CHAPTER FIVE
Becoming a Social Psychologist
Leon Festinger in action (top).
Jason, Vera, and Hal at Indiana Dunes, 1956: “You guys did it; you really did it.”
Vera and I had decided to camp our way across the country for reasons of beauty and economy. When we needed to sleep, if the nearest campground was uninteresting (as most were), we would spend only one night, get an early start the next morning, and continue westward. But whenever we were near a scenic place to camp, like a national park, a lakeside state park, or a charming village, we might spend three or four nights. We had decided that our first stop would be not for beauty but for family. We headed for Chicago, where we could visit with Jason and spend a few nights in his bachelor’s apartment on South Harper Street.
While driving through Pennsylvania, we heard a news bulletin on the car radio, announcing a polio epidemic in Chicago. At that time no word struck as much fear into the hearts of parents as “polio.” Vera and I knew that it was a highly infectious viral disease that frequently caused paralysis, especially in children, and that it spread rapidly in large urban centers. Jonas Salk had recently developed an effective vaccine against the disease, but it was not yet in wide use. Of course, we realized that the chances of Hal’s contracting polio were remote. Nevertheless, as new parents, we decided to err on the side of caution and steer clear of Chicago.
Instead, we invited Jason to join us, camping out at Indiana Dunes State Park, about fifty miles from Chicago. For Jason, who was a creature of comfort, the idea of sleeping on the ground filled him with dread, so he agreed to come but only for the day. He enjoyed his visit and playing with his nephew so much that, to his credit, he decided to spend the night. At first he tried to sleep outside the tent in my sleeping bag and air mattress while Vera and I shared her sleeping bag in the tent. But soon Jason was complaining that he heard a rustling sound and, in spite of our assurances to the contrary, insisted, only half in jest, that there were grizzly bears nearby waiting to attack him. He pleaded with us, also only half in jest, to let him sleep in our tent. I will not attempt to explain how three full-sized people managed to squeeze into a two-person pup tent. I would not recommend it.
We crawled out of the tent at five o’clock in the morning, groggy and giddy, to attend to Hal sleeping a few feet away on his comfortable mattress in the back seat of the car. (Our putting him to sleep in the car while we were in the tent nearby may seem strange and even neglectful by today’s standards, when many parents would handcuff their infants to their wrists as a defense against would-be kidnappers. But in those days everyone tended to trust strangers rather than fear them.) As the sun was rising, Jason, with tears in his eyes, kept looking from Vera to me to Hal, and said, “You guys did it; you really did it.” Jason, who was destined never to have a child of his own, seemed overwhelmed by the mere fact of Hal’s existence. He kept reaching out and stroking Hal’s head with infinite tenderness and affection.
In the evening Jason decided to drive home so that we could all get a little sleep. As we were embracing, saying good-bye, he said, “Just think. Only ten years ago, you and I were slaving away for Abe Shaw, and, chances are, ten years from now, with a little luck, you and I will both be professors somewhere—maybe even at the same college—wearing tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, smoking pipes, and having students hanging on our every word. It’s a miracle!” I agreed with him, but for me the bigger miracle had already occurred during those two days: Jason no longer saw any need to act as my father, as he had done at Brandeis, making sure that I kept my eye on the ball and my nose to the grindstone. And he was no longer playing the role of big brother, as he had been while we were growing up in Revere, leading the way, showing me how to do things, defending me from bullies. Now, for the first time, he was treating me as his equal. Indeed, if anything, he was looking up to me, as someone who was not only a promising graduate student but a husband and father as well.
Although Jason hated sleeping on the ground, Vera and I grew to like it more and more as our trip progressed. Our favorite lay-over was Rocky Mountain National Park, where we stayed for an entire week. Hal was the hit of the campground. Each morning as we crawled out of our tent, we found a cluster of campers with their noses pressed against the VW’s windows, waving and cutting up and eventually succeeding in getting Hal to smile at them. Their antics were a great benefit because they usually kept Hal entertained and happy, allowing us an additional twenty minutes or so in the sack. By the time we reached Nevada, however, we were yearning for a soft bed and a hot shower. We stopped at a small motel in the gold-mining town of Battle Mountain, and it was there that our second son, Neal, was conceived.
When we arrived in Palo Alto, we phoned Dick Alpert, who had volunteered to find us an apartment near the Stanford campus. But try as he might, he couldn’t find a place he thought we would like, so he decided to move out of the small cottage he had been renting and, with his landlord’s permission, ceded it to us. When we objected he laughed and said that he was living below his means anyway. Stanford had just made him an acting instructor for one year (while he was finishing his dissertation), and our coming had provided him with an excuse for upgrading his living arrangements.
The cottage was a delight. It was located on Homer Lane, a dirt road on the edge of the Stanford golf course in an area that was evolving into an artists’ colony. Although it was too small for the three of us, it had enormous charm, and we worked hard to use the available space efficiently. There was one bedroom at the far end, which we assigned to Hal so that, with the door closed, he could sleep without being disturbed. A large floor-to-ceiling bookcase divided the living room at the front of the cottage from the kitchen and dining area. To keep the living room free for guests, we placed our bed in the dining area, just two steps from the dining table. The running joke among my pals was, “Elliot arranged the furniture so that he wouldn’t need to walk very far to go from eating to sleeping.”
That winter, early 1957, we were joined by Vera’s older sister, Lili. Lili had remained in Hungary after the Holocaust because, like many Jewish survivors at the time, she was optimistic about the egalitarian promise of Communism; more important, she was a serious music student, and wanted to continue her studies with Zoltán Kodály at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. By the time she became disillusioned with the totalitarianism of the Soviet regime, however, the Iron Curtain had closed and emigration was impossible. She remained trapped until the Hungarian revolution of 1956; during that turmoil she managed to escape, making her way to America and eventually to us. She slept in the living room on the couch, and when Neal was born in May, she was a great help. However, the cottage, which had been too small for the three of us, now contained five. One day the landlord dropped in, took one look around, and gave us thirty days to get out. We ended up spending the rest of our time in Palo Alto at another army-barracks arrangement on the grounds of the Stanford Research Institute. We considered it luxurious—it had two bedrooms. Eventually, Lili began giving piano lessons and was earning enough to move to her own apartment.
In December 1958 our daughter, Julie, was born. That’s right, three kids in three years! Vera had always wanted to raise a family while we were still young, and she convinced me that, although it would be hard work, it would also be fun. As usual, she was right on both counts. My favorite chore was feeding the infants in the wee hours of the morning. Vera was breast-feeding, but, because she needed her sleep, it was my job to wake up for the four o’clock feeding, prepare the supplementary bottle, and feed the infant. Although I did this for all of the newborns, I particularly remember how great it felt with Julie, holding her close to me, cuddling, and administering the bottle as if the milk were flowing from my own woefully inadequate breast. Early on, after a change of diaper and a half-hour feeding, Julie would go back to sleep, and so would I. But by the time she was three or four months old, she refused to go back to sleep, and there she would be, wide awake, playful and eager to start the day. When I tried to pull away to catch another hour or two of sleep, she would hold tight. Although I was dead tired and longed to crawl back into bed, she gradually charmed me into wakefulness—and I would put the coffee on.
Many years later my good friend, poet David Swanger, beautifully captured my feelings about the early ritual with Julie in these lines from his poem “My Daughter’s Morning”:
From that moment on, for me, Stanford became Leon Festinger. Stanford had a great Psychology Department with several first-rate professors, but none had his combination of skill, brilliance, and meticulousness. Leon would not allow us to draw conclusions that were unsupported by evidence. “If you want to go beyond the data,” he would exhort us, “that’s speculation—a hypothesis for your next experiment.” He thought drawing unwarranted conclusions was not only sloppy thinking but bordered on the unethical; he called it “hanky-panky.” Leon’s favorite joke reveals, to me, his love of precise thinking and precise communication: An old Jewish couple is lying in bed when the wife says, “Saul, close the window. It’s cold outside.” With a groan, Saul gets up out of bed, closes the window, turns to his wife, and says, “So now it’s warm outside?”
