CHAPTER SIX

  Outside Harvard Yard  Hal, Julie, and Neal inspecting newborn Josh, 1961.  The distance between my childhood house in Revere and Harvard University is about seven miles, but, for me, the psychological distance was astronomical. Harvard was and is, of course, the pinnacle of American education; Revere was (and, for all I know, still is) among the dregs. While growing up in Revere, I knew no one who was attending or who had ever attended Harvard, even for a week. The year I graduated from high school, even our class valedictorian had been turned down for admission to that hallowed institution. Naturally, when I was a high school senior, I did not bother applying. I imagined that if I had applied, the admissions committee would have taken one look at my high school grades and would have rolled on the floor laughing. And, now, nine years later, here I was, wearing the obligatory tweed jacket and khaki pants, striding through Harvard Yard. Here I was, Harry Aronson’s shy little boy, teaching at an institution that would not have wanted him as an undergraduate.  I was feeling a cacophony of emotions. I was feeling proud of myself for having gotten there. I was in awe of the place. It is not only a great university by any criterion but also the place where John Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Franklin Roosevelt studied. And I was feeling annoyed at myself for being so awestruck; Harvard was the bastion of WASP exclusiveness, where the guarantee of admission was having a father who was a wealthy Protestant alumnus. This was the school that, at that moment, was enforcing a quota limiting the admission of Jews and other minorities. Just three decades earlier, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, had had the audacity to insist that sharply decreasing the number of Jews at Harvard would be good for the Jews because, if a sizable number enrolled, it would fuel the existing anti-Semitism among the Gentile students.  My heart was beating hard as I walked past Widener Library and up the steps of Emerson Hall, which housed the main offices of the Social Relations Department. In those days Harvard psychology was split into two departments. Memorial Hall housed the “hard-science” group who studied animal learning, sensation and perception, physiological psychology, and so on. That department was led by such luminaries as B. F. Skinner and Edwin G. Boring. The “soft sciences” (social psychology, personality, and clinical) had united with sociology and anthropology to form the Social Relations Department. The luminaries of this group were Henry “Harry” Murray, Gordon Allport, and Jerome Bruner. From what I could gather, the main reason for the split was that the luminaries from the soft and hard ends of the continuum could not get along with one another.  Between the tenured senior faculty and the newly arrived, awestruck assistant professors lay the abyss. The abyss was filled with assistant professors in their fourth or fifth year on the faculty. “Harvard is a terrible place to be but a wonderful place to be from,” one of those young men informed me. Several others agreed heartily. What they were caviling about was the unwritten law of faculty promotion: Because Harvard was committed to excellence, the institution would not bestow tenure without conclusive evidence that the particular person was the best available scholar in his or her subdiscipline. Because it was unlikely that an assistant professor who had been out of graduate school for only five or six years would meet that criterion, I was warned, tenure was a virtual impossibility. As a result, most of the senior faculty treated the junior faculty in much the same way that native Parisians treat summer tourists, as if we were just passing through on our way somewhere else. Upon hearing this assessment, I shrugged my shoulders and thought, “Too bad, but so what?”  But not all of the assistant professors were ready to throw in the tenure towel. My old pal Dick Alpert had his eye on the prize. Dick had arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor of child development two years earlier and was eager to remain there for the rest of his life. One evening he and I decided to go to dinner and a movie together. After dinner he said that he needed to stop off at his office for a minute on the way to the theater. When we walked in he flicked on the light and then said, “Okay, let’s go.”  “What the hell was that all about?” I asked.  “Well,” he said, “Harry Murray lives just up the street. He often goes for long walks at night. Suppose he comes walking by, sees my light on, and it registers in his mind that I am a hardworking person, worthy of promotion.”  I waited for him to start laughing. But he was dead serious.  “I wish you luck,” I said.  Although I was appalled by his attitude, Dick was a good friend. He felt at home around Harvard Square and was eager to serve as my guide. “This is the Wurst Haus, a great old-fashioned German delicatessen, excellent beer. This is St. Claire’s; you don’t want to eat there, but they have a terrific bartender who pours the best martini in town. This is Elsie’s: good for a quick lunch; she makes the kind of roast beef sandwich you wish your mother could have made. For Italian food, Simione’s in Central Square, but if you want real Italian food, you have to hop on the subway and go to the North End.”  Because Dick wanted to be the one to introduce me to what was best about the university, he was eager to accompany me to my first meeting of the full Harvard faculty. The meeting was held in University Hall, a historic building in Harvard Yard, the central quadrangle of the campus. Dick was quick to point out that the building had been designed by Charles Bulfinch. “Class of 1781,” he said with a wink, “and you are not to ask which university he graduated from in 1781, wise guy.”  The meeting itself was presided over by the dean of faculty, McGeorge Bundy, who was soon to gain worldwide fame as national security adviser to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, and, in that capacity, to become a major proponent of the war in Vietnam. At the moment he was chairing the meeting in an engaging but dominating way. Although he exuded charm, he made it clear that he was in charge. At one point he got into a heated but gentlemanly argument with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.  I don’t remember anything else about the meeting. I’m sure some business was transacted, but whatever it was, for me, it was the underlying puffery that dominated the proceedings. Almost everyone who spoke seemed to be bathing in his own self-importance. After the meeting, as we emerged from the building, Dick was beaming.  “Didn’t you love it?”  “Well, actually, no.”  He was aghast. “Why the hell not?”  “A little too . . . a little too . . . ”  “A little too what?” He was getting impatient with me.  “Well, I guess a little too Courvoisier for my taste.”  Dick burst into laughter. “Oh, my God, you can take the kid out of Revere, but you can’t take Revere out of the kid.”  “Well, maybe. But, you know, they call Courvoisier ‘the brandy of Napoleon,’ but they didn’t start making the stuff until ten years after Napoleon died. You can look it up.”  “So? What’s your point?”  I felt awful. I hated ruining it for Dick; he was trying so hard to make me like it the way he did. But I hated the meeting. There was a studied elegance and civility to it that got under my skin. Even the argument between Bundy and Schlesinger seemed unreal. They seemed to be enjoying their own performance rather than disagreeing about anything important. It was the last Harvard faculty meeting I ever attended.  I drove home that evening with a heavy heart. Why did I let that stuff bother me so much? Why did I have to rain on Dick’s parade? Why couldn’t I have gone along with him or at least kept my mouth shut? Why did I needle him about the “brandy of Napoleon”? That night, after Vera had bathed Julie and put her to bed and I had told the boys some bedtime stories, we retired to the living room for our usual coffee, nightcap, and sharing of the day’s events.  “It was eerie,” I said. “What Dick saw as admirable pomp, I saw as pomposity.”  As usual, Vera saw things more clearly than I did: “You and Dick are on trains heading in opposite directions.”  Within a few months of my arrival in Cambridge, I had pretty much concluded that I was not going to get tenure there: not only because tenure was damn near impossible for any of us young guys but also because it wasn’t a good fit—either because Harvard (with its elite, gentlemanly anti-Semitism) was not the right place for me or because I (still proudly clinging to some of my blue-collar crudeness) was not the right person for it. I was already working at reducing my own dissonance. I went to that meeting determined to minimize whatever might have been good about it and ready to lampoon anything that could possibly be lampooned (“Bulfinch, class of 1781,” indeed). Dick, on the other hand, had decided to go all out for tenure and would do just about anything that would allow him to stay. Therefore, he was motivated to embrace all of it. One of the things I had always loved most about Dick was his uncanny ability to poke fun at himself and his own foibles, including his occasional “little rich boy” antics. But because he was hell-bent on making it there, he could not see the humor in the light-switch gimmick or the pretentiousness in the faculty meeting.  Bulfinch aside, there were many things about Harvard itself that I quickly came to cherish, not the least of which were the intelligence and the motivation of the graduate students. Indeed, during my very first week on campus, while I was still unpacking my books, who should saunter into my office but a young man who was to become my first advisee and the best student I would ever have. It was Merrill Carlsmith, the talented but wooden young undergraduate with whom I had worked at Stanford. After graduating from Stanford in 1958, Merrill began his graduate work at Harvard a year before my arrival. Wooden no more, he embraced me warmly and with excitement as if he had discovered a long-lost older brother. And, in a sense, he had.  “You are a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “What took you so long to get here?”  He had been disappointed, complaining that there was no one for him to work with at Harvard; no one on the faculty was doing the kind of high-impact experimentation that he had learned to do at Stanford. I informed him that there were few places in the world where that kind of experimentation was being done. “And,” I added with mock bravado, “Harvard is about to become one of them.”  “Don’t be so sure,” he said.  “What do you mean?”  “Well,” he said, “I don’t quite know how to put this. But what I have picked up is that it is not just a matter of their not knowing how to do our kind of experimental work, it is that some members of the faculty are hostile to it.”  “On what grounds?”  “No one has said this to me directly, but, from what I can gather, the general feeling around here is it is ungentlemanly, maybe even unethical, to use a cover story when describing the experiments to our subjects. They don’t see it as theater. They see it as lying.”  “That’s interesting. Well, my friend, are you ready to start doing some ungentlemanly experiments?”  “You bet.”  And off we went.  In those days fewer than half of the Social Relations faculty members were housed in its headquarters, Emerson Hall, a venerable ivy-covered building in the center of Harvard Yard. Its most distinguished residents were Gordon Allport and Talcott Parsons; the rest of us had our offices in several cottages scattered outside the central campus. These cottages functioned like fiefdoms, with each of them housing one senior member of the faculty and several junior members. My former mentor from Wesleyan, Dave McClelland, ran the fiefdom at 5 Divinity Avenue.  I had been assigned to 9 Bow Street, a nondescript two-story yellow clapboard house adjacent to a motor-scooter sales and repair garage. My office assignment was no accident. Jerry Bruner, a brilliant, erudite cognitive psychologist, wanted to take me under his wing. The summer before my arrival at Harvard, Jerry had written me a warm welcoming letter, in which he informed me that my office would be near his and inviting me to teach a freshman seminar with him on the human mind. I wrote back telling him that I was happy to be housed at Bow Street but that I didn’t think I wanted to teach the freshman seminar. When I arrived in Cambridge I learned that Jerry and I would be coteaching the seminar.  Teaching with Jerry was an interesting experience. In the seminars I had taught with Ralph Haber at Stanford, our aim was to encourage the students to express their ideas in response to pointed questions and encouragement from us. The seminar at Harvard was about Jerry and his breadth of knowledge. I think the students got a lot out of listening to him; I know that I did. I contributed as well, but I missed hearing from the students and getting to know them.  