Elliot Aronson || Not by Chance Alone

for taking the time to chat with me. Good to be here, Scott. You have been through a lot. You live through the Great Depression, World War Two, the McCarthy witch hunts, the civil rights movement, and the years of sexual liberation. All that must have had an impact on your work in social psychology. I would guess, Yeah, what do you think attracted you to social psychology? Do you think when you were a little kid, do you remember just being fascinated with the way people treated each other

and things relating to social dynamics. Yeah, well, you know, I grew up in a small city population about thirty thirty five thousand, Revere, Massachusetts, just northeast of Boston. It was a blue collar city and it was virulently anti Semitic, and we lived in a neighborhood I think we were the only Jewish family in the immediate neighborhood. And so my first real contact with social psychology was getting pushed around or beaten up on the way home from Hebrew

school at night. So I sort of got acquainted with the dynamics of prejudice when I was like nine years old, when these gangs of you know who were like fourteen fifteen years old were sort of pushing me around and calling me dirty Jew. I was wondering why they hated jew so much, 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 began to like me, would that mean that they might hate other Jews less

than they already did. And of course I didn't realize it when I was nine years old, but these are profound social psychological questions, and so I was very curious about that, about how it is that I didn't do anything to harm these kids, and yet they had a

built in hatred for me. And I think that is an incredibly interesting dynamic that you know, I wasn't happy when it was happening, but it really got me interested in how the human mind work, and whether prejudice is built in or whether you have to learn it, and questions like that, which are powerful questions, which are you know,

where the answers are not clear. But when I went to college and I decided to majure in economics because my father was unemployed during the Great Depression and couldn't support a family, I didn't know what to major in. I was loving college, but I didn't know that I had to declare a major, and I thought, well, i'd major in something practical. You know, I've learned something about the way the economy works, but I wasn't particularly liking it. And then I happened to wander into a class by

Abraham Maslow. He was teaching introductory psychology in nineteen fifty one or fifty two, whenever that was. I walked into the class because I happened to be with a fellow student or an attractive young woman that I was trying to impress, and I wanted to sense some time with her, and she had that class or I went in with her and I sat there and as I was talking about the causes of prejudice, and th oh, my god.

For the first time, I realized that there was a whole area, a whole science of psychology where you could ask questions like that and try to answer them, and that really excited me. I don't know how it is with other people, but when I was nineteen years old, the word psychology the only thing it meant to me was psychotherapy. If someone said do you want to be a psychologist? I thought that meant do you want to

do psychotherapy? And even today, you know, some of my relatives, my aunts and uncles, when I first became a psychologist, they wondered, how come you don't have clients, you know? And so I didn't know there was a whole area of psychology like to study something like prejudice, that that's all I stuff in social psychology. And there wasn't a lot of that at Brandeis. I mean, people the faculty speculated about things like that, but there was no one

doing social psychological research there. And it wasn't really until I got to Stanford and met Leon Festinger that I realized what the promise was, what one could really do as a social psychologist. But I was interested in the area, and Maslow really ignited that interest because there was a kind of his notion of humanistic psychology overlapped with things like why people hate each other or love each other? And how does that come about? And he had a

fresh perspective on that. Elliot Aarnson, WHOA. I mean, can we just step back a second here. First of all, Maslow, you went to his lecture and you suddenly forgot about this beautiful young girl that didn't end up being the one you married it. But but so his lecture must have been really captivating. I mean, I thought I could hold hands. It was a big room that had about one hundred and fifty students in it, and I thought if we sat in the back of the room, we

could hold hands. But after about ten minutes I dropped her hand. I fout of taking notes because Maslow was much more fascinating than she was. I mean, I just to you, yeah, I mean, this is just everything you've said, is just all these series of events. You know, you do talk about the role of luck in your book, you ask even and you set up your fastening autobiography as saying was a lot of this luck wasn't you know, what are all these factors that go into the calculus

of this. You know, you may maybe if it weren't for that inspiring moment, it might have taken a little bit longer for you to realize there was a field dedicated to this stuff. But am I right in saying that Maso was partly responsible for finding your wife? Yeah, in a different way, in a different way yet, right, Well, yeah, we I mean I knew who she was, Vera, but

we traveled in different circles. I mean I was with the dumb guys and Vera was I saw her at a distance and thought she was pretty smart and traveled with you know, her friends were really the intelligentsia of a class. But when I decided to major in psychology and I switched from economics to psychology, Maslow hired us, both of us because I think he considered us the

top students. He really liked her. She was a better student than I was, and he hired us both to sort of be his secretaries, file clerks and things of that sort. Maslow, you know, it was a very small psychology department. There are only four or five faculty members, and Maslow was the chair, and they didn't even give him a full time secretary, so he could You know, both Vera who we came, My wife and I were

on work study scholarships. In other words, they gave us a scholarship of that covered most of our tuition, but for women board and stuff like that, we had to work, and so Maslow was able to employ us as his I used to type letters for him and file things and stuff like that. And that's how Vera and I

got to know each other initially. And then occasionally he would invite us over his house for dinner, two or three times in our senior year, and I thought it was because he wanted to bring us together a little more. Vera was dating one of the graduate students in psychology, and many years later, after we were married for a long time, Vera and I went back to Brandeis to give a talk. I went to give a talk, and this may have been around nineteen ninety and Rick Morant

was there. He had been one of our teachers. He came to my talk and he said afterwards, when we were chatting, he said, at the beginning of every psychology faculty meeting, they brought up the issue of who's ahead in the Vera sweepstakes, Elliott or this guy Norby who had been dating and that was pretty funny. That was the topic of the day. Who was Vera smiling at more favorably? At this time, I didn't even know we