After the incident with the term paper, I continued to find Leon’s seminar exhilarating, but I was no longer intimidated by his style. Whenever he gave me one of those looks, which he did more than a few times, I found it challenging rather than daunting. The six of us in the seminar felt like we were part of something important. The theory of cognitive dissonance was changing the way we thought about the human mind and social influence, and we were contributing to the development of an idea that would permanently change social psychology.
Dissonance theory taught me the great lesson of social influence that was to guide my thinking for the next fifty years as a researcher and writer: Although it’s true that changing people’s attitudes sometimes changes their behavior, if you want a more powerful change to take place, you will try to evoke a change in behavior first; attitudes will follow. This way of seeing things was completely counterintuitive for laypeople and even for most social psychologists at the time. The idea was that if, for example, you want someone to do you a favor, you must first persuade him that you are a nice person. This is not wrong; it is merely inefficient. As my students would later demonstrate, you can produce a much more powerful effect by first getting him to do you a favor; he will then convince himself that you deserved his doing you that favor, and that therefore you are a nice person. And, as a result, he is apt to do you a much bigger favor in the future.
Dissonance theory was a breath of fresh air at a time when radical behaviorism dominated all of psychology. In the 1950s almost all behavior was explained by rewards and punishments. People like food, golf, and their mothers, behaviorists said, because of rewards associated with food, golf, and their mothers. Therefore, if a rat, pigeon, or person kept doing something for no obvious reward, behaviorists would claim we weren’t looking hard enough—the reward has to be around here, somewhere, or else the rat, pigeon, or person would stop behaving that way. Dissonance theory did not deny the importance of principles of reinforcement; rather, it showed us that the mind is much more complex than principles of reward and punishment would lead us to predict. Of course, Abraham Maslow had also railed against the limitations of behaviorism, but his ideas were vague and untestable. (When Leon learned that it was Maslow who had first gotten me excited about psychology, he said, “Maslow? That guy’s ideas are so bad they aren’t even wrong.”) Dissonance theory was pregnant with testable ideas, some of which had far-reaching ramifications. During the second half of the seminar, we began generating these testable hypotheses.
I happened to be reading John Whiting’s work on initiations as rites of passage among indigenous tribes of Africa and South America; Whiting was describing the differences, not theorizing about their origins or purpose. But in Festinger’s seminar it dawned on me that perhaps one function of those initiations was to create a more cohesive group, just as people who go through extreme basic training required to join the marines develop a strong commitment to the corps, and just as pledges develop attachment to their fraternities after weeks of horrible hazing, and, for that matter, just as I came to love Brandeis after a semester of sleeping in cars.
The prediction from dissonance theory is that the cognition “I went through hell and high water to get into this group” would be dissonant with “ . . . only to discover that the group is worthless and its members are insipid.” To reduce dissonance, most people would minimize the importance of any negative aspects of the group and focus primarily on the positive ones. But people who voluntarily join the marines (or who work hard to stay at Brandeis) are self-selected; they might have joined the marines or chosen Brandeis because they liked it prior to the initiation. For this reason, correlational data are inadequate to test the hypothesis. I needed to design an experiment so that I could randomly assign participants to either a severe-initiation condition or a mild one and see whether the former came to like an unappealing group more than the latter.
And so one day, as Jud and I were leaving Leon’s seminar, I floated my hypothesis by him. Jud responded enthusiastically, and the two of us spent the next several days designing an experiment. Our hypothesis required us to set up a situation where people would volunteer to try out for membership in a group. We would randomly assign one-third of them to a severe-initiation condition, one-third to a mild-initiation condition, and one-third to a no-initiation condition. Afterward, we would ask them how much they liked the group they had joined.
We immediately had two problems. What kind of group would sound so interesting that college students would be willing to undergo a severe initiation to get into it? And what kind of severe initiation could we do, since hazing was out of the question? Jud and I hit on the idea of sex. We figured that almost all young adults are interested in talking about sex. Once we determined the topic of the group discussion, the rest of the procedure fell into place.
We advertised that we were forming groups of students to meet for several discussions on the psychology of sex. (As it turned out, most of the volunteers were women, so we decided to use women only.) We phoned them and arranged an appointment for each participant to come into the lab, one at a time, for a one-hour interview. I greeted each woman and explained that I was a social psychology graduate student who was studying the dynamics of the group-discussion process. I added that the actual topic of the discussion was not important to me; I had selected the topic of sex to guarantee plenty of volunteers. “But that presented me with a major drawback,” I would say. “Specifically, shy students find it difficult to discuss sex in a group setting. Because any impediment to the free flow of the discussion could invalidate my research, I need to know if you have any hesitation about entering a discussion about sex.” When the participants heard this, each and every one said that she would have no difficulty at all.
Up to this point, the instructions were the same for all participants. If the subject had been preassigned to the no-initiation condition, I simply told her that she was now a member of the group. For women assigned to the severe-and mild-initiation conditions, however, I said that because I needed to be absolutely certain that everyone could discuss sex openly, I had developed a screening device—a test for embarrassment—that I asked them to take. This test constituted the initiation. For the severe-initiation condition, the test was highly embarrassing. The young woman had to recite, to me, a list of twelve obscene words, including fuck, cunt, and blow job, and two particularly steamy passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (In 1957, trust me, reading this material out loud was really embarrassing—for me as well as the students!) The mild-initiation participants had to recite a list of words related to sex that were not obscene, such as vagina, penis, and sexual intercourse.
Next, each student listened to a tape recording of a discussion of “sexual behavior” that she believed was being held by the group she had just joined. The recording was identical for each volunteer, and the discussion was as slow, boring, and turgid as I could make it. Finally, Jud (who was blind to each student’s condition) interviewed each of the students and got her to rate the discussion and the group members on a number of dimensions—how appealing the group was, how intelligent and articulate its members seemed, and so on. The results were just as we had predicted. Subjects who went through the severe initiation thought the group was terrific, while those who went through the mild initiation or no initiation saw it (correctly!) as dull and boring; several wanted to resign immediately.
It was fascinating to see the specific ways that women in the severe initiation reduced their dissonance. For example, one guy on the tape, stammering and muttering, admitted that he hadn’t done the required reading on the courtship practices of some rare bird, and the mild-initiation listeners were annoyed by him. What an irresponsible idiot! He didn’t even do the basic reading! He let the group down! Who’d want to be in a group with him? But those who had gone through a severe initiation rated the discussion as interesting and exciting and the group members as attractive and sharp. They forgave the irresponsible idiot. His candor was refreshing! Who wouldn’t want to be in a group with such an honest guy? It was hard for me to believe that they had listened to the same tape recording.
I can still remember the exhilaration I felt as the data began to fall into place. I was elated by the realization that I had discovered something new and exciting about how the human mind works— in this case, that going through a difficult experience in order to gain something makes people like that thing better. More generally, I realized that, as complex as human behavior is, it is also lawful. All I had to do was identify the law, hone it into a testable hypothesis, and invent a procedure to get at the essence of that hypothesis. Doing this experiment also showed me that I might have a knack for creating a methodological key to unlock some of the mysteries of human behavior. It was a great revelation. I don’t think I have ever been more excited about anything in my entire life. Intellectually speaking, anyway. It was my first experiment, and it became a classic, one of the defining experiments of dissonance theory.
The challenge of this kind of experimentation is to find a way to imbed the participant in a prearranged scenario that is coherent, absorbing, and believable. The experimenter must have the skills of a playwright, a director, and an actor without abandoning scientific rigor. In our experiments the laboratory comes alive; real things are happening to real people. This way of working allows us to transcend the fabled artificiality of more traditional laboratory experiments. We called this approach “high-impact experimentation” because we plunked people into the middle of a situation that was so real for them that they had to respond as they would have responded outside the laboratory. In designing this kind of experiment, I discovered that it is possible—actually, essential—to achieve scientific rigor without artificiality or sterility. That became my mantra as an experimenter.