During that first semester Jerry also invited me to attend weekly research meetings with his seven or eight graduate students. I thought the group was doing some interesting research, but their projects were not my cup of tea. So, after attending the first three or four meetings, I skipped one. Jerry came into my office the next day and asked how come I wasn’t there. That’s when I realized that, as with the invitation to coteach the freshman seminar, an invitation from Jerry was more than an invitation; it was a command. At that point I was reluctant to rock the boat, so I did attend the next meeting. Jerry announced that he needed to fly to London the following day and would miss the next meeting, but that “Elliot will run things in my absence.”  I didn’t want to let the group down, so I showed up and ran the meeting, but I didn’t like what was happening. In effect, Jerry was turning me into his lieutenant, and I did not see that as part of my job description. When he returned from Europe I confronted him. His response was warm and supportive. “Of course I understand,” he said. “You have research projects of your own and don’t want to get enmeshed in mine.”  A few days later I handed a couple of scribbled letters to Mrs. Horan, the secretary whose office was between Jerry’s and mine, and asked her to type them for me. She explained that Jerry had told her that she couldn’t do that for me anymore because she was being paid from his research grant and I was no longer a member of the team. That administrative decision seemed perfectly reasonable. But it meant I now had to trek a half mile to Emerson Hall, where the department chairman’s secretary typed my letters. Having my office at Bow Street had suddenly become a major inconvenience.  Near the end of the semester Jerry came into my office and told me that he was expecting a visiting scholar from Oxford. “Would you mind,” he asked, “moving your office up to the attic so as to make space for him?” Again, Jerry’s request seemed perfectly reasonable. At first, though, because there was only one office in the attic, I felt isolated. Then Merrill and I managed to clear out a bunch of junk from an adjacent storeroom and commandeered a small table and a few chairs. The room was windowless and unattractive, but it gave Merrill and my other students a place to hang out. All at once my students and I were isolated together. The following September, when two additional graduate students, John Darley and Tony Greenwald, joined us in that cramped little storeroom, we worked in a truly splendid isolation. We had the entire attic to ourselves, and this proved to be an electrifying arrangement. We were forever bouncing ideas off one another, criticizing and sharpening research designs and procedures, and constantly learning from one another.  I was beginning to learn how things were done at Harvard, or at least at 9 Bow Street. But I had yet to teach my first stand-up lecture course, scheduled for the spring semester. The chair of the department, Robert White, had kindly invited me to teach any course I felt comfortable with, so I chose Social Influence and Conformity. But I was anything but comfortable. Although I had had some success teaching seminars and had given guest lectures at Wesleyan and Stanford, I had never been responsible for a whole course. Any idiot can give an effective guest lecture, especially with a week or two to prepare, but to construct a set of coherent lectures that told an accurate and interesting story? That was difficult.  One night, shortly before the term began, I woke up in a cold sweat, anxious about what might be in store for me. There I was, a kid who had been educated (so to speak) at Revere High School, intimidated by the idea of lecturing three days a week, exposing my knowledge and ignorance to a roomful of the nation’s brightest students. Most had attended elite private schools like Groton, Andover, and Exeter, becoming accustomed to having the finest, most knowledgeable teachers in the country. I wondered what I would talk about at the end of my second lecture, after I had finished telling them everything I knew about social influence. They will discover I am an impostor! They will tear me apart! Worse, they will yawn, stand up, and walk out of my class!  When daylight arrived and my panicky ruminations began to subside, I told myself that although some of these kids might be smarter and more sophisticated than I was, I had something important to teach them and I was passionate about the subject. If I worked hard at preparation, how could I fail to excite them? I crafted each lecture so that it not only went to the core of the theories and research that I knew and loved but also was illustrated by stories—some personal, some historical, some humorous, some touching, some tragic—that illustrated the points I was making in a way that the students would not easily forget. Each of my lectures was a story in and of itself, with a beginning, middle, and end. And each lecture dovetailed into the next, so that, taken together, they formed a series of interlocking chapters that came to a climax in the final class.  Within a few weeks many of the students were bringing their friends and roommates to audit. After each lecture clusters of students hung out asking questions until we were forced to vacate the room by the incoming class. Several walked along with me from Emerson Hall all the way back to Bow Street, asking questions and raising thoughtful objections. They found the course material important and relevant, and many were fascinated by experimental methodology. The student grapevine was the measure of my success: Enrollment jumped from sixteen in my first year to more than sixty my second year to well over a hundred in my third year. I had arrived. I was a teacher.  I was also eager to begin my experimental research, and the first idea I wanted to test stemmed from a running argument that Leon and I had been having during my last year at Stanford. Although the theory of cognitive dissonance had certainly been fruitful, it was still vague around the edges. I had often joked with the younger graduate students, saying that if they really wanted to be certain whether two specific cognitions would produce dissonance, they had better ask Leon. Leon was well aware of the need to establish firm boundaries. Indeed, in his book, he had tried to define the limits of the theory by proposing a hypothetical situation in which a man was driving late at night on a lonely country road and got a flat tire. When the man opened the trunk of his car, he discovered he didn’t have a jack. Leon maintained that although the man would experience frustration, disappointment, perhaps even fear, he would not experience dissonance. The example disturbed me. I said, “Of course there is dissonance! What kind of idiot would go driving late at night on a lonely country road without a jack in his car?”  “But,” Leon countered, “where are the dissonant cognitions? What is dissonant with what?”  I struggled with that one for several weeks. Finally, it dawned on me that the answer was going to involve the self-concept. In Leon’s example, the dissonant cognitions are (a) the driver’s cognition that his behavior was idiotic and (b) his self-concept of being a reasonably smart and competent guy. This simple insight led me to the realization that, in previous research, the theory had been producing its clearest, least-ambiguous predictions only when an important element of the self-concept was threatened, typically when an individual behaved in a way that was inconsistent with his or her sense of self.  Back in 1957, when Jud Mills and I had first framed our hypothesis for the initiation experiment, we believed that the dissonance was between the person’s cognition “I went through a severe initiation to get into a group” and the cognition “the group is dull, boring, and worthless.” But, in 1959, I saw that I could frame the hypothesis in a different way: The cognition “I am a sensible, competent person” is dissonant with the cognition “I went through a severe initiation to get into a worthless group.” In the Festinger/Carlsmith experiment, the original hypothesis stated that the dissonance was between “I believe that the task I performed was boring” and “I told a person that it was interesting.” Reframed, the dissonant cognitions become “I am an honest, moral person” and “I told a lie.”  At the time I thought that what I was proposing was a minor modification. Leon disagreed. He thought the change was huge, and he was not pleased. He believed that my formulation would significantly limit the scope of the theory. “Nonsense,” I said. “All I am doing is tightening it a bit.” But Leon was right. Actually, we were both partly right. My modification did limit the scope of the theory; but it also made it tighter, and the advantages of that tightness outweighed the loss of generality. Eventually, Leon came to see it my way, but it took him a while (about ten years!) to fully embrace the change and to begin talking about cognitive dissonance in terms of the self.  What I thought, at the time, was a minor adjustment turned out to be a major revision, one that transformed dissonance theory from a theory about attitudes into a theory about the self. Because beliefs about the self are the most important cognitions that people hold, then dissonance is most painful, and therefore most likely to motivate change, when our behavior or attitudes are inconsistent with who we think we are. Moreover, the importance and centrality of cognitions about the self make them resistant to change. Thus, in my self-consistency formulation, the existence of dissonance motivates us to maintain our self-concept by changing our attitudes and subsequent behavior.  I realized that the reason that most of our experiments had worked was because virtually all of our participants had reasonably high self-concepts. Indeed, my thinking about cognitive dissonance in terms of the self-concept uncovered a previously hidden assumption imbedded in the original formulation: namely, that, like the residents of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, most people think of themselves as above average in just about everything. But what about people who don’t think so highly of themselves? By my reasoning, if an individual considers himself to be a schnook, he would expect himself to do schnooky things, such as going through a severe initiation to get into a worthless group or lying to another person for a paltry sum of money. For such individuals, dissonance would not be aroused under the same conditions as for persons with a favorable view of themselves. Rather, dissonance would occur when negative self-expectancies were violated—that is, when the person with a poor self-concept behaved in a way that reflected positively on the self.  That is precisely what Merrill and I set out to investigate. In our experiment we did not want to try to influence a person’s entire self-concept, which would have been unethical as well as impossible. But we could test our idea more efficiently. All we would need to do is give people false feedback on some specific ability that they didn’t know they had. We constructed a bogus but convincing personality test that we dubbed “The Harvard Social Sensitivity Test.” This consisted of a series of twenty cards; each card contained three photographs of young men (which we selected, arbitrarily, from an old Harvard yearbook). Merrill told the subjects that one of the photos on each card was that of a hospitalized schizophrenic, and their task was to guess which one. After choosing the alleged schizophrenic on each of the twenty cards, Merrill recorded the amount of time it took them, pretended to grade their answers against a bogus answer key, and announced their score and the time it took them. The initial test consisted of four sets of twenty cards each. Merrill told half of the subjects that their score on each set was very high (either a sixteen or a seventeen); he told the other half that their scores were consistently low (either a four or a five).  At this point, half of our subjects saw themselves as being socially insensitive and half as being highly sensitive, according to our official-sounding test. Next, to create dissonance, Merrill manipulated the feedback about their performance on a critical fifth and final trial of twenty cards, giving the subjects scores that were either the same as their previous scores or the opposite of their previous scores. Thus, in the crucial experimental conditions, one-half of the participants who expected to do poorly on the fifth and final task received the same low score on the final trial (four correct); this result was consonant with their self-concept of low social sensitivity. The other half received an unexpectedly high score on the final trial (sixteen correct), a result that was dissonant.  How could we get an indication of the degree of discomfort each person felt? After administering the final test, Merrill, who had blossomed into a convincing actor, slapped his forehead in chagrin and confessed that he had forgotten to time their performance on that trial and was not sure what he could do about it. He went into the adjacent room, allegedly, to ask Professor Aronson what he should do. A few minutes later Merrill returned to the room, apologized profusely, and told them that he needed to ask them to take the fifth test again, “so that I can record how long it takes you. Please pretend that you are seeing the final set of photos for the first time.”  