were in competition, but apparently the faculty did. And I think Maslow kind of thought that I might be good for Vera. He liked me, but he really loved Vera. I think Vera was his absolute favorite, he thought. He once told me Maslow did. There was a party at Maslow's house and I had little too much to drink, and I used to have a pretty sharp tongue. It

was kind of sarcastic. And the next day Maslow, on a couple of days later, math Will call me into his office and gave me a little lecture saying that I had to be a little more careful of the way I related to people. And I remember this very distinctly. He said, you bite. He says, you don't have any venom. He said, I don't think you're out to really hurt people, but you have a very you have a sharp bite,

and you really ought to control that. And that was the major interpersonal advice he ever gave me, and I think it was good. I think he was right that my way of being at that time was very self protective, and I would I could be pretty tough talking and I took that advice very seriously, and it was it

was well meant. But he really loved very He thought that she was very special, and she was very She had she had and still had as an incredible serenity about her that I think that Matheow saw and really cherished about her. Well, it sounds like you got very lucky with there. I hope you mean that in the broadest a general way. I do I do with Matheow. With There. College was a time, more so then than now,

where you know where a person. It was a period of time where you found your vocation and your mate, and if you were lucky, you found the right vocation and the right mate. And that I was incredibly lucky in that it was the right vocation and the right

mate for me, incredibly lucky. That's why you know the title of my autobiography is not by chance alone, because I really do believe that life progresses by a series of lucky breaks or unlucky breaks, and then it's not by chance alone, a person needs to figure out from

all the things that are happening. I'll just talk in terms of myself, but of all the things were happening to me, growing up in poverty, growing up in an anti Semitic neighborhood, suffering from that, getting an education, and discovering social psychology, all of those things with a series of breaks that you needed to figure out, is this the path that I should be taking? Is will this

lead somewhere? So you get breaks, good breaks, bad breaks in the as I fumbled my way through life and stumbled my way through life, how do you take advantage of whatever breaks you get. At the beginning of my senior year, when I started to apply to graduate school, I thought I would want to be a clinical psychologist.

I thought that was a career pathway that I could follow, And I applied to a number of schools in clinical psychology and was admitted with a fellowship to a few of them, and then decided about in January of my senior year that I really didn't want to do psychotherapy for a living, and so I turned them down. And

then I didn't know what to do. I thought I would be a teacher, you know, I thought my goal would be to get a master's degree somewhere and maybe try to teach at a prep school, you know, something a little bit above a public high school. But I didn't really have a clear notion of what I wanted to do with my life, and so I just followed my nose and it led to interesting places. Yeah, it's amazing that that one lecture you attended by Masos to

happen to be the one that he talked about discrimination. Yeah, I bet he saw in you some similarities to himself, because you were painfully shy as a young man, as as a boy growing up, and so was he described being painfully shy as well. And is that right? You used to dream of being Captain Marvel. Now. One that I dreamt about is that on Saturdays in those days, there was since there was a double feature at the movie theater and a cereal and Captain Marvel was in

a cereal form. I read him in comic books and saw him in the movies. So I used to tie a towel around my neck like a cape and say the magic word shazam. That turned a little innocuous shy billy Batson into this really strong powerful guy who could fly Captain Marvel. And I was a shy kid and very I didn't have a lot to say. And I come from a very large family of aunts and uncles. My mother was one of ten children, my father was one of seven children, so I had like seventeen uncle

our aunts, and we had these big family meetings. And I was this very shy little boy. And so I came home from the movies once and I got on the edge of my porch, which was about ten feet off the ground, and I said Shazam, and I leaped off, and I didn't land right, and I kind of strained my leg and ankle. And so the next day was a Sunday, and there was a family meeting and everybody was there and I kind of go limping in and

what happened to Elliott? And somebody said, oh, he thought he was Superman and jumped up and thought he could fly off the porch, and they all started laughing, and I remember sitting really embarrassed and feeling like crying and saying, not Superman, Captain Marvel, you know exactly. It's a portant difference that actually is a very poor difference for the

fact that you got hurt. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, look, there was the pivotal moment where you kind of realized that you weren't destined to be painfully shy your whole life. And it seemed like when you became a mic man on the boardwalk, you started working on the boardwalk, and then you got upgraded to the mic man. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that story. Yeah.

I had a lot of jobs on the boardwalk when I was about fourteen years old and fifteen and sixteen, and one of the jobs was working at the Pocarino table it's just giving change. And one night, the mic man, who was usually a guy in his forties, so it was a rainy night and it was late and we were supposed to be open until about midnight, but it was like eleven o'clock and it was hardly anyone on the boardwalk. So he said to me, Hey, kid, why don should take over the mic And I thought, Wow,

this is my big chance. So I got up there and I had I had actually thought about this for a while, and I liked the mic man, and I liked the way he worked. It was he's very important because there's a loudspeaker outside, and if you can attract people into that place where the pokermino tables were, the sooner you break the ice. If people look in and there's nobody. It's like if you walking by a restaurant and you're looking for a place to eat, and at

seven point thirty at night it's empty. You don't want to go in there. You think, ow, it's probably a cam me place. You walk by and there's nobody in there, you don't want to come in. So the mic man, if he's good, will break the ice early by getting a few people in. West there a few people and it begins to exponentially multiply. So it was totally empty. So I had this in my mind. I had this spiel worked out. Walk right in, sit in, get a seat, get a ball, play poker, poker frinicle five cents. It