Previously, much of the research in social psychology consisted either of investigating trivial phenomena (“people will believe an article published in the New York Times more than one published in Pravda”) or of observing how people who scored high or low on some personality test (like achievement motivation, to take a not-so-random example) would behave in a variety of situations. What I picked up from Leon was the audacious belief that, as scientists, we did not need to confine our research to trivial topics or pallid methods. Rather, with sufficient ingenuity, we could find a way to investigate in the laboratory just about any phenomenon. This could free the scientist from an overreliance on personality variables and from accepting a trait as an explanation for the subsequent behavior. We could learn directly what causes people’s behavior, because we, the experimenters, have created the “what.” It was the severe initiation that produced a liking for the group, and it did so regardless of the subject’s early childhood experiences or personality.
The key ingredient in the high-impact experiment is theatricality. If the experiment is going to work, the script must be believable and the experimenter must be a convincing actor. Otherwise, the subject will not get involved, and the experiment will fail. For some reason, perhaps having to do with my stint as a mike man on the Revere Beach Boardwalk, the dramaturgical requirements of an experiment came easily to me. For example, in the initiation experiment, I was able to come up with a scenario that convinced the subjects that it made sense for them to go through an embarrassing initiation to get into that group discussion. In addition, it didn’t take me long to grasp the importance of pilot testing; because our procedures are complex, such pretesting can ensure that the procedure is affecting the subjects the way it was intended. It is the scientific equivalent of rehearsing your Broadway-bound play in New Haven first. If the pilot study doesn’t work, it is back to the drawing board.
When I was about to run my first pilot subject in the initiation experiment, I invited Leon to observe through a one-way mirror. When I finished I came back to his office and said, “Any suggestions?”
“Nope.”
“What do you mean, ‘Nope?’ How can I improve my performance?”
“It’s perfect. You are ready to go.”
“But I’ve got three more pilot subjects scheduled for this afternoon.”
“Cancel them. You are ready to go.”
Earlier, I said that Leon’s praise, if it came at all, usually came in the guise of criticism. But, occasionally, it came in more direct form, as in his noncritique of my laboratory performance. That kind of praise was the gold standard, precisely because I knew it did not stem from his wish to be kind or any need to be liked, which was unimportant to him.
Shortly thereafter, Leon actually asked for my consultation. He had designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that a person telling a lie for a small reward would believe his own lie to a greater extent than someone telling the same lie for a large reward. The latter has an adequate justification: “I told a lie for twenty dollars; it was worth it.” The former feels dissonance: “Why would I tell a lie for only a buck? I must believe it.” Festinger had asked Merrill Carlsmith, the undergraduate in the seminar, to carry out the experiment, which was as carefully crafted as an Arthur Miller play.
When the subject arrived at the lab, he would be asked to do a few unbearably dull tasks. (The first was to fill a tray with twelve spools, one at a time and using one hand, then take all the spools out, one by one, then put them back in, over and over again for a half hour.) Merrill would watch, taking notes and doing mysterious things with a stopwatch, then tell the subject the experiment was over, and thank him for his help. He would explain that he was testing the hypothesis that people work faster if they are told in advance that the task is incredibly interesting than if they are told nothing and informed, “You were in the control condition. That is why you were told nothing.”
At this point Merrill would say that the guy who was supposed to give the ecstatic description to the next subject had just phoned in to say he couldn’t make it. Merrill would beg the “control” subject to do him a favor and play the role, offering him a dollar (or twenty dollars) to do it. Once the subject agreed, Merrill was to give him the money and a sheet listing the main things to say praising the experiment and leave him alone for a few minutes to prepare. Then Merrill would bring the guy into the waiting room where an undergraduate woman was waiting (actually a confederate of ours), and leave him to describe the experiment to her in glowing terms.
But it wasn’t working, and Merrill was frustrated because the subjects were suspicious. So Leon and I sat behind the one-way mirror as Merrill ran his fifth pilot subject. Merrill was an extraordinarily bright guy, but, as an experimenter, he was wooden. The poor guy was deprived; while I was gaining invaluable training on the boardwalk, Merrill was wasting his time playing lacrosse at Andover. As Leon and I watched him sleepwalk his way through the experiment, it was crystal clear why the subjects weren’t buying it: He wasn’t selling it. Leon said to me, “Train him.”
And I did. I gave Merrill a crash course in acting. “You don’t simply say that the assistant hasn’t shown up,” I said. “You fidget, you sweat, you pace up and down, you wring your hands, you convey to the subject that you are in real trouble here. And then, you act as if you just now got an idea. You look at the subject, and you brighten up. ‘You! You can do this for me. I can even pay you.’”
After three days of intense training (I felt like we were in the Actor’s Studio), Merrill was ready. The experiment went off without a hitch. Only one out of forty subjects was suspicious. And the hypothesis was confirmed: The subjects who were paid only one dollar for lying convinced themselves that the tasks were fairly interesting, while those who were paid twenty dollars continued to see the tasks as horribly dull, which of course they were.
I loved every part of the process: coming up with the idea, designing the experiment, writing the script, rehearsing the performance, training an assistant, debriefing the participants so they understood why we did what we did, analyzing the data, and writing up the study for publication. It was like the feeling I had, years earlier in Revere, after I had mastered the skill of fielding a ground ball, when I suddenly knew I could do it. Instead of being nervous in tight situations and praying that the batter would hit the ball somewhere else (“Please God, anywhere else but not to me!”), I wanted the ball to come bouncing in my direction.
I had discovered the kind of research I wanted to do, and as the poet Pablo Neruda put it, “something ignited in my soul.” I had found my calling. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the Psychology Department didn’t invite me to return next year? If only I had done better in those damned statistics courses. Near the end of the spring quarter, Leon told me that he would like to hire me as a research assistant for the next two years, starting in the summer. I said, “Sure, if I’m still here. I didn’t do too well in my statistics courses.”
He turned his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. “Statistics?” he said. “No big deal. A guy like you? After you get your degree, you can hire a statistician or even two; they are a dime a dozen.” Leon was pretty good at putting things in perspective.
The warmth of his reaction was the first step toward the eventual demolition of the usual student-professor barrier. At that moment I stopped seeing Leon as merely a difficult taskmaster or even as a challenging mentor, and started seeing him as a friend. At the time Vera teased me by observing that my own severe initiation at his hands virtually guaranteed that I’d come to like him. Perhaps it did, at first. But an initiation doesn’t explain why a person’s liking for a group (or person) might continue to deepen for decades. Thirty-two years later, when I gave the eulogy at Leon’s memorial, evoking the hearty laughter of recognition with my stories of his toughness and that famous look of pity and contempt, I felt the sorrow of losing one of the most warm and gratifying friendships of my life.
In 1959 I earned my Ph.D. and accepted an offer from Harvard to be an assistant professor. The previous year we had replaced the totaled Volkswagen with a 1954 Chevrolet station wagon, big enough for our growing family—three-year-old Hal, two-year-old Neal, and eight-month-old Julie. Vera and I set off on another trip across the country, this time from Palo Alto to Cambridge, and this time with enough money for motels and a stop in Chicago to visit Jason and his new wife. I had all but forgotten the humanistic concerns that had initially attracted me to psychology. I was no longer thinking of doing good; I was now thinking of doing good experiments. As we headed toward Cambridge, my car was full of kids and my head was full of ideas, and I could hardly wait to settle in and get started.
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Leon Festinger in action (top).
Jason, Vera, and Hal at Indiana Dunes, 1956: “You guys did it; you really did it.”
Vera and I had decided to camp our way across the country for reasons of beauty and economy. When we needed to sleep, if the nearest campground was uninteresting (as most were), we would spend only one night, get an early start the next morning, and continue westward. But whenever we were near a scenic place to camp, like a national park, a lakeside state park, or a charming village, we might spend three or four nights. We had decided that our first stop would be not for beauty but for family. We headed for Chicago, where we could visit with Jason and spend a few nights in his bachelor’s apartment on South Harper Street.
While driving through Pennsylvania, we heard a news bulletin on the car radio, announcing a polio epidemic in Chicago. At that time no word struck as much fear into the hearts of parents as “polio.” Vera and I knew that it was a highly infectious viral disease that frequently caused paralysis, especially in children, and that it spread rapidly in large urban centers. Jonas Salk had recently developed an effective vaccine against the disease, but it was not yet in wide use. Of course, we realized that the chances of Hal’s contracting polio were remote. Nevertheless, as new parents, we decided to err on the side of caution and steer clear of Chicago.