This ruse gave participants an opportunity to change their answers on retaking the test. We hypothesized that the number of responses a participant changed when allowed to retake the test would be an accurate measure of their degree of discomfort with their score on the aborted trial. And the results clearly supported our prediction of the need for self-consistency: People who expected a low score and received a low score changed few of their answers. But people who expected a low score and received a high score changed many of their answers—thus guaranteeing a lower score. Their success on the final trial created dissonance with their self-concept; to reduce dissonance they intentionally sabotaged their own performance. How could we be sure that our subjects were reducing dissonance rather than, say, having forgotten their correct answers on the aborted test? Easy. Those whom we had randomly assigned to the condition where they expected a high score and got a high score changed almost none of their answers, thereby demonstrating that memory was not an important factor.  After Merrill ran his final subject and I debriefed her, explaining the hypothesis and the reason for the deception, we rushed to the room that held the “MonroeMatic” calculator to analyze our data. I read off the numbers while Merrill punched the keys. The results were highly significant.  “This is a groundbreaking experiment,” Merrill said. “Let’s celebrate!”  “I’m not sure how groundbreaking it is,” I replied, “but we can talk that over during our celebration. Let’s go to St. Claire’s. I’m told that their bartender makes a great martini.”  Thus began a tradition that I continued throughout my career as a mentor. Whenever my students and I completed an experiment, we celebrated with martinis. These celebrations were not merely joyous punctuation marks; more often than not, they produced conversations that were a prelude to our next experiment. And the first of these celebrations was no exception. I told Merrill that I wanted to find a way to teach Hal, now three and a half years old, to behave a bit less aggressively with his two-year-old brother, Neal, and that I was thinking of a variation on the procedure he used in the Festinger/Carlsmith experiment. Merrill said, “You mean whenever Hal hits Neal you will punish him by making him pack a bunch of spools in a tray?”  “Not exactly. But look, your experiment was about insufficient reward, right? I mean, paying a person one dollar for lying was not enough to get him to justify telling the lie. So he needed to add justifications by convincing himself that the spool packing was more interesting than he had thought—therefore making him less of a liar.”  “Right.”  “Okay, but you cannot offer a small reward to Hal for not hitting Neal because he is almost always not hitting Neal. That means we have to use punishment, or at least the threat of punishment. Suppose I threaten to prevent Hal from watching cartoons on TV for a whole month if he hits Neal. That’s a severe punishment, and it might get him to stop beating up on Neal for a while, at least while I am in the room. But that’s not what I want. Because he still will like the idea of hitting Neal.”  “So you want Hal to convince himself that hitting Neal—or any other little kid—is a bad idea.”  “You got it. And how do I accomplish that?”  “Of course!” Merrill said. “By threatening him with a very small punishment. You have turned my experiment with Leon inside out: Small rewards for telling a lie gets a person to convince himself that what he said was true. But a threat of small punishment for committing a forbidden act will get a person to convince himself that he didn’t want to do it in the first place because it is not fun or interesting. How can we test this on several little kids? We can’t stand around and wait for them to beat up on each other, can we?”  “No, but we can offer threats of either mild or heavy-duty punishment for some minor activity that little kids do all the time.”  And so, right there in St. Claire’s bar, Merrill and I worked out the procedure that came to be known as the forbidden-toy experiment.  Merrill and I purchased several attractive toys and brought them to the preschool run by Harvard University. We invited the kids, who were four and five years old, to play with them. We came back for two hours a day for the next five days, establishing rapport with the children and encouraging them to play with the toys we had brought. After a few visits the children would greet us excitedly, referring to us as “the toy guys.”  On the sixth day we brought each of the children into an adjoining small playroom and asked him or her to tell us how much they liked each of the toys. The next day we brought each of the children into that playroom again, where they could play alone with the toys. We pointed to the toy that the child had ranked as their second most favorite, placed it a few feet from the other toys, and told the child that it was okay to play with all of the toys except that one. We threatened half of the children with mild punishment for transgression (“I would be a little angry”), and we threatened the other half with more severe punishment (“I would be very angry. I would have to take all of the toys and go home and never come back again. I would think you were just a baby”). Then we left the room and allowed the children twenty minutes to play with the other toys. We watched through a one-way mirror to see whether they would resist the temptation of playing with the forbidden toy. All of them did.  On returning to the room we asked each of the children to rank the attractiveness of all the toys once again. And now the children who had gotten our mild threat rated the forbidden toy as being significantly less appealing than they originally said it was. Because they lacked much external justification for refraining from playing with the forbidden toy, they needed to supply some of their own justification. And that is just what they did. They convinced themselves that they hadn’t played with it because they didn’t really like it.  In contrast, the children who had gotten our severe threats did not change their opinion of the forbidden toy. They continued to rate it as highly desirable; indeed, some even found it more desirable than they had before we had threatened them for playing with it. They had good external reasons for not playing with the toy and therefore had no need to invent additional reasons, so they continued to like the toy.  