takes five cents to play and win a game. Come on in and play poker. Hey, there are three kings on table number twenty seven. Pay off that luck he went to. Hey there's a full house on table number fourteen. Pay off that luck they went to. It was nobody playing, It was empty, But I kept that spill going because it was fun and what could have hurt. A few people looked walk by, heard what I was saying, looked in, there was nobody there, started to laugh and then came

in and started to play. Then I kept going, and then a few more people came in, and the next thing I knew, they were like it seemed like half the people who were on this whole expanse of the boardwalk were in the Polkerno room playing pokerino. The guy who ran the place was a guy named Abe Shaw who was blind, interestingly enough, and he had a reputation he could come into that arcade and he could guess

how many people were playing pokerino. If there's like thirty five tables, he could tell how many people were playing by the sound of the balls and the sound the money going into the slots and stuff like that. And he said, it's like eleven thirty at night, rainy night. And he saw it was busy suddenly, and he said, who's on the mic? And I said, I was that kid parents, and he hired me on the spot. I was upgraded from sixty cents an hour to two and

a half dollars an hour to be the relief mic. Man, and that was Now that didn't make me feel unshy. It made me feel if I was behind the mic, sitting up in that it was like a raised little booths. I didn't have to show myself. I couldn't talk in class in junior high school. In high school, I was I used to stammer and turn red if I was called on, but behind the mic when I was sort

of anonymous. Later I learned that a lot of actors like Henry Fonder were shy people, Jimmy Stewart, shy people who you who's their acting because they're playing a role to get out of themselves and momentarily overcome their shyness. And in retrospect that I think that's exactly what I was doing. Yeah, And a lot of your research is, you know a lot of things that fascinate you. Big theme that fascinates you is how to how people can change. Yeah,

So I think that that's really right. It's really interesting. I want to talk about your brother Jason for a second, because it looks like he was really protected you in a lot of ways, and you really, I mean it shows in your book how much you admired him, and you know, even on the one hand, you wanted to exert your independence, may be almost embarrassed that he had

to fight the bullies. At the same time, he still very very much looked up to him, right, Yeah, well he was I think everybody feels almost everybody feels that way about their big brother. He was two and a half years older than I was, and he was big and strong and smart and a very good athlete, and very had a lot of self confidence. And he did

protect me from bullies a little bit. And also he taught me how to play baseball and how to dribble a basketball and all of that stuff that was very important. I became a pretty good baseball player. I actually it's the one thing I excelled in when I was a kid, and I became a better baseball player even than my brother. But he was the one who got me to really take it seriously, so that we'd be playing on this baseball field that was just full of pebbles and little

rocks and pieces of glasses. I was terrible field in a slummy area, and he would hit me ground balls, and what I would try to do stand on the side and maybe backhanded, because I was definitely afraid that the ball would take a bad hop and hit me

in the face. And he taught me to get in front of the ball and to move my body always to get is if I could to get in front of the ball, because if the bolt like a bad hop, chances I would hit me on the chests land in front of me, and I could still pick it up and throw the guy out. So I used to play shorts up and second base and I really got good at it, and Jason did that for me. Jason, but

Jason was superb in the family. He was the guy who was full of jokes, and he could sing, it could dance, he could do all kinds of things, and so, like I mentioned family meetings before, when we entered a family gathering, it would be Hey, it's Jason's here, Hi Elliott, And so I kind of resented that a little bit, but he deserved it. He was great. And the big thing he did, the greatest thing he did for me was get me to go to college. I didn't think

I was smart enough to go to college. I was doing pretty well in high school mostly be's nc's, a very few a's, more c's than a's, so I was probably had a B r B minus average. And my father died when I was a junior in high school and we didn't have any money anyway, and he died in debt, and the family. Jason was already in college in the very first class that was admitted to Brandeis University when Brandeis first opened, and he loved college and

he was excelling in college. And he was a sophomore when my father died, and I was a junior in high school, and the family got together and they decided that as long as Jason was already they were worried that they would have to support my mother and my sister and me, and they didn't want to do that. So as I look at it now, they thought, okay, Jason can continue in college, but Elliott, when he graduated from high school, should go to work at the Ford

Motor Company that was nearby. And I thought that's probably a good idea. You know, they paid well. And Jason in effect said, screw that, Elliot's going to college. And then they said, well, what do you mean, who's going to support your mother and sister? And Jason said, my mother can work. She worked before she was married, she can work now. She never worked while she was married. But she could do that, and she did, and he

was absolutely right, and she thrived when she worked. And I didn't know whether it was a good idea or not. At the time, I didn't feel like I could be a good student, and I wasn't a good student in high school because I was bored and the teachers were lousy and it was a but when I did I ended up at Brandeis also with a work study scholarship. The only reason I went there was because it was

the only place that offered me a scholarship. And the only reason they offered me a scholarship was because they just were just starting and my essay he scores were really high, even though my grades were only mediocre, and they took a chance on me, and I went to the one place that gave me a scholarship. And going there was very interesting because my brother who had preceded me through grade school, junior high school, in high school, who as a star student, also preceded me at Brandeis.