Instead, we invited Jason to join us, camping out at Indiana Dunes State Park, about fifty miles from Chicago. For Jason, who was a creature of comfort, the idea of sleeping on the ground filled him with dread, so he agreed to come but only for the day. He enjoyed his visit and playing with his nephew so much that, to his credit, he decided to spend the night. At first he tried to sleep outside the tent in my sleeping bag and air mattress while Vera and I shared her sleeping bag in the tent. But soon Jason was complaining that he heard a rustling sound and, in spite of our assurances to the contrary, insisted, only half in jest, that there were grizzly bears nearby waiting to attack him. He pleaded with us, also only half in jest, to let him sleep in our tent. I will not attempt to explain how three full-sized people managed to squeeze into a two-person pup tent. I would not recommend it.
We crawled out of the tent at five o’clock in the morning, groggy and giddy, to attend to Hal sleeping a few feet away on his comfortable mattress in the back seat of the car. (Our putting him to sleep in the car while we were in the tent nearby may seem strange and even neglectful by today’s standards, when many parents would handcuff their infants to their wrists as a defense against would-be kidnappers. But in those days everyone tended to trust strangers rather than fear them.) As the sun was rising, Jason, with tears in his eyes, kept looking from Vera to me to Hal, and said, “You guys did it; you really did it.” Jason, who was destined never to have a child of his own, seemed overwhelmed by the mere fact of Hal’s existence. He kept reaching out and stroking Hal’s head with infinite tenderness and affection.
In the evening Jason decided to drive home so that we could all get a little sleep. As we were embracing, saying good-bye, he said, “Just think. Only ten years ago, you and I were slaving away for Abe Shaw, and, chances are, ten years from now, with a little luck, you and I will both be professors somewhere—maybe even at the same college—wearing tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, smoking pipes, and having students hanging on our every word. It’s a miracle!” I agreed with him, but for me the bigger miracle had already occurred during those two days: Jason no longer saw any need to act as my father, as he had done at Brandeis, making sure that I kept my eye on the ball and my nose to the grindstone. And he was no longer playing the role of big brother, as he had been while we were growing up in Revere, leading the way, showing me how to do things, defending me from bullies. Now, for the first time, he was treating me as his equal. Indeed, if anything, he was looking up to me, as someone who was not only a promising graduate student but a husband and father as well.
Although Jason hated sleeping on the ground, Vera and I grew to like it more and more as our trip progressed. Our favorite lay-over was Rocky Mountain National Park, where we stayed for an entire week. Hal was the hit of the campground. Each morning as we crawled out of our tent, we found a cluster of campers with their noses pressed against the VW’s windows, waving and cutting up and eventually succeeding in getting Hal to smile at them. Their antics were a great benefit because they usually kept Hal entertained and happy, allowing us an additional twenty minutes or so in the sack. By the time we reached Nevada, however, we were yearning for a soft bed and a hot shower. We stopped at a small motel in the gold-mining town of Battle Mountain, and it was there that our second son, Neal, was conceived.
When we arrived in Palo Alto, we phoned Dick Alpert, who had volunteered to find us an apartment near the Stanford campus. But try as he might, he couldn’t find a place he thought we would like, so he decided to move out of the small cottage he had been renting and, with his landlord’s permission, ceded it to us. When we objected he laughed and said that he was living below his means anyway. Stanford had just made him an acting instructor for one year (while he was finishing his dissertation), and our coming had provided him with an excuse for upgrading his living arrangements.
The cottage was a delight. It was located on Homer Lane, a dirt road on the edge of the Stanford golf course in an area that was evolving into an artists’ colony. Although it was too small for the three of us, it had enormous charm, and we worked hard to use the available space efficiently. There was one bedroom at the far end, which we assigned to Hal so that, with the door closed, he could sleep without being disturbed. A large floor-to-ceiling bookcase divided the living room at the front of the cottage from the kitchen and dining area. To keep the living room free for guests, we placed our bed in the dining area, just two steps from the dining table. The running joke among my pals was, “Elliot arranged the furniture so that he wouldn’t need to walk very far to go from eating to sleeping.”
That winter, early 1957, we were joined by Vera’s older sister, Lili. Lili had remained in Hungary after the Holocaust because, like many Jewish survivors at the time, she was optimistic about the egalitarian promise of Communism; more important, she was a serious music student, and wanted to continue her studies with Zoltán Kodály at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. By the time she became disillusioned with the totalitarianism of the Soviet regime, however, the Iron Curtain had closed and emigration was impossible. She remained trapped until the Hungarian revolution of 1956; during that turmoil she managed to escape, making her way to America and eventually to us. She slept in the living room on the couch, and when Neal was born in May, she was a great help. However, the cottage, which had been too small for the three of us, now contained five. One day the landlord dropped in, took one look around, and gave us thirty days to get out. We ended up spending the rest of our time in Palo Alto at another army-barracks arrangement on the grounds of the Stanford Research Institute. We considered it luxurious—it had two bedrooms. Eventually, Lili began giving piano lessons and was earning enough to move to her own apartment.
In December 1958 our daughter, Julie, was born. That’s right, three kids in three years! Vera had always wanted to raise a family while we were still young, and she convinced me that, although it would be hard work, it would also be fun. As usual, she was right on both counts. My favorite chore was feeding the infants in the wee hours of the morning. Vera was breast-feeding, but, because she needed her sleep, it was my job to wake up for the four o’clock feeding, prepare the supplementary bottle, and feed the infant. Although I did this for all of the newborns, I particularly remember how great it felt with Julie, holding her close to me, cuddling, and administering the bottle as if the milk were flowing from my own woefully inadequate breast. Early on, after a change of diaper and a half-hour feeding, Julie would go back to sleep, and so would I. But by the time she was three or four months old, she refused to go back to sleep, and there she would be, wide awake, playful and eager to start the day. When I tried to pull away to catch another hour or two of sleep, she would hold tight. Although I was dead tired and longed to crawl back into bed, she gradually charmed me into wakefulness—and I would put the coffee on.
