome. And he goes. You want to know why he goes because every day I spend ten minutes thinking about how all this is going away. It's just temporary. Everything you think is is permanent. It's going away. So get used
to that feeling. And I felt myself getting lighter when I and so every day after my meditation, I spent five minutes going, this may be the last day of my life. Wow, this may be the last time I pet my dog, kiss my wife, call my father. It lends an incredible poignancy to life and I it's weird because social psych was wrong on this one. It didn't capture what the Buddhists and the Stoics were telling us
about contemplating your death. It was going mortality salience. This makes assholes other people and I that I don't There may be some truth to that experimentally. But for me, in the mindset of appreciate every moment, there's nothing like death to remind you of that that you're mortal, and so it takes away a lot of the fears that I had, and a lot of the worries about trivial stuff.
And I think that's that's something that I try to give to my students, even though the idea that they're contemplating death at their young age is it really works better when you're older, Yeah, and you truly feel that the time is running out.
Our mutual friend Abraham Maslow talked about this, you know, the post mortem life. He said, I wish everyone could live a post mortem life, which is what he experienced after his first heart attack and he still lived. He said, Wow, I wish everyone could experience this kind of transcendence. Yeah, this transcend state of a very day consciousness. Elliott, can you give me some reflections here on death?
I hope so. I don't know. I I don't know where to start. I grew I had a brother who was two and a half years older than I am, and he died of cancer when he was thirty two years old. And my father died when he was in his forties, and so I came out of both of those experiences really with the belief that I might not have a long time to live. And so it made me very conscious of dying. And I had a young
family at the time that my brother died. I had Josh was just gone right around the time that my brother was dying, and I have four kids, and I was, thank God, how much time do I have left? And it really focused me on exactly what Josh just was talking about, and you might not have much time left. Really enjoy what you're doing, and what do you enjoy doing? And it was being with my family, telling the kids' bedtime stories, being with my wife and really enjoying her,
and teaching and doing research. And so I did everything I had been doing, but with more awareness and more intensity. Now I'm ninety three years old. I never expected to live this long. I've lived almost three times as long as my brother, who was my first mentor live. Wow, So I'm really feeling I'm really feeling it. And you're long enough, you'll live long enough. And your friends keep dying. Leon Festinger died, Abe Maslow died, Ned Jones died Phil Zimbato,
Lee Ross. I'm a lot of them, and I've been giving an awful people who aren't famous but who are old, good friends of mine. And I've given a lot of eulogies in the past ten years. And there's one nice thing about giving a eulogy. It makes you really think about another person's life and reflect back and think of your own. When I hit ninety, when a couple of my kids asked me, well, what should we do for
your ninetieth birthday? That's a milestone. I thought about that and I thought, you know what, every time I give a eulogy, people would come back to me and say something like, Gee, what a great eulogy. It's too bad Ned wasn't alive, but you have to say about them. It's too bad that Leon wasn't alive to hear what you have to say about him, et cetera. And I thought, what I want is a living eulogy. What I want is for all of you to sit down and write
a eulogy as if I had just died. Tell me what I meant to you, Tell me what was important about me to you. And then my daughter in law, one of my daughters in law she's a very active, very powerful person. Wrote to all of my friends, to some of my students, and they all wrote things are made videos and stuff like that. And I've seen a blogy now every once in a while and it's really
an exciting process. Every time I'm feeling down, the eulogies perked me up and make me much more conscious and much more aware of what's important to me.
Oh, I love this well. I hope this episode as well is a tribute to you you you know and uh and really offers that purpose as well to our listeners. You know, A big part of living a good death. A big part of good death is a good life. You've you've certainly lived and are still living a very good life. And a big part of good life is having transcendence. And sometimes that takes the form of beautiful children. So tell me a little bit about about Are you proud of your son, Elliot.
I'm proud of I'm proud of Josh a lot. And Josh is the only one of my sons who became a social psychologist. And a lot of people said, oh, that but a courageous thing to do. I never thought of it as courageous, but I thought of it as difficult, and Josh has done some beautiful work. I love his attitude toward research. I love his attitude toward teaching. I've seen him teach, I've heard him lecture at convention. He's terrific,
and his research has been very, very good. And I like what I love what he's doing.
Now, thanks for the urergy man.
Yeah, but I have four kids, and I love what each of them does. And the one thing they have in common that it just makes me bubble over with happiness is that none of them think that money and fame is really important. None of them believe in that shit. Both of them. They're all doing things that are good for humanity. Yeah, I'm touched by all of them.
That's a big part tresidents, Josh, in thirty seconds or less, just send us off. You're telling us what you're proud of about your father.
I'm proud that he could have become one of those those celebrity academics, and he always resisted it, and so I teach that to my students. I go two questions that people automatically say yes to that they should think, can I have more money? And do you want to? Do you want more money, or do you want more fame? If you really look at it, you should think very careful about those things. And so yeah, I'm proud that
he's the real deal. He's authentic, and that he cares about people, and that he's created a legacy of doing research that is blends the best of Maslow with the best of Bestinger and made something that I hope the field will return to and over and over again. That's what the Social Animal is about, is a reminder that the field used to do some really cool stuff and it wasn't online. Thank you so much, guys, Thank you.
It's very fund You asked a very good question. This was a great fun