And at Brandeis he was he you know, was the first president of the first class at Brandeis. He was the editor. He ended up being the editor of the yearbook. He was the director of the first variety show and all of that stuff, and then I came in his footsteps and needed to excel in my own way. And it's a very interesting phenomenon. It sounds like he was kind of your guardian angel. He was in a lot

of ways, in a lot of ways. Well, let's fast forward to your PhD work at Stanford and this amazing encounter you had with Leon Festjer, who, by all accounts he was a bit of a jerk, right, No, No, he was nothing like a jerk. Okay. He was brilliant and very tough and very demanding, and he could be He was very aggressive. He was an aggressive guy who if you didn't do things the right way, he could come down on you like a ton of bricks. It was. He was very demanding. He had very high standards, and

he demanded that everybody meet them. And he was scary. Everybody was afraid of him. The other professors were afraid of him, certainly the graduate students were, and they, most of them kept were smart enough to keep away from him. So when I was a first year student at Stanford, he and I Infestinger and I arrived at the same time, he as a young full professor and me as a very rather insecure first year graduate student, and I heard a reputation and I didn't want anything to do with

that guy. But there was a guy who was a fourth year graduate student. Name was Richard Alpert, who later became known as Baba Ramdas. He's the guy who with Tim Leary, opened the Age of Aquarius with psychedelic drugs. And in those days, in the nineteen fifties, he was a graduate student in developmental psychology and I had met him earlier and we became friends. And he said he

came over the house once for dinner. Vera and I lived in a small cottage and we had a baby, and Vera was pregnant with another baby soon to arrive, and Dick came over and said, yeah, you know, it was the first year of students. We've got this new guy, Festinger who's supposed to be brilliant, and nobody is signing up for a seminary. Only three or four students signed up, and none of the first year students signed up. I

think they're all afraid of him. And he said it in a very point way, and I thought, oh, he's talking to me. He thinks I'm scared of this guy, and I want to impress Dick. So I said, well, I'm going to sign up for that thing. And I signed up for it. And everything i'd heard about him was true. He was brilliant infesting her and also nasty

if you came in the least bit unprepared. You know, there's a lot of reading, and he was supposed to really read it and think about it, and then he'd come in and ask you a question, and if you couldn't really answer it in a reasonable way, he would. He was like a prosecuting attorney, and it was really difficult. He would reduce people to tears, and it was a great learning experience. A because he was developing the theory of cognitive dissonance at that moment, and that's what we

were dealing with. And B because out of a feeling of self preservation, if nothing else, you really had to do the stuff you had to. You couldn't be sloppy. You couldn't be sloppy thinking. So I'll give you one example of festing her inaction. He assigned a term paper and I wrote it. I've written many term papers, and I figured I could do that easily enough. In the meantime, I'm waking up at four o'clock in the morning to

feed my baby, and so it was. It was a tough life, so I didn't do as good a job as I might have done. Anyway. I'm walking past his office one day on my way to the THA Room teaching assistant room where I had a desk. They're like five or six deaths there, and I was a teaching assistant and introductory psychologia. I'm walking past Leon's office and he calls me in aaronson and he signals to me, and I said yeah, and he says, stack of stuff on his desk and including seven or eight of us

in that seminar. And he pulls my turn paper out from the stack and he holds it up between his summer and forefinger at arm like, turns its head away and hands me the paper and says, I believe this is yours, all right? So I took it, and I said, I guess you didn't like it very much? He says he gave me a look which anyone who ever worked with him knew that looked very well. It was sort of like it was like what it was a mixture

of contempt and pity. Right. The contempt is that he's contemptuous of you for wasting his time, and the pity is he feels bad for you that you were born brain damage, felt like and he said, that's fact. I didn't like it very much. So I took the paper and I walked to my down the car to where my office was with it. I had a desk, and I was really afraid to open it because of all of the marks and you know, corrections and arrows and

the shit that I would find in there. And I opened it and there wasn't a single mark on it, nothing blank, just the way I handed it in. So I thought, you know, what is this? So I took the paper and I gathered all my courage and I walked into his often excuse me, doctor Festinger. But there must be some mistake because you didn't write anything on my paper. How am I supposed to know what I

did wrong? But then he gives me this look again, contempt and pity, and he says, what, you don't have enough respect for your own thinking to follow your ideas through to the illogical conclusion, and you expect me to do that? This is graduate school Sonny not kindergarten. Wow. Took the paper, walked back to my office, called up Vera, and I said, hey, honey, you know those cartons we

haven't finished unpacking yet. Don't bother. I may not be here for very long, thinking you know, what should I do? Should I withdraw from the seminar or should I Then I reread the paper, and I tried to reread it through Festinger's eyes, and it was a half baked, lousy job. So I figured, Okay, I can do better than that. And it was sort of like a real conflict situation because I really hated his ass and was afraid of him, and at the same time he was clearly brilliant. Everything

his reputation was absolutely right. He was a terrible person and brilliant, and I thought I can learn something from this guy. So I really worked on that paper for three or four days, very hard, and then I walked into his office, put it on his desk and said,

maybe you'll like this one better. To his credit, he must have read it right away, because twenty minutes later he came into where I was sitting at my desk, put the paper in front of me, sat on the corner of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder and said, now this is worth criticizing. Oh man, you know, yeah, a lot of grad students may have, you know, totally shrunken from that experience. And you kept going, well, you know,

the temptation to shrink away was high. But what you know, what he said at that moment was so important to me because it was it was it's funny. I love to tell that story. I actually told it. When he died, I told that story, and his memorial service, his wife, his widow, asked me to give the eulogy. And when I told that story, there were about twenty people in the audience that practically fell off their chairs laughing because similar things happened to them when they worked with Festinger

over the years. I bet. But what he was telling me beautifully was if you're not willing to work to your full potential, then I don't want to have anything to do with you. But if you give me everything you have, then I will give you the most precious thing that I have, which is my critical ability, and we can work together. But I don't want anything to do with you unless you're going to really do it. And that was a great lesson to me as a