Many years later my good friend, poet David Swanger, beautifully captured my feelings about the early ritual with Julie in these lines from his poem “My Daughter’s Morning”:For her, I bring the day:During the first week of classes Robert Sears, the Psychology Department chairman, called an orientation meeting of all first-year graduate students. After greeting us warmly and providing the usual information about required courses, he changed expression. He looked grim, cleared his throat ominously, and asked us to take a good look at our fellow students. “At this time next year, about half of the people you are looking at will be gone,” he said. “Because we aren’t good at predicting graduate student success, our policy is to admit twice as many students as we intend to retain.” There was absolute silence in the room. Acute anxiety makes no noise. That afternoon I asked Ralph Haber, who was beginning his third year in the program, whether Sears had been serious. “Oh, yes,” said Ralph. “In my first year almost two-thirds of my classmates were told not to return. Some of them were quite bright and did well in their course work. But surely you have nothing to worry about.” I nodded, but inside I was petrified, thinking, “Ralph has no idea how much I don’t know about psychology.” I was stunned by the contrast between this welcome and the one I had received at Wesleyan. “So this is what it’s like in the big leagues,” I thought. During that first year I did pretty well in the required courses, but my performance, especially in the two mandatory statistics courses, could hardly be called dazzling. I worked hard in those statistics courses, but, unlike many of my peers, I never quite got a feel for it, and earned low Bs in both of them. And the mere fact that there were two required statistics courses, I assumed, meant that the Stanford faculty considered the subject to be of paramount importance. I felt I was in real danger of being among the 50 percent who wouldn’t be asked to return next year. It was in my role as a teaching assistant, leading sections in Introductory Psychology, that I felt most competent. In these seminars I was developing a style that I would call “gently Socratic.” Aron Gurwitsch had demonstrated the power of the Socratic method of questioning. But Gurwitsch’s style was edgy; he knew the response he wanted and was impatient with students who didn’t give it to him. I was learning not to reject answers I didn’t like, but to follow the student’s answer with a thought-provoking question that might lead the student to an interesting place. The students were responsive, and their continued attendance made it clear that they liked what I was doing. Ralph had also led sections in Introductory Psychology that fall. We were both scheduled to do it again in the winter quarter, this time assisting Professor Ernest “Jack” Hilgard, who would be teaching the course, assigning his own widely used introductory textbook. At Ralph’s urging, we approached Hilgard with the rather impudent proposal that he allow us to coteach an honors seminar instead of the usual cut-and-dried sections. Instead of reading the textbook, our students would read original works of the psychologists being summarized in the textbook—psychologists like John Watson, B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, D. O. Hebb, Abe Maslow, and Kurt Lewin. Hilgard expressed some reservations about the idea, but, after thinking about it for a few days, he decided to give us our head, adding, “Don’t blow it.” Ralph and I selected fifteen students from Hilgard’s class of some two hundred. In addition to attending Hilgard’s lectures, they met with us for three hours one evening per week in Ralph’s living room. It was a rich learning experience for the students and for Ralph and me as well. The students read the original works with care; the group discussions were lively and informative. Every single student in that seminar rated it as the best course they had taken at Stanford, and more than half of them went on to graduate school in psychology. The teacher in me found that gratifying, but the scientist in me would not allow me to take much credit. I was well aware that our students could hardly be considered a random sample of the Stanford student body. The group was a highly select one; each student had volunteered with the full knowledge that the seminar would require extra work. So I already owed a lot to Ralph, because it was through his initiative and persuasiveness that I had such a wonderful teaching experience. And then, a year later, he saved my life. At Christmas-time, Vera, Lili, the kids, and I piled into our little VW and drove to Los Angeles to visit relatives. On the way home, as I was driving at night in the rain through the Pacheco Pass, a twisting mountain road with steep drops on either side of the highway, we came around a curve and got hit with a ferocious blast of wind. I cut the wheel sharply to the left, and the car skidded across both lanes of the highway and off the precipice on the opposite side. We were airborne, and I heard Vera say, “Oh, no.” And in that moment, I thought, “Is this how it ends?” The car rolled over and over and came to rest on its roof. Incredibly, none of us was seriously injured. Vera suffered a mild concussion, I tore up a knee, and Lili and the babies were unhurt. I pulled everyone out of the car as fast as possible, climbed back up the steep hill, and tried to flag down a passing car. No one wanted to help a disheveled guy on the roadside at night, so I finally stood in the middle of the road waving my arms so that the next car had to stop. I explained what happened, and the driver agreed to call for an ambulance at the next station. He did, and we were all taken to the nearest hospital, where we spent the night. The next morning I called John Wright, a fellow graduate student, who came to collect us and drive us back to Palo Alto. John and I stopped at the accident scene and walked down the hill. The Volkswagen was totaled. The driver’s door had been ripped off when the car had begun rolling and lay halfway between us and the car. “My God,” said John. “How come you weren’t thrown from your seat? The car would have rolled over you and crushed you. How come you’re still here?” “Ralph Haber,” I said. “He had been nagging me for ages to get seat belts. He’d read Consumer Reports or something. I thought they were a pain in the neck. They’re expensive, and you have to go to a shop and get holes drilled in the floor of your car to have the damned things installed. But I finally did it, just to get him to stop pestering.” Dick Alpert also saved my life, but in a far less literal way. During the break between the winter and spring quarters of my first year, Dick dropped in to our cottage at dinnertime, bearing a cheesecake and a bottle of Courvoisier. He held up the bottle and said, with a self-deprecating smile, “After all, it’s the brandy of Napoleon,” and asked Vera if she would mind putting a little extra water into the soup so that he could join us for dinner. Vera and I had grown increasingly fond of Dick and loved his frequent, unannounced dinnertime visits. Dick had more style than anyone we had ever met. We were amused and charmed by his refined taste in such niceties as wine and brandy, which, needless to say, was hardly typical of professors, let alone of acting instructors who did not quite have a Ph.D. The Courvoisier was one of his hallmarks, as was the flashy Mercedes that he drove. Dick was to the manor born. His father was George Alpert, a wealthy and powerful corporation lawyer who was also president of the New Haven Railroad, chairman of the board of trustees at Brandeis University, and God only knows what else. Over dessert, Dick asked me if I had met Leon Festinger, the professor who had joined the Stanford Psychology Department that fall. I didn’t know him, but I had heard a lot about him. Although he was only thirty-six, he was a star, perhaps the hottest theorist and researcher in social psychology. He was rumored to be hard at work on developing a new theory on something called “cognitive dissonance.” In our stat course we learned that he had invented a widely used nonparametric statistical technique—in his spare time, I guess. He sounded too good to be true. But, alas, “good” is not an adjective I would have used to describe him, for he also had earned a reputation for toughness bordering on cruelty. Since September the psychology building had been reverberating with stories from his previous academic positions—stories of graduate students having been so humiliated by his overbearing personality and relentless sarcastic wit that they had left the social psychology program and decided to become forest rangers, real estate brokers, or even psychotherapists, in order to get as far away from him as possible. I had not gravitated toward an adviser yet; I was thinking of working with Sears, or Hilgard, or perhaps Al Bandura, who was doing some interesting research on children’s imitation of aggression. I wasn’t sure who it would be, but I was sure it was not going to be Leon Festinger. “Well,” said Dick, “this Festinger guy is apparently an extraordinary scholar. Some say he is a genius. He has to be good because he is one of the most highly paid professors on campus.” (Dick was the kind of person who would know.) “He is so special that Bob Sears gave him the first two quarters off so that he could settle in and set up his lab without bothering with students. Now in the spring quarter he will be teaching a seminar, and only three students have signed up for it. That’s a waste of a very expensive resource. The faculty thinks that the graduate students are keeping away because they are afraid of him. By the way, I notice that you haven’t signed up for his seminar. How come?” I wasn’t sure whether that was a suggestion, a challenge, or a taunt. But whatever it was, it worked. I wasn’t going to let Dick think (know!) that I was a coward. “Well, actually, as it happens, I was thinking of signing up for it,” I said. “I will check it out.” And I did, but not right away. As the spring quarter was about to begin, I sought out Judson Mills. Jud was a second-year graduate student who had spent a year studying with Festinger at the University of Minnesota and had come to Stanford as his research assistant. I told Jud the rumors I had heard about Festinger and asked him if they were true. Jud smiled wryly and said, “Well, not entirely. At Minnesota, none of the students ever became forest rangers.” Funny, but not helpful. I realized that I had better talk with the man himself. It was with some trepidation that I stepped into Festinger’s office, introduced myself, and told him that I was thinking of en-rolling in his seminar. I explained that I didn’t know anything about social psychology, and I asked him if there was something I might read that might help me decide whether I wanted to take his course. He leaned back in his chair and slowly looked me up and down. Then he grunted, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling (as if to say, “Just look at the idiots they’re sending me these days”), and, with some reluctance, reached into a desk drawer and handed me the carbon copy of a book-length manuscript. He said, “I hear you have little kids. Is that true?” I was flattered that he seemed to know something about me. I thought he was trying to be friendly, so I relaxed a little. “Only one so far—a little boy; he just had his first birthday,” I gushed. It was a mistake. Festinger was not making small talk. He didn’t smile. He grunted again, pointed to the manuscript, and informed me that it was a book he had just written, that he had sent the original to the publisher, and that this carbon was the only