Who is festinger

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Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. It was this same work that led to Festinger's receiving the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Psychological Association in and to his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in that same year. The honors continued throughout his career. Festinger turned next to the development of a set of ideas for which he is perhaps best known in psychology— the theory of cognitive dissonance Festinger, In a way the ideas of the dissonance work were a further and more basic development of his thinking about the social determinants of the evaluation of beliefs and abilities.

Dissonance theory was an attempt to determine, at a more basic, purely cognitive level, the origin of such pressures. In essence, dissonance theory was startlingly simple. The key hypothesis is that when incompatibilities exist between two or more ideas or cognitions, pressures will arise to reduce the discrepancy.

This was hardly a new idea and, in one form or another, had already been proposed by a number of psychologists now known as "balance" theorists.

What Festinger did with the idea, however, is an illustration of his almost unique genius. He pushed this idea just about as far as it could go, examining and testing its implications for a breathtaking variety of phenomena.

These included an experimental examination of the cognitive consequences of forced compliance; studies in both rats and humans of the effects of insufficient reward; a field study of the effects of being wrong on the proselyting efforts of a millenial group; and on and on in a body of work that Edward Jones described as "the most important development in social psychology to date.

It was marvelous work; however, Festinger moved on. Boredom was anathema, and the moment things got dull or he found that he was repeating himself, doing some trivial variation of a spent idea, he changed his interests. Starting about , while at Stanford, he developed an interest in the visual system and perception.

He worked during this period on a variety of problems related to eye movements, efference, and the conscious experience of perception as well as on neurophysiological coding for the perception of color. I confess that my expertise is such that I dare not fake an attempt to evaluate this research nor, in.

I do note, however, that this work drew much attention, stirred much controversy, and attracted a talented group of students. Finally, about , some eleven years after he came to the New School, Festinger closed his laboratory and abandoned experimental psychology altogether.

His explanation, in his own words, was Festinger, :. Four years ago I closed my laboratory which, over time, had been devoted to studying ever narrowing aspects of how the human eye moves. It is natural for me to talk as if the laboratory was at fault, but a laboratory is only a collection of rooms and equipment. It was I who conceived of and worked on narrower and narrower technical problems.

That is not a proper occupation for an aging man who resents that adjective. Young men and women should work on narrow problems. Young people become enthusiastic easily: any new finding is an exciting thing. Older people have too much perspective on the past and perhaps, too little patience with the future. Very few small discoveries turn out to be important over the years; things that would have sent me jumping and shouting in my youth now left me calm and judgmental and my lack of enthusiasm kept reminding me of that despised adjective, aging.

Having a critical perspective on the recent past [was] debilitating in other ways also. I have been actively engaged in research in the field of psychology for more than 40 years.

Forty years in my own life seems like a long time to me and while some things have been learned about human beings and human behavior during this time, progress has not been rapid enough; nor has the new knowledge been impressive enough.

And even worse, from the broader point of view we do not seem to have been working on many of the important problems. And so, despite his marked success as an experimentalist, Festinger moved on. His first foray outside the laboratory involved an examination of what one might learn about the "nature of man" from archeological data. He visited a number of archeological digs with French and Israeli specialists and began a systematic examination of what one could deduce and infer about man and the structure of primitive society.

He published his speculations in in a book called The Human Legacy. It is an intriguing volume in which a first-rate mind trained in one discipline applies itself to the data and problems of another discipline and raises questions that, to my mind, provide one of the few nonbanal examples in the social sciences of the potential of cross-disciplinary work.

For example, he notes that in some digs there is huge variability in the quality of workmanship of artifacts such as arrowheads, while in other digs such artifacts are all of similar high quality. This leads him into fascinating speculation about the development of the division of labor in primitive society. Similarly, other artifacts lead to speculation about the development of religious technology and of the role of play and of games in mankind's history. In its own way it is a marvelous book whose reception in Festinger's own professional circles bemused him no end for he was often asked by his fellow psychologists, "But what does this have to do with psychology?

From what might be called psychosocial-archeology, Festinger moved on to a deep interest in the history of religion. He worked closely with a number of medieval and Byzantine church scholars, and eventually his interest focused on the differences between the Eastern and the Western or Roman church and the role such differences might have played in the differential development and acceptance of material technology in these two parts of the Roman empire.

Festinger died before he could publish this material, but he made the same profound impression on the medieval historians as he had made earlier on the psychologists with whom he worked. Indeed, a recent book called Papacy , Councils and Canon Law in the 11thth Centuries is dedicated by its author Robert Somerville to the memory of Leon Festinger—surely the only time in intel-. It was an astonishing intellectual career.

The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed through studying a series of rumors followed by an earthquake in India in The hypothesis of cognitive dissonance was that a person will try to achieve consistency or consonance when he faces psychological uncomfort as in cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger was a true legend in the field of social psychology. He died on February 11 th , in New York City. Home Blog Contact. Return to top of page. Friendship processes. Fogg, B. Persuasive technology: Using computers to change what we think and do. Gazzaniga, M. Leon Festinger: Lunch with Leon. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1 1 , Morvan, C.

London: Macat International Ltd. Miles, J. Management and organization theory: A Jossey-Bass Reader. Nail, P. Inconsistency in cognition: Cognitive dissonance. Chadee Ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Schachter, S. Leon Festinger. Biographical Memoirs, 64 , Suls, J. In Encyclopedia Britannica. The New York Times. Leon Festinger, 69, new school professor. Theodore created PracticalPsychology while in college and has transformed the educational online space of psychology.

His goal is to help people improve their lives by understanding how their brains work. What Determines the Level of Cognitive Dissonance? The Proximity Effect. Leon Festinger's Books, Awards, and Accomplishments. What is Cognitive Dissonance? Cognitive dissonance is the psychological tension people experience when they become aware of discrepancies between two of their cognitions e. All of us have experienced cognitive dissonance at some point in our lives.

How was the Theory Developed? According to Festinger, two main factors influence the level of dissonance we experience in a given situation: The importance of the cognitions involved - The greater the importance attached to the inconsistent cognitions, the more dissonance it will cause.

On the other hand, if you learn that you have major heart disease, eating fast food every day takes on greater significance. Your unhealthy eating habits will likely trigger much more dissonance as you understand that your actions may be a matter of life or death.

The ratio of consonant to dissonant cognitions - The more dissonant cognitions there are in relation to consonant ones, the greater the level of dissonance experienced. Imagine that Todd wants to quit drinking cognition 1 but still finds himself at a bar every night cognition 2. He will likely experience a measure of dissonance.

How Can Cognitive Dissonance be Reduced? The resulting dissonance could be reduced by either changing your belief about smoking e. If you do either one of these, your belief would become consonant with your action, so dissonance would decrease.