student and eventually as a professor. That and you know earlier when we were talking about Maslow, Maslow really believed that his time was absolutely precious and he doled it out very, very carefully. I think Festinger believed the same thing, but it was in a different way. And Festinger was really scrutinized the person he was working with. And if you met him halfway, if you gave him everything you had,

he gave you everything. He had everything. You could call him at three o'clock in the morning and say, hey, I just got an idea, and he would be right there with you. And I just felt enormously privileged for a while. I mean, at that moment we became teacher and student. Within a year we were like colleagues, and within a couple of years we were close friends. It was the meshing was incredible, not by chance alone. It was by chance that Dick Albert came over the house

for dinner and challenged me to take that seminar. It was not by chance that I hung in there and that I took the ship. And I thought, you know, there are some tough Thawns around this particular rose, but the rose is worth it, and let's see how hard I can work, and let's see how far this takes me. And Festinger was brilliant. He was a great mentor not to everybody. There were a lot of really smart, good graduate students who Festinger had nothing to do with because

they didn't meet his standards. But once you met them, the rewards were enormous, absolutely enormous. And the guy was so critical and so discerning that if he thought I was good, then that was a huge boost to my self esteem. Then I guess I must be good. I remember when I was finishing up at Stanford after three or four years, and I was in the job market and I had offers from some really great universities. And when I said to him, you know, I don't know

if I'm good enough for this the big time. And he said, well, you know, you've done three really good experiments. You know where that puts you among social psychologists in the field? About it the ninety nine according to his standards. Yeah, I thought, wow, And he doesn't bullshit. Okay, Yeah, he said it's probably true, and I get and of course it is true. How many what's the Irish number of

really good experiments that anyone does. You know, some people publish a lot, but if you take away the chaff, if you take away all the crap that people do just to get promoted and just so you know, it will count up. Some people do a couple of hundred experiments, but there maybe the really good ones have done six or seven really good experiments that change the way we think about the field. That's rare. What do you make of the so called replication crisis in social psychology that

everyone's talking about in the field. Well, I think it's real, but there are so many threads to that. One one thread is that a lot of people. One of the things that I'm worried about in social psychology is the tendency what I call the tetification of psychology. And that's not edification, vacation. I know. You mean people are trying to do cute, easy, charming studies that will get them on the TED show that they can talk about in

fifteen minutes in a charming way. Like, for example, you know that if you get into the power pose, it really affects your testosterone level, et cetera and makes you more successful. That is very you know, that is flashy and attractive, but it will get you on the Ted Show and maybe sell a book, but it's not If it doesn't hold up, it's because not because people are intentionally dishonest, but because they may cut a few corners and not really do the experiments the way they in

the in the tightest possible way. And if that doesn't if that those things don't replicate, then that's a problem. And I think we need to train our graduate students. This is a tough one. This is a tough sell. To root for the null hypothesis. That is the way to go. If you're a researcher, you root for the null hypothesis, and you, as the experiment should be the hardest one to convince that there is a significance level there.

Then and your actual hypothesis is valid. But if there are errors, if there are mistakes, if there are things in there that aren't exactly right, you want to be the first to know that, so you ought to. If you're sure of it, you don't have to replicate. Let people who don't believe it try to replicate it, and that's the best kind of replication anyway. If they are motivated to prove that you're wrong. They're going to do the experiment in a very tough way, and so replication

is really important. But what's even more important is doing it right to begin with. And forget about getting tenure, forget about looking good, forget about getting on the Ted Show. Make sure ever comes out of your fucking laboratory is as good as it can possibly be and can stand up to scrutiny. Yeah, for sure. It seems like the cognitive distance theory has stood the test of time in

Fester's theory. Now you have done work yourself on this theory, which, by the way, I think it's incredible that he sent you his manuc he let you read his manuscript before it was even published. He kind of asked for your feedback. I think that's incredible. But you've done some of your own work on that, and in this book you wrote called mistakes were made, but not by me. You kind of apply cognitive distance theory to some practical issues more

so than he Didvestnger did. And one of the issues you tackled was why so many people can do such harmful, foolish, self defeating our cool things and still sleep soundly at night. Could you unpack a little bit how cognitive distance theory helped sheds the light on that. Yeah, you know, I don't know anyone who says I'm an evil person. You see, and I'm doing these evil acts. People do things and then they justify them. And the scheme I developed is

it's like a shape, like a pyramid. And let's just take a simple example that any college student will understand readily. Let's assume that you're taking an important exam and you know that if you do well on that exam, you're going to be able to go to graduate school, and if you don't do well, you probably won't, and you really are highly motivated to go to graduate school. When you study hard for the exam and you walk into

the exam and you absolutely pull a blank. You look at the questions and it's as if it's from a course you never took before. And yet the other people seem to be writing away and they're answering the questions and everything, and you really panic, and you look around and you notice you have to be sitting behind the smart person in the class, who also happens to have large legible handwriting. The question is do you cheat or

don't you cheat? And if there are two people taking the exam, and let's say that initially, if you ask them about their opinion about cheating, let's say they're almost identical. They both believe that you shouldn't do it. But it's not the worst thing in the world. There are a lot of things worse than that. That it's a victimless crime. And so they both are sort of in the middle, like at the top of the pyramid, but they are a little bit apart, and one of them decides to

cheat and the other one decides not to cheat. Whichever way they go, they are doomed to experience cognitive dissonance. The person who decided not to cheat is giving up going to graduate school. That's the cognition I really wanted to go to graduate school, and I could have gone there if only I had cheated. Is dissonant with the cognition I didn't cheat. The person who decided to cheat saying, I'm an honest, honorable person, and yet I did this

dishonest thing. So how do they reduce dissonance, Well, they both feel the same way about cheating to begin with, but once they make their decision, it's almost as if they're sliding down two opposite ends of the pyramid, so that the person who cheated is trying to convince himself that everybody does it. A person would be really a fool not to do it. It's a victimless crime. There's

no problem with it. It's I'm not hurting anybody, and I'm going to be a terrific professor or a doctor, a lawyer or whatever if only I have the chance, and I will pay back to society, and everything is great, and their attitude to cheating softens tremendously, so that if you get to them a few days later, they think

cheating is nothing. It's everybody does it. The other guy is motivated to convince himself that cheating is a terrible thing to do because my decision has cost me going to graduate school, so that a few days later, or even a few hours later, their attitudes are enormously different. And this is the aspect of distance theory, which I call self justification, which means that people can do all kinds of things and justify it one step at a time.