copy he had left. He made me promise, under the pain of death or dismemberment (whichever I preferred), not to let my toddler get blueberry jam all over it. So much for small talk. I left his office thinking, “What a prick! Do I really want to spend ten weeks in a small seminar room with that guy?” That evening I told Vera about my encounter with Festinger and asked her opinion. She said, “He sounds nasty. What are your options?” I told her that the best alternative was Jack Hilgard, who was offering a seminar that sounded interesting. I reminded her that Jack and I had a good working relationship based on my teaching the honors seminar the previous quarter. She said, “Taking Jack’s course sounds reasonable—and safe. But since when do you go for what is safe? Why don’t you at least take a look at Festinger’s book and see if you like it? I will hide the blueberry jam.” After dinner that evening and after Hal was safely in bed for the night, I glanced at Festinger’s manuscript. It was called A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. I casually read the first few pages, just to get an idea of what it was about. I had no intention of reading beyond that. But I got hooked, and the next thing I knew it was three in the morning. I had read the damn book in one sitting. It was the most exciting thing I had ever read in psychology. That was more than fifty years ago; it’s still the most exciting thing I’ve ever read in psychology. Festinger started with a simple proposition: If individuals held two cognitions that were psychologically inconsistent, they would experience dissonance, a negative drive like hunger or thirst. Unlike hunger or thirst, it is a cognitive drive, but just as unpleasant. Accordingly, they would be motivated to reduce dissonance as much as they would attempt to reduce hunger or thirst, in this case by trying to change one or both of the dissonant cognitions to bring them into consonance, or harmony. Festinger’s defining example was that of the lifelong cigarette smoker who discovers that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. The smoker experiences dissonance. The cognition “I smoke cigarettes” is dissonant with the cognition “cigarette smoking produces cancer.” Clearly, the most efficient way for a person to reduce dissonance in such a situation is to give up smoking. The cognition “cigarette smoking produces cancer” is consonant with the cognition “I do not smoke.” But most smokers find it difficult to give up the habit; many try and fail, repeatedly. What might they do to reduce dissonance? In all probability they will work on adjusting the other cognition, that “cigarette smoking produces cancer.” They might minimize the evidence linking cigarette smoking to cancer, trying to convince themselves that the science is inconclusive. They might seek out intelligent people who smoke and, by so doing, convince themselves that if those guys do it, it can’t be all that dangerous. They might switch to a filter-tipped brand and delude themselves into believing that the filter traps the cancer-producing materials. And they might add cognitions that are consonant with smoking in an attempt to make the behavior less absurd in spite of its danger: “I may lead a shorter life, but it will be a more enjoyable one”; “I’m just the kind of bold person who enjoys taking risks.” What Festinger did was forge a marriage between the cognitive and the motivational. As he stated it, dissonance theory is essentially a theory about sense-making: why and how people try to make sense out of their environment and their behavior, resolve discrepancies, and thus try to lead lives that are (at least in their own minds) sensible and meaningful. The book contained very little original experimentation, but it contained rich ideas, as well as the seeds of some fascinating research that was to percolate through the professional journals for the next twenty years and revolutionize social psychology. Of course, I did not know that at the time. What I did know was that the theory was new, interesting, and provocative. At least it interested me and provoked me to think in ways that I never thought before. So I enrolled in the seminar. I figured, “He is a prick, all right, but a smart and interesting prick.” There were only six of us in the seminar. In addition to Jud Mills and myself, there were two fourth-year graduate students in psychology, a graduate student who had wandered over from the Sociology Department, and an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate junior named Merrill Carlsmith. The seminar was lively and tense. Festinger’s style was to assign a number of books, most of which had little or no direct relevance to social psychology, and cross-examine us about the content of each book and what ramifications we thought it might have for dissonance theory. For the most part, Festinger did not have a clear, preconceived notion of what those ramifications might be. Unlike Gurwitsch, he wasn’t trying to lead us to a specific answer; rather, we were all exploring together. Still, exactly as advertised, he was brilliant and scary. His questions were razor sharp, and he made it clear that we had better answer knowledgeably and not leave any loose ends. It was like having a tiger in the classroom. He could pounce on you at any time without warning, often for reasons that were baffling or trivial to us. Even Jud was not exempt; far from it. One day he gave a report on a book he’d read, and Leon asked him to elaborate on what seemed to me to be a minor detail. Jud couldn’t do it, and Leon said, in exasperation, “How could you possibly have missed the point?” Jud stammered some reply, but Leon continued his harassment until the class ended. As Jud and I were walking out of the room together, he was visibly shaking. Then he turned to me and said, “You know, I do think that Leon likes me.” Festinger could be savage and harsh, all right, but he also exuded a warmth, joy, and playfulness. At times he was a cross-examining attorney, trying to trip us up. At other times he was Sherlock Holmes to our Doctor Watson, treating us as colleagues in pursuit of an elusive solution to a complex problem. And he would also break us up with a quick and spontaneous display of humor, occasionally at his own expense. I looked forward to the seminar meetings with excitement and anxiety, and was learning not to worry too much about the anxiety. Halfway through the quarter, Festinger assigned a term paper in which he asked for an analysis of the Salem witch trials. I read the material, wrote the paper, and handed it in. A couple of days later, I was walking past his office toward the TA room where I had a desk. He saw me go by, yelled out my name, and beckoned me to come in. He picked up my paper from a short pile on his desk, held it disdainfully at arm’s length between his thumb and forefinger, turned his face away from it, as if it were a particularly smelly piece of garbage, and said, “I believe this is yours.” I was devastated, but I tried to put on a brave front. I said, “I guess you didn’t like it very much.” He glared at me for what seemed like a very long time. Then he turned his hands palms up, shrugged his shoulders, and a look came into his eyes that anyone who ever worked with him would instantly recognize. It was a mixture of contempt and pity. The reason for the contempt part of that look was obvious: I was wasting his time. The pity part of that look seemed to imply that he felt sorry for me because I had been born brain-damaged. He said, “That’s right, I didn’t like it very much.” I took my paper and slunk down the corridor to my desk in the TA room. I sat there for about ten minutes before I could gather the courage to open it and read the terrible words I expected to find scrawled in the margins. When I did, I was astounded to discover that there wasn’t a mark on it. What was I to make of this? I gathered my courage, marched back to Festinger’s office, and said, “Hey, Leon, you forgot to write any criticisms in the margins. How am I supposed to know what I got wrong?” He stared at me for several seconds. Then he turned his hands palms up, shrugged his shoulders, and that awful look of contempt and pity came into his eyes again. He said, “What? You don’t have enough respect for your own work and your own thinking to go the extra mile, to follow your own reasoning to its logical conclusions, and you expect me to do that for you? This is graduate school, not kindergarten. You’re supposed to tell me what’s wrong with it.” I walked back to my desk and sat there fuming. I had just come off of a quarter where I was being hailed by the students in my honors seminar as a great teacher, and a month later I was being treated like an idiot by the most interesting professor in the Psychology Department. I was confused and furious. I didn’t need this kind of humiliation, and I certainly didn’t need to deal with this son of a bitch. I could simply get through this course and ignore him for the rest of my time in grad school. Yet during those weeks in his seminar I had seen that he was an extraordinary thinker and a great scientist. I knew that I could learn a lot from him if I had the guts to hang in there. With a sigh, I picked up the paper and began to read it carefully, trying to see it through Festinger’s eyes. And when I did I found it poorly reasoned, incompletely analyzed, imperfectly argued. The son of a bitch was right! What now? If I rewrote the paper, would he even bother to read it? “Fuck that,” I said to myself. “You are thinking like an undergraduate. Rewrite the damn thing for yourself. You owe it to yourself to do it right. Who cares what that bastard thinks?” The truth is, I did. I cared a lot what that bastard thought. For the next two or three days (it seemed like seventy-two consecutive hours), I worked and reworked that paper until I was satisfied with it. I walked over to Leon’s office. As usual the door was open, but he had his nose buried in a book. I didn’t want to interrupt him, so I waited at the threshold. He raised his head and looked intently out the window; he seemed to be staring at his own thoughts. I hesitated for a moment or two, strode into his office, plunked my paper on his desk, and said, “Maybe you’ll like this one better.” I turned on my heel and walked out. To his credit, he must have dropped what he had been doing and read my paper immediately, because twenty minutes later, he came into the TA room carrying my paper. He placed it gently in front of me, sat down on the corner of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Now, this is worth criticizing.” This incident turned out to be a gift of incalculable value. Naturally, I would have preferred it if the gift had come wrapped in a gentler, kinder package. Leon showed me, in the most vivid manner possible, that he was not going to accept anything that fell short of my best effort. By declaring that my revised paper was worth criticizing, he was telling me that I was worth his time and energy. What I got a glimpse of, at that moment, was confirmed during the rest of my time in graduate school as I got closer to Leon and watched him in action. He put a high premium on his own time and energy. If a student did not go all out, Leon was not going to waste any effort on him. But on those surprisingly rare occasions when a student did give him everything he had, Leon would give that student everything he had and, most valuable of all, his criticism, which was always sharp and always on target. Ironically, his taking the trouble to give you his criticism was just about the highest praise he could provide.
warm milk, new diaper, escapades;
She lowers all bridges and
sings to me most beautifully
in her own language, while
I fumble with safety pins.