Dissonance theory would predict that the children’s shift in toy preference would be fairly permanent, and it is, as my friend Jonathan Freedman found when he repeated our experiment at the Stanford preschool. Freedman used as his forbidden toy an extremely appealing battery-powered robot that scurried around hurling objects. Two months later almost all the children who had been mildly threatened were still resisting the temptation to play with the robot, whereas the majority of the children who had been severely threatened went right to it. We had demonstrated a powerful phenomenon: The children did not come to devalue their behavior (playing with the toy) because an adult told them it was undesirable; they convinced themselves that it was undesirable. And that new conviction had staying power. This paradigm may well apply beyond toy preference to more basic and important areas in child rearing, such as the control of aggression—which, of course, was the practical problem that had originally piqued my interest. Was I able to get Hal to persuade himself that beating up on Neal was a terrible idea? Not completely. The problem with applying our finding to everyday aggression is that we would need to find exactly the right level of threat: mild enough to induce the child to supply his own justification for refraining to act aggressively, but severe enough to get him to refrain from aggressing in the first place. If the threat is not quite severe enough to induce restraint, it might lead him to justify his aggressive behavior toward his younger brother (“I guess I really like beating up on the little bastard, because I am braving a punishment in order to keep doing it”), which, of course, is the exact opposite of what we would hope to accomplish. I worked hard to fine-tune the level of my admonitions to Hal, and eventually his aggressiveness toward Neal did, indeed, diminish. Whether this small success was due to my intervention or to maturation (Hal’s, not mine!), or to countless other possible factors, I cannot be certain. Alas, my little experiment at home, on one child, lacked a control condition.  Near the end of my first year at Harvard, I received a registered letter from the National Science Foundation approving my application for a three-year research grant. So I was in a good mood when I returned home that evening. I walked into our living room and saw Hal sitting on the floor with a sheepish look on his face. He was staring at what had been a ten-inch statuette depicting a ballplayer with his glove raised high over his head, as if he were about to make a catch. It was a chintzy little thing, made out of some nondescript material painted to look like bronze. But bronze it was not. Its flimsiness was apparent, in part because it was lying there in three distinct pieces. “Daddy, I dropped it, and it broke all by itself,” Hal said.  The statuette wasn’t one of Hal’s toys. It was a baseball trophy and a survivor, having remained intact for many years of rough-and-tumble travel. I had managed to pack it and bring it with me whenever I made a major move. For fourteen years it always had a place of prominence on my mantel or dresser as I went from Revere to Waltham, to Middletown, to Palo Alto, to Cambridge. I bent down, picked it up, and looked at it forlornly, wondering if it could be repaired. Was that crummy little trophy that important to me?  Fifteen years earlier I had had my bar mitzvah. I read and sang from the Torah, made a speech to a synagogue overflowing with relatives, friends, and the usual array of schul-menschen—old men who spoke little or no English and seemed to spend most of their days in the synagogue. Because of my intense shyness, I hated the whole ordeal. The best thing about my bar mitzvah was that once it was over, I no longer had to attend Hebrew school. And the best thing about no longer attending Hebrew school was that it freed up my late afternoons for baseball. In February the Red Sox went to Sarasota, Florida, for spring training. Around the same time, kids from my neighborhood would head for the nearby diamond to begin impromptu choose-up games of baseball. Revere, Massachusetts, was not Sarasota, Florida. It was usually bitter cold in late February, with patches of sooty snow in the outfield. When the temperature rose above freezing, the turf turned to mud.  Although we didn’t need an incentive to play, that winter and spring we had a special reason to hone our baseball skills: The Revere Parks Department had announced that it was planning to initiate a summer league for thirteen and fourteen year olds. The league would consist of eight teams, one from each of the eight baseball diamonds scattered around the city. I desperately wanted to make that team. This was long before the birth of Little League, with its strict adult supervision, tight organization, uniforms, experienced coaches, impartial umpires, and all the trappings of the big leagues. Those of us trying out for our neighborhood team were a ragtag group of kids. Yet, on our own, we managed to self-select a team fairly and sensibly. It was a meritocracy, pure and simple: The most talented nine guys were on the team, regardless of race, creed, or color.  Although anti-Semitism was a powerful force in my neighborhood, it did not intrude on the selection process. Only two Jewish kids tried out for the team, and both of us made the starting lineup. Although I was uncomfortable at first with my Gentile teammates, expecting the worst, after a few games we bonded as a team. A few years later, when my father died and our family was sitting shiva, my aunts and uncles were startled by the frequent visits from the “goyim,” my former teammates. The guys managed to overcome their discomfort with this Jewish ritual because they wanted to lend me their support during my time of mourning.  I wanted to play center field. It always struck me as the mountaintop of baseball, commanding, as it did, a 180-degree view of everything that was happening on the field. But I was not a fast runner. By consensus, the position was awarded to Sonny Barnacle, the fastest thirteen year old in the neighborhood. Although I was disappointed, the decision was fair. I was assigned to play second base. Jason had schooled me in the art of fielding grounders on rough terrain. Under his tutelage (and constant nagging), I learned to let go of my fear and get my body in front of all grounders hit in my direction. Moreover, although I was not fast, I was quick; that is, I was adept at taking those first three or four steps in the right direction as soon as the batter hit the ball. This enabled me to get a good jump on most grounders, putting my body in front of them before lowering my glove to field them. If a ball took a bad hop, it would usually carom off my chest, and I was able to pounce on it and throw the runner out.  