Congressmen can accept what amounts to a bribe from a major corporation in order to push through legislation which favors that corporation, and he convinces himself that he really did it for the public. Go would one step at a time. This is how distance works in the real world, how it works. And my aim in writing that book was to drag Festing, or maybe kicking and screaming, into the

real world. Festinger didn't care about the real world. He treated experiments in social psychology the way someone would treat a chess problem. How do you solve this interesting problem about how the human mind works? Not how do you account for what congressmen do? How do you account what police do in police interrogations? How they can get innocent people to confess to a crime that they didn't even commit so they can close the case. How does that

come about? How That's what the book is about. And there's a lot of ways to apply this theory, a lot of things that happen in the real world that Festinger was uninterested in, but that I'm very interested in. And I think that, you know, I really loved writing that book because it does bring what was to some of us, or a lot of people who are non social psychologists, would seem like an esoteric thing about how the mind works but it brings it right into their

everyday life. Oh absolutely. And I'm wondering how do individual differences play a role here? I mean, what about people who like really don't have guilt at all, Like you know, like what about like psychopaths, psychopaths of cognitive distance? No, yeah, they has that been studied? I don't know it might be, but it's almost perfectly clear to me that it takes somebody like our president. He doesn't even seem to remember what he said last week, are yesterday or an hour ago?

I mean, it doesn't seem to register. And I think that that it's hard to know where his self esteem level is. I think that I regard him as having a self esteem that's both high and fragile, meaning that he thinks he's terrific. It's not based on very much as oppoth to someone who has high self esteem that's really well grounded, that he's really done a lot and

self esteem is very high. But maybe, like we were talking before, like Abraham mas Well or Leon Festinger or something like that, who's really solid in their regard for themselves because it's based on a lot of really good evidence. I think that Trump's behavior smacks of someone who really thinks he's terrific but is not sure, and so anytime someone disagrees with him, that person becomes his enemy. Anytime someone says something nice about him, he wants to embrace

that guy. This is a guy who really is very needy, needful of things that help him. Bold stir his high opinion of himself, which isn't based on very much except that he seems to have a lot of money. So I, uh, well, tell me about this other study that you kind of you know, there's this Dale Carnegie's book is very famous and he has all this advice, and one of his advice on making friends and being successful is to do

out praise lavishly. But you did research, sing that's not correct, right, Well, it's maybe correct, but it's as far as it goes. But what we found was that people will like someone more if they begin if the other person begins by with a negative attitude toward the target person, and then it gradually becomes more positive. That really works much better

in terms of winning friends and influencing people. Then if they always doled out praize lavishly for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it becomes you trust it more if it looks like the guy wasn't just trying to impress you or shine you on. And secondly, the guy seems much more discriminating if he can dislike you and then gradually changes, that is much more meaningful. And

the same thing works in reverse. You dislike a person more if they begin by liking you or saying nice things to do, and gradually the more they get to know you, the more they dislike you. That really can be very irritating, and that leads to a lot of dislike on the target person's behalf. And that was an experiment I did a great many years ago with Darwyn Linder, showing that the gain of esteem and the loss of esteem much more powerful than constant esteem. Okay, let's get

to your perhaps most seminal work. You've done a lot of great work, and that's the Jigsaw classroom intervention. The context behind this intervention is fascinating because it's this newly desegregated schools in Austin, Texas, which created violence and aggression between different ethnic groups. And you know you were called in to observe this classroom, is that right? Yeah? Yeah, Well we were called in to do something okay, and the school was in the whole school system was in crisis.

So we did go in and we observed some classrooms, and what we concluded was what everybody knows who's ever been in the school system, that the classroom is a very competitive place. And if you're looking at an elementary school classroom, the kids are, you know, raising their hands, and if someone comes up with the right answer, there's a groan, and they're competing. They don't want the other person to do well. They want to do well. They want to show the teacher how smart they are. So

that's one thing very competitive. Second thing is in Austin, as in any other place that's newly desegregated, if there is residential segregation, which there usually is in most American cities, where the blacks and Mexican Americans live in the lousy part of town and the whites live in a better part of town, the kids don't really know each other. They haven't interacted much before desegregation and the school system

in the lower class parts of town. Histor where race and ethnicity is correlated with social class, certainly in Austin, the white kids lived in a middle class area and their school system was good. The black and Mexican American kids lived on the other side of Interregional Highway thirty five, and they lived in their shacks. Their schools were lousy, and so when they entered, like let's say they enter the fifth grade, the black kids and the Mexican American

kids are reading at a fourth grade level. The white kids are reading at a fifth and sixth grade level. In terms of reading and comprehension. We tested this and that's what we found. So you bring black kids and Mexican American kids into a highly competitive situation where they're guaranteed to lose, and what came about after just a