From that moment on, for me, Stanford became Leon Festinger. Stanford had a great Psychology Department with several first-rate professors, but none had his combination of skill, brilliance, and meticulousness. Leon would not allow us to draw conclusions that were unsupported by evidence. “If you want to go beyond the data,” he would exhort us, “that’s speculation—a hypothesis for your next experiment.” He thought drawing unwarranted conclusions was not only sloppy thinking but bordered on the unethical; he called it “hanky-panky.” Leon’s favorite joke reveals, to me, his love of precise thinking and precise communication: An old Jewish couple is lying in bed when the wife says, “Saul, close the window. It’s cold outside.” With a groan, Saul gets up out of bed, closes the window, turns to his wife, and says, “So now it’s warm outside?”
After the incident with the term paper, I continued to find Leon’s seminar exhilarating, but I was no longer intimidated by his style. Whenever he gave me one of those looks, which he did more than a few times, I found it challenging rather than daunting. The six of us in the seminar felt like we were part of something important. The theory of cognitive dissonance was changing the way we thought about the human mind and social influence, and we were contributing to the development of an idea that would permanently change social psychology.
Dissonance theory taught me the great lesson of social influence that was to guide my thinking for the next fifty years as a researcher and writer: Although it’s true that changing people’s attitudes sometimes changes their behavior, if you want a more powerful change to take place, you will try to evoke a change in behavior first; attitudes will follow. This way of seeing things was completely counterintuitive for laypeople and even for most social psychologists at the time. The idea was that if, for example, you want someone to do you a favor, you must first persuade him that you are a nice person. This is not wrong; it is merely inefficient. As my students would later demonstrate, you can produce a much more powerful effect by first getting him to do you a favor; he will then convince himself that you deserved his doing you that favor, and that therefore you are a nice person. And, as a result, he is apt to do you a much bigger favor in the future.
Dissonance theory was a breath of fresh air at a time when radical behaviorism dominated all of psychology. In the 1950s almost all behavior was explained by rewards and punishments. People like food, golf, and their mothers, behaviorists said, because of rewards associated with food, golf, and their mothers. Therefore, if a rat, pigeon, or person kept doing something for no obvious reward, behaviorists would claim we weren’t looking hard enough—the reward has to be around here, somewhere, or else the rat, pigeon, or person would stop behaving that way. Dissonance theory did not deny the importance of principles of reinforcement; rather, it showed us that the mind is much more complex than principles of reward and punishment would lead us to predict. Of course, Abraham Maslow had also railed against the limitations of behaviorism, but his ideas were vague and untestable. (When Leon learned that it was Maslow who had first gotten me excited about psychology, he said, “Maslow? That guy’s ideas are so bad they aren’t even wrong.”) Dissonance theory was pregnant with testable ideas, some of which had far-reaching ramifications. During the second half of the seminar, we began generating these testable hypotheses.
I happened to be reading John Whiting’s work on initiations as rites of passage among indigenous tribes of Africa and South America; Whiting was describing the differences, not theorizing about their origins or purpose. But in Festinger’s seminar it dawned on me that perhaps one function of those initiations was to create a more cohesive group, just as people who go through extreme basic training required to join the marines develop a strong commitment to the corps, and just as pledges develop attachment to their fraternities after weeks of horrible hazing, and, for that matter, just as I came to love Brandeis after a semester of sleeping in cars.
The prediction from dissonance theory is that the cognition “I went through hell and high water to get into this group” would be dissonant with “ . . . only to discover that the group is worthless and its members are insipid.” To reduce dissonance, most people would minimize the importance of any negative aspects of the group and focus primarily on the positive ones. But people who voluntarily join the marines (or who work hard to stay at Brandeis) are self-selected; they might have joined the marines or chosen Brandeis because they liked it prior to the initiation. For this reason, correlational data are inadequate to test the hypothesis. I needed to design an experiment so that I could randomly assign participants to either a severe-initiation condition or a mild one and see whether the former came to like an unappealing group more than the latter.
And so one day, as Jud and I were leaving Leon’s seminar, I floated my hypothesis by him. Jud responded enthusiastically, and the two of us spent the next several days designing an experiment. Our hypothesis required us to set up a situation where people would volunteer to try out for membership in a group. We would randomly assign one-third of them to a severe-initiation condition, one-third to a mild-initiation condition, and one-third to a no-initiation condition. Afterward, we would ask them how much they liked the group they had joined.
We immediately had two problems. What kind of group would sound so interesting that college students would be willing to undergo a severe initiation to get into it? And what kind of severe initiation could we do, since hazing was out of the question? Jud and I hit on the idea of sex. We figured that almost all young adults are interested in talking about sex. Once we determined the topic of the group discussion, the rest of the procedure fell into place.
We advertised that we were forming groups of students to meet for several discussions on the psychology of sex. (As it turned out, most of the volunteers were women, so we decided to use women only.) We phoned them and arranged an appointment for each participant to come into the lab, one at a time, for a one-hour interview. I greeted each woman and explained that I was a social psychology graduate student who was studying the dynamics of the group-discussion process. I added that the actual topic of the discussion was not important to me; I had selected the topic of sex to guarantee plenty of volunteers. “But that presented me with a major drawback,” I would say. “Specifically, shy students find it difficult to discuss sex in a group setting. Because any impediment to the free flow of the discussion could invalidate my research, I need to know if you have any hesitation about entering a discussion about sex.” When the participants heard this, each and every one said that she would have no difficulty at all.
Up to this point, the instructions were the same for all participants. If the subject had been preassigned to the no-initiation condition, I simply told her that she was now a member of the group. For women assigned to the severe-and mild-initiation conditions, however, I said that because I needed to be absolutely certain that everyone could discuss sex openly, I had developed a screening device—a test for embarrassment—that I asked them to take. This test constituted the initiation. For the severe-initiation condition, the test was highly embarrassing. The young woman had to recite, to me, a list of twelve obscene words, including fuck, cunt, and blow job, and two particularly steamy passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (In 1957, trust me, reading this material out loud was really embarrassing—for me as well as the students!) The mild-initiation participants had to recite a list of words related to sex that were not obscene, such as vagina, penis, and sexual intercourse.
Next, each student listened to a tape recording of a discussion of “sexual behavior” that she believed was being held by the group she had just joined. The recording was identical for each volunteer, and the discussion was as slow, boring, and turgid as I could make it. Finally, Jud (who was blind to each student’s condition) interviewed each of the students and got her to rate the discussion and the group members on a number of dimensions—how appealing the group was, how intelligent and articulate its members seemed, and so on. The results were just as we had predicted. Subjects who went through the severe initiation thought the group was terrific, while those who went through the mild initiation or no initiation saw it (correctly!) as dull and boring; several wanted to resign immediately.
It was fascinating to see the specific ways that women in the severe initiation reduced their dissonance. For example, one guy on the tape, stammering and muttering, admitted that he hadn’t done the required reading on the courtship practices of some rare bird, and the mild-initiation listeners were annoyed by him. What an irresponsible idiot! He didn’t even do the basic reading! He let the group down! Who’d want to be in a group with him? But those who had gone through a severe initiation rated the discussion as interesting and exciting and the group members as attractive and sharp. They forgave the irresponsible idiot. His candor was refreshing! Who wouldn’t want to be in a group with such an honest guy? It was hard for me to believe that they had listened to the same tape recording.
I can still remember the exhilaration I felt as the data began to fall into place. I was elated by the realization that I had discovered something new and exciting about how the human mind works— in this case, that going through a difficult experience in order to gain something makes people like that thing better. More generally, I realized that, as complex as human behavior is, it is also lawful. All I had to do was identify the law, hone it into a testable hypothesis, and invent a procedure to get at the essence of that hypothesis. Doing this experiment also showed me that I might have a knack for creating a methodological key to unlock some of the mysteries of human behavior. It was a great revelation. I don’t think I have ever been more excited about anything in my entire life. Intellectually speaking, anyway. It was my first experiment, and it became a classic, one of the defining experiments of dissonance theory.