few weeks is this situation exacerbated the existing stereotypes. The white kids thought the black kids and the Mexican American kids were stupid or lazy or both because they weren't doing well, and the Mexican American kids thought that the white kids would show offs and teachers pets and arrogant

and all of that stuff. The stereotypes were exacerbated. And you know, we concluded after observing classrooms for about a week that if someone had intentionally designed a situation that would make desegregation fail to do the things we were hoping that it would do. That is to decrease prejudice, to increase the self esteem of black and Mexican American kids, and it would be a situation where the minority kids

could learn more than they do. You know, remember the Supreme Court decision in nineteen fifty four that ordered desegregation. Part of their decision was based on some research in social psychology showing that the mere fact of being segregated into their own schools had a negative effect on the

self esteem of minority kids. So that the concept from eighteen ninety six in the case of plus E versus Ferguson, the concept of separate but equal was erroneous because segregation itself made the situation unequal, even if the schools and the teachers and the facilities were indeed equal, which they weren't. But even so, just the fact that being segregated producers

the lowering of self esteem makes it unequal. And that's why in nineteen fifty four they over turned plus versus Ferguson in the case of Brown versus Board of Education. So we expected these terrific results that weren't happening. And when because I was living in often at the time when it was desegregated. My students and I, my graduate students, and I could see why it wasn't happening, why the good effects that we were hoping for with these segregations

just weren't taking place. And so we made a simple intervention. We changed the dynamics of the classroom from a competitive one to a cooperative one where we formed six person groups that were had to cooperate with each other in order to learn the lesson of the day. They had to listen to each other, they had to talk to each other, they had to help each other, they had

to accept help from each other. And within a few weeks, these small groups, groups that were inter racial and inter ethnic and intergender groups, they were as diverse as we could make them. They were functioning like a really first rate basketball team where you passed the ball around until you find an open man and it doesn't matter who

scores the basket because you are a team. And we found that after only six weeks in this cooperative situation that we invented self esteem of minority kids increased, their performance on objective exams, improved as opposed to a control condition, Their liking for school increased, their prejudice went down, their absenteeism went down. We had good behavioral measures. Of course, absenteeism is a wonderful measure of how well kids a

liking school. And in the traditional classrooms, absenteism was at the level that would always always had. In the Jigsaw classrooms, this absenttheism was way down. The whole atmosphere shifted. It was a highly successful intervention and it made desegregation work the way it was supposed to work. Is it still used? Is your intevidual still used today? Yeah, it's used. It's was disappointing in the sense that I thought, hey, look where you have a way of making desegregation work and

making school a happier, more productive place. Yeah, it has been, and we thought it would be universally adopted, but it wasn't, and it wasn't because the educational system is highly conservative and it doesn't change easily. So it's being used. And I have a website called Jigsaw which shows people how to use it, and they can take all the material

out of it that they want to. It's all free of charge and it gets a lot of hits from teachers, so I know people are using it, but it hasn't achieved the success and the universality that I would have

hoped for maybe someday. Yeah, you know, I just figure I'm a researcher, I'm not a change agent, and I was at a choice point of you know, do I really wanted to vote a lot of time to going around to schools and training teachers and getting school superintendents excited about but that would have taken me away from what I'm joy doing most research. Well, hopefully some educators will listen to this podcast and inspired to use it. I thought them It's right on the website. It easily.

That's great. I mean, it's very clear that this shifting the environment from this competitive environment to cooperative is sort of it's a no brainer that that's the kind of education system we need to get the best out of students. But its unfathomable that I wouldn't be widely adapted. Yeah, you know, we'll be wrapping up this interview. You've been

so generous with your time. I want to talk about This Social Animal, which is one of your also monumental works in which you now have additions with two of your sons, Hal and Josh that you've you've worked on with. First of all, I want to why do you think it's such a popular book, and also tell people what Aaronson's first law is. I'll start with the first law, which I said with tongue in cheek. You know, Arison's first law like Newton's first law. You know, I was

making fun of myself, but it's true. And the first law is that people who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. And all that means is it's another way of saying that the situation is extremely powerful, and we

know that it has powerful effects on us. And I like to point to the Milgram experiment on obedience as that the premiere example of a really well done piece of research, over and over and over again, in different countries with men, women, children, upper class, lower class, blacks, whites, green, yellow, two out of three people will go all the way in blind obedience to authority. That's the situation that's really powerful, and it overcomes personality differences and things of that sort.

We can't find personality differences that would predict who would do it and who wouldn't. And that's people who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. People who do immoral things are not necessarily immoral, et cetera. That's Arason's first law. And you know I have a lot of first laws. I don't have any second laws. When I used to teach introductory social psychology, I would always come up with something and call it Arason's first law until the student's

caught on to what I was doing. It just means this is important. Pay attention, Social Animal. Why is it popular? Well, because it was written with passion. I have taught introductory social psychology ever since I started teaching. I loved teaching that course. I love being the first I liked virginal freshmen and sophomorest they're not technically virgins, but people who don't know anything about social psychology. I love being the first one to introduce them to this field. What a

metaphor there, Elliott. Well, it's an exciting field. And when I was teaching, I never liked any of the textbooks. So one of my graduates, my teaching assistants, I used to I used to covetch a lot about the textbooks, and Skuy Harold Siegel told me, he said, well, why don't you write one of your own? Are you kidding? And I'm a researcher. Researchers don't write textbooks. And then I started to write these things as handouts to my students,

just so supplemental lectures. And the next thing I knew I had a few things that could be called chapters, and publishers started to get interested, and so then I kept writing until I had nine chapters of what I considered the essence of social psychology. And I wrote it not because i wanted to write a textbook, but because I'm a teacher, and I wanted to give the students more than I could give them just by lecturing to them, because it lecture only lasts an hour. And it came

out really I liked it. I liked the way it came out, and you know, the examples from my own family and for my life and things like that, and it reads like it was written by a person, a living, breathing person, not a mechanical machine. When I first started teaching, textbooks were written like one study after another, here's a phenomenon, and then this one did it, and that one did it, and that one did it. Whoa, And so that's how I wrote it. And I think passion is a good thing.

In writing, and nobody wants wants to read a book that or even a journal article. The experiment that did this, the experiment that did that, Yeah, screw that. I did it. And so we used the first person. And in my textbook in The Social Animal, it's all written, this is what I think. And it does read well. Now, you know, it's not the most popular in the world because it doesn't have the requisite fifteen chapters. It only has nine chapters because I only wrote about the material that I

really feel passionately about. So it's a boutique book. Well but around. It's been around for I don't know, forty five years. I'd say it's a classic in psychology. So you must be pretty proud of your children. You know. I've had the pleasure of personally getting to know your son Josh, and you know, he's carrying on the torch in a lot of ways with the stereotype threat and you know, and and kind of studying effects of certain per secons on minority students and things like that. But

you have four children. He must be so proud of all of them. Oh yeah, I mean they're good people. And Josh is terrific. He's a very good social psychologist he does. He does really interesting research and does it well and does it with prudence, prudence and passion. And he's a terrific teacher too. He cares about his students. He really works hard at preparing his lectures. He's really

a great professional. I have another son, Hal, who's a sociologist, but who's working primarily as a as a solar expert. He goes to Africa and installs his solar collectives and clinics so that if you happen to need an operation in the middle of the night, electricity often fails and kind of tough to have your appendix being taken out and the lights go out and they're working by candlelight.

And he brought solo electricity to Africa, invented a thing called the solar suitcase, which like a piece of carry on luggage which has everything you need to light up an entire room. And so he's done great work. I have a son, Neil, who was a firefighter and paramedic who was right there in the trenches with you know where things are really happening, harmobile accidents, homeless people in

the streets, drugged overdoses. Whatever firefighters take care of firefighting is one of the things, only one of the things they do. And my daughter Julie was an educational evaluatorship. Interestingly ironically enough, she would go classrooms and evaluate what they were doing, sometimes including teachers who were using the jigsaw classroom. So it's a being interested in people and doing good important things. Is it's a family business. I really like the way each of my kids is doing

it in their own way. And you know, I have a granddaughter who's started college and I don't usually give advice, but I told her, you know, forwards, be good and do good. You said, like's a roller coaster right in your book. It is, so I'm not even gonna bother asking you what was your most proud moment or what was your most you know as you make a career in the book is that it was all part of this big roller coaster that you just kind of accept

every moment right live every moment. And you know, look, I couldn't tell you what was my proudest moment. I can't even tell you what's the best thing I've ever done. I don't know, but I do know that you know, you live your life in the best way that you can, and you accept the potholes that you can't do much about. You know, going blind was a difficult experience losing my eyesight. That happened about seventeen, eighteen years ago. And you play the hand, your dealt in the best way you can

play it. That's an elaboration on be good and do good. You play the hand in the best And that's another thing I learned from my brother. You know that I'll end with this story, Okay, okay, my brother who when he was thirty one years old caught lung cancer and died a very painful death at thirty two. But once when he was in high school, when he was about seventeen years old, he used to play a lot of poker with a bunch of guys his own age. And I was about fourteen, and he once let me sit

in and play with the big guys. As everybody knows that the difference between being seventeen and being fourteen is enormous in terms of being welcome and playing something like in a poker game which was not high stakes, but high stakes for me and I I got dealt three or four really crappy hands in a row, and after the fourth one, I said, Jesus Christ, I keep getting

these crappy cards. And I further reached across the table, grabbed me by the shirt front and practically lifted me out of the chair and said, look it, any asshole can win at this game if you're dealt a full house. The trick of this game is to win, to do well, even if you dealt a lousy hand. Your job is to play the hand as well as it can possibly be played, no matter what your cards look like. I

never want to hear you complain again. And then he got dealt a terrible hand, thirty one years old and you get lung cancer. That's a pretty bad hand he was dealt. So it's a terrific lesson. Life is full of less Playing the hand that your dealt as well as you can play it is a good one. There's a good thing to carry around with you. Thank you so much for sharing that story. Anything you still want

to accomplish research wise, No, I'm done with research. I just hope the field does its job and overcomes this latest bump in the road, this crisis you mentioned about replication. I was invited to hear the irony. I was invited to give a TED talk just a couple of weeks ago. It sat on my computer for a while before I finally said, no, I can't. I don't. I don't try to summarize my any project in eighteen minutes because it ends up being perforce. But you might get a book deal. Yeah, right,

I already once had one of those. Yeah, I don't feel like No, it's you take away all the nuances, you take away all the difficult parts of it, and then you present it, and it's I think it's you know, some of those things are very good, but I think in general it's done our field a lot of harm. Well, thank you for such a comprehensive We didn't do an e team minute interview, did we. We did a very long interview, so long, so thank you to take Okay, what do you say? What do you say? Took however

long you had to take it did. I think we got in a lot about you. Really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work you've done for the field. I consider you a legend in psychology. I think you will long be remembered, you know, one hundred tutor years from now as a pioneer in the field. So thank you for all the incredible work that Okay, Scott, good to talk to you. Thank you so good to talk to you too. Thank you so much for listening

to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.