The challenge of this kind of experimentation is to find a way to imbed the participant in a prearranged scenario that is coherent, absorbing, and believable. The experimenter must have the skills of a playwright, a director, and an actor without abandoning scientific rigor. In our experiments the laboratory comes alive; real things are happening to real people. This way of working allows us to transcend the fabled artificiality of more traditional laboratory experiments. We called this approach “high-impact experimentation” because we plunked people into the middle of a situation that was so real for them that they had to respond as they would have responded outside the laboratory. In designing this kind of experiment, I discovered that it is possible—actually, essential—to achieve scientific rigor without artificiality or sterility. That became my mantra as an experimenter.
Previously, much of the research in social psychology consisted either of investigating trivial phenomena (“people will believe an article published in the New York Times more than one published in Pravda”) or of observing how people who scored high or low on some personality test (like achievement motivation, to take a not-so-random example) would behave in a variety of situations. What I picked up from Leon was the audacious belief that, as scientists, we did not need to confine our research to trivial topics or pallid methods. Rather, with sufficient ingenuity, we could find a way to investigate in the laboratory just about any phenomenon. This could free the scientist from an overreliance on personality variables and from accepting a trait as an explanation for the subsequent behavior. We could learn directly what causes people’s behavior, because we, the experimenters, have created the “what.” It was the severe initiation that produced a liking for the group, and it did so regardless of the subject’s early childhood experiences or personality.
The key ingredient in the high-impact experiment is theatricality. If the experiment is going to work, the script must be believable and the experimenter must be a convincing actor. Otherwise, the subject will not get involved, and the experiment will fail. For some reason, perhaps having to do with my stint as a mike man on the Revere Beach Boardwalk, the dramaturgical requirements of an experiment came easily to me. For example, in the initiation experiment, I was able to come up with a scenario that convinced the subjects that it made sense for them to go through an embarrassing initiation to get into that group discussion. In addition, it didn’t take me long to grasp the importance of pilot testing; because our procedures are complex, such pretesting can ensure that the procedure is affecting the subjects the way it was intended. It is the scientific equivalent of rehearsing your Broadway-bound play in New Haven first. If the pilot study doesn’t work, it is back to the drawing board.
When I was about to run my first pilot subject in the initiation experiment, I invited Leon to observe through a one-way mirror. When I finished I came back to his office and said, “Any suggestions?”
“Nope.”
“What do you mean, ‘Nope?’ How can I improve my performance?”
“It’s perfect. You are ready to go.”
“But I’ve got three more pilot subjects scheduled for this afternoon.”
“Cancel them. You are ready to go.”
Earlier, I said that Leon’s praise, if it came at all, usually came in the guise of criticism. But, occasionally, it came in more direct form, as in his noncritique of my laboratory performance. That kind of praise was the gold standard, precisely because I knew it did not stem from his wish to be kind or any need to be liked, which was unimportant to him.
Shortly thereafter, Leon actually asked for my consultation. He had designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that a person telling a lie for a small reward would believe his own lie to a greater extent than someone telling the same lie for a large reward. The latter has an adequate justification: “I told a lie for twenty dollars; it was worth it.” The former feels dissonance: “Why would I tell a lie for only a buck? I must believe it.” Festinger had asked Merrill Carlsmith, the undergraduate in the seminar, to carry out the experiment, which was as carefully crafted as an Arthur Miller play.
When the subject arrived at the lab, he would be asked to do a few unbearably dull tasks. (The first was to fill a tray with twelve spools, one at a time and using one hand, then take all the spools out, one by one, then put them back in, over and over again for a half hour.) Merrill would watch, taking notes and doing mysterious things with a stopwatch, then tell the subject the experiment was over, and thank him for his help. He would explain that he was testing the hypothesis that people work faster if they are told in advance that the task is incredibly interesting than if they are told nothing and informed, “You were in the control condition. That is why you were told nothing.”
At this point Merrill would say that the guy who was supposed to give the ecstatic description to the next subject had just phoned in to say he couldn’t make it. Merrill would beg the “control” subject to do him a favor and play the role, offering him a dollar (or twenty dollars) to do it. Once the subject agreed, Merrill was to give him the money and a sheet listing the main things to say praising the experiment and leave him alone for a few minutes to prepare. Then Merrill would bring the guy into the waiting room where an undergraduate woman was waiting (actually a confederate of ours), and leave him to describe the experiment to her in glowing terms.
But it wasn’t working, and Merrill was frustrated because the subjects were suspicious. So Leon and I sat behind the one-way mirror as Merrill ran his fifth pilot subject. Merrill was an extraordinarily bright guy, but, as an experimenter, he was wooden. The poor guy was deprived; while I was gaining invaluable training on the boardwalk, Merrill was wasting his time playing lacrosse at Andover. As Leon and I watched him sleepwalk his way through the experiment, it was crystal clear why the subjects weren’t buying it: He wasn’t selling it. Leon said to me, “Train him.”
And I did. I gave Merrill a crash course in acting. “You don’t simply say that the assistant hasn’t shown up,” I said. “You fidget, you sweat, you pace up and down, you wring your hands, you convey to the subject that you are in real trouble here. And then, you act as if you just now got an idea. You look at the subject, and you brighten up. ‘You! You can do this for me. I can even pay you.’”
After three days of intense training (I felt like we were in the Actor’s Studio), Merrill was ready. The experiment went off without a hitch. Only one out of forty subjects was suspicious. And the hypothesis was confirmed: The subjects who were paid only one dollar for lying convinced themselves that the tasks were fairly interesting, while those who were paid twenty dollars continued to see the tasks as horribly dull, which of course they were.
I loved every part of the process: coming up with the idea, designing the experiment, writing the script, rehearsing the performance, training an assistant, debriefing the participants so they understood why we did what we did, analyzing the data, and writing up the study for publication. It was like the feeling I had, years earlier in Revere, after I had mastered the skill of fielding a ground ball, when I suddenly knew I could do it. Instead of being nervous in tight situations and praying that the batter would hit the ball somewhere else (“Please God, anywhere else but not to me!”), I wanted the ball to come bouncing in my direction.
I had discovered the kind of research I wanted to do, and as the poet Pablo Neruda put it, “something ignited in my soul.” I had found my calling. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the Psychology Department didn’t invite me to return next year? If only I had done better in those damned statistics courses. Near the end of the spring quarter, Leon told me that he would like to hire me as a research assistant for the next two years, starting in the summer. I said, “Sure, if I’m still here. I didn’t do too well in my statistics courses.”
He turned his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. “Statistics?” he said. “No big deal. A guy like you? After you get your degree, you can hire a statistician or even two; they are a dime a dozen.” Leon was pretty good at putting things in perspective.
The warmth of his reaction was the first step toward the eventual demolition of the usual student-professor barrier. At that moment I stopped seeing Leon as merely a difficult taskmaster or even as a challenging mentor, and started seeing him as a friend. At the time Vera teased me by observing that my own severe initiation at his hands virtually guaranteed that I’d come to like him. Perhaps it did, at first. But an initiation doesn’t explain why a person’s liking for a group (or person) might continue to deepen for decades. Thirty-two years later, when I gave the eulogy at Leon’s memorial, evoking the hearty laughter of recognition with my stories of his toughness and that famous look of pity and contempt, I felt the sorrow of losing one of the most warm and gratifying friendships of my life.
In 1959 I earned my Ph.D. and accepted an offer from Harvard to be an assistant professor. The previous year we had replaced the totaled Volkswagen with a 1954 Chevrolet station wagon, big enough for our growing family—three-year-old Hal, two-year-old Neal, and eight-month-old Julie. Vera and I set off on another trip across the country, this time from Palo Alto to Cambridge, and this time with enough money for motels and a stop in Chicago to visit Jason and his new wife. I had all but forgotten the humanistic concerns that had initially attracted me to psychology. I was no longer thinking of doing good; I was now thinking of doing good experiments. As we headed toward Cambridge, my car was full of kids and my head was full of ideas, and I could hardly wait to settle in and get started.
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