Uniforms? We wore our ordinary street clothes, usually torn and dirty. Equipment? Most of us owned gloves, but that was about it. Our left fielder patrolled the outfield with a catcher’s mitt, because that was the only glove he owned. The Parks Department supplied bats, a chest protector and mask for the catcher, and one ball per game. Often, the game was interrupted for several minutes while we all hunted for a foul ball lost in the tall weeds and assorted rubble bordering the diamond.  Our first season as a team we lost more games than we won. But the next year we were a year older and stronger. Billy MacDonald, our pitcher, added a slow curve to an already good fast-ball. Les Hiscoe, our best hitter, had been lifting weights, and now hit for power. And I, thin as a rail, gave up trying to hit home runs and learned to be a contact hitter. I consistently hit soft line drives just over the infield. Kenny Gordy, our shortstop, and I worked for hours on turning double plays and got pretty good at it.  We won the championship that year and were each given a trophy in a formal ceremony. It was, as I said, a chintzy little thing, but it assumed great importance for all of us and for me, in particular. It was the first thing I had ever won, the first time my talent at anything had been recognized. I cherished that trophy. Kneeling by my son, I turned its broken pieces around and around in my hands and seriously thought about having it repaired. Then I grinned at Hal, stroked his head, and said, “You are absolutely right. It did break all by itself. It’s not your fault.” I stood up and, with a sigh, dumped the pieces of the trophy in the trash, realizing, at long last, that I didn’t need it anymore.  Early in my second year Gordon Allport invited me to give a guest lecture in his undergraduate personality course. I suspected that he was one of the people Merrill had in mind when he warned me that some of my colleagues had serious reservations about the ethics of high-impact experiments. Gordon, at sixty-three, was the most distinguished professor in the Social Relations Department. Fame and respect had come early in his career; I was charmed by the fact that he had been elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA) when I was in the first grade, learning how to read.  I saw Gordon as the instantiation of the best that Harvard had to offer: a wise, kind, scholarly, upright elder statesman. He was always impeccably groomed, his suits always neatly pressed, his shoes always shined. Every aspect of his demeanor was perfectly proper. When I was with him I felt especially rumpled, unkempt, and tousled, and had to fight the urge to check to make sure that my fly was zipped all the way up. I didn’t spend a lot of time with Gordon, but his presence was an important part of my sojourn at Harvard. I was very fond of him, and my fondness grew the longer I knew him. I think he liked me a little, too. Not excessively, of course, because, as I suspected, I was not his kind of person.  He confirmed my suspicion in his introduction to my lecture. After showering me with the typical compliments (“brilliant,” “creative”) that a gentleman scholar gives a visiting lecturer, he concluded by referring to me as “the master of mendacity.” I was taken aback. I was not absolutely certain what “mendacity” meant, but I guessed it had something to do with lying; at best it was a back-handed compliment but, more likely, an outright insult. Making such a statement was so out of character for Gordon that it spooked me, causing me to stumble over the first few sentences of my lecture.  Afterward, I walked Gordon back to his office. We paused outside the door, and he reached out and warmly shook my hand with both of his. As he opened his mouth to thank me, I said, “Gordon, what’s with this ‘master of mendacity’? Were you calling me a good liar, or what?” He turned bright red and invited me into his office.  “No, no, no, of course not. I was primarily complimenting you on your skill in doing those deception experiments that you and Mr. Festinger are so adept at.”  “Gordon, forgive me, but I suspect that you think that kind of research is . . . is . . . schmutzig.” I intentionally used the Yiddish word for “dirty.” I knew that Gordon would understand me because it was identical in German, a language he knew well.  He laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. Let me just say that I would be unable to do that kind of experiment. I know you think of it as theatrical, but I see it as deceptive.”  “Call it what you will,” I said, “but you realize, of course, that we do explain everything to each of our subjects at the end of the session, and none of them has ever expressed any unhappiness about the process.”  “Fair enough,” he said. “But why do it in the first place? Why all the theatrics, the sleight of hand, the deception, the gimmicks?”  “For one reason only: because theatrics or deception, whatever you want to call it, is the only way to test the hypotheses I am most interested in.”  “Why don’t you just ask people what they would do?”  I did a double take. At first I thought Gordon was pulling my leg, but then I realized that for all his wisdom and sophistication, he had little or no understanding of the basic requirements of an experiment. Nor did he seem to understand one of the most fundamental things about us humans: We don’t know what we would do in most hypothetical situations, and even after we have behaved in a certain way, we are often unaware of why we did what we did. Because I had lectured about the initiation experiment in his classroom, I used that as my example. I described to Gordon how, when I was debriefing the subjects at the end of the session, all of the subjects in the severe-initiation condition agreed that my hypothesis was interesting, but most insisted that their liking for the group had nothing to do with the initiation. They liked the group, they assured me, because it really, truly was interesting.  Gordon stroked his chin thoughtfully and said, “And you believe they were incorrect because . . . ”  “Because we had randomly assigned each subject to different conditions! The only difference between the experimental condition and the control condition was the severity of the initiation. Statistically, the difference between conditions could not have happened by chance. Therefore, I can say, with a high degree of certainty, that most of the people would not have liked the group if they had been in the control condition.”  “Your logic is airtight,” he said. “Can I buy you lunch?”  And off we went to the Harvard Faculty Club, where we had a most enjoyable meal. To get the conversation off research, I asked him whether he had grown up in New England.  “Oh, no, far from it. I was born in a small town in rural Indiana and grew up in Cleveland. My father was a country doctor. He never made much money and didn’t want to. I was able to attend Harvard as an undergraduate only because they offered me a scholarship. You look surprised. Did you think I was born in Harvard Yard?”  Now it was my turn to blush. “Of course not . . . Well, as a matter of fact, just about. You do seem . . . ”  “Why, Professor Aronson, I do believe that you have stereotyped me.”  I raised my hands over my head in mock surrender. “Guilty as charged,” I said.  “A common error,” he said, gracefully letting me off the hook.  Grace was one of Gordon’s major hallmarks. A decade after his death in 1967, I was invited to write a retrospective review of his 1954 masterpiece, The Nature of Prejudice, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. “The conclusions Allport drew are not noticeably different from the conclusions that a reasonable scholar would draw today,” I wrote. “This is a tribute to the wisdom, scholarship, and judgment of a graceful mind.” To read that book now is to appreciate how far ahead of his times Gordon was in his understanding of prejudice and its bitter consequences.  Shortly after my lunch with Gordon, I was invited to Yale to give a colloquium for the Psychology Department. Afterward, a young assistant professor introduced himself and asked me to his office because he was eager to describe the details of an experiment that he was designing. His name was Stanley Milgram, and the experiment was to be on the topic of obedience to authority. He was inspired by the capture and pending trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and wanted to determine the extent to which ordinary people would obey the commands of an authority figure, even if it meant subjecting an innocent person to severe pain. I told Milgram that I thought it was a great idea and a daring experimental procedure. I had no idea that it was to become one of the most important and controversial experiments ever done in social psychology.  In Milgram’s experiment, described to participants as “an experiment on learning,” the subject (who was cast in the role of teacher) tested another person (the learner) on a series of paired words that the learner had supposedly memorized. The teacher sat in front of a machine with toggle switches labeled as ranging in intensity from 15 volts to 450 volts (and above that, ominously, XXX) and was told the learner was attached to this shock generator. Every time the learner made an error, the experimenter, dressed in a white lab coat, told the subject to administer an electric shock and to increase the shock level after each incorrect answer. Milgram’s question was: How far would a person go in blind obedience to an authority figure, in this case the white-coated experimenter? In actuality, of course, no one got any shocks. The learner was an accomplice, and his responses were scripted.  Two years later Milgram’s published results electrified (so to speak) the psychological world. Earlier, he had asked several psychiatrists, as well as his colleagues and students, to predict what percentage of people would continue delivering shocks to the very end. They all were certain that no more than 2 or 3 percent, a few sadists, would go beyond 300 volts. Yet nearly two-thirds of the subjects continued to administer shock all the way, up to the highest levels, simply because the experimenter said, “The experiment requires that you continue.” Many were uncomfortable, many sweated and protested and complained, yet they obeyed. In subsequent replications the results were almost identical. It mattered not whether the subjects were students, salespeople, or carpenters; men or women; Americans, Europeans, or Middle Easterners.  Milgram had answered Gordon’s question—why couldn’t you “just ask people” what they would do?—far more convincingly than I did. His experiment demonstrated unequivocally that “just asking people” what they think they would do if an authority ordered them to harm another person would yield completely unreliable answers.  Nonetheless, the experiment evoked a firestorm of criticism on ethical grounds. Psychologists, ethicists, and many general readers were outraged by the intense discomfort Milgram’s procedures caused the participants. To take just one example, Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist, claimed that the procedures had caused “loss of dignity, self-esteem and trust in rational authority,” and thus would be “harmful in the long run.” I do not deny the ethical problems raised by the experiment, and in the main I think it is good that procedures this extreme are no longer possible. But most of the critics overlooked the sturdiness and resilience of the average participant; even those who felt miserable about going all the way to the maximum level of shock later said they had learned a lesson of incalculable value. Not one of Milgram’s subjects complained, and none reported having suffered any harm. Indeed, when polled a few weeks later, 84 percent said they were glad to have participated, and the rest were neutral, a record of satisfaction that exceeds that of most innocuous psychological experiments. Gordon Allport was not among Milgram’s critics. He was not happy with the ethical problems embedded in the procedure, but he felt that the data Milgram gathered were of great consequence. A few years later Milgram joined the faculty at Harvard. He would not have been hired without Gordon’s endorsement. Apparently, Gordon had overcome his distaste for high-impact experimentation.  In spite of our differing approaches to the Harvard scene, Dick Alpert and I remained close friends. He was a frequent visitor to our home in Arlington, just northwest of Cambridge, and Vera and I spent weekends with him in his rustic family retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We hiked, swam, and played music together, all with far more enthusiasm than talent.  I had also served as an adviser on his research grant to study early childhood education. So it was no surprise when Dick phoned and asked if I could join him and Timothy Leary for an informal lunch and consultation on a research project they were planning. Tim Leary, a close friend of Dick’s, was a personality psychologist who had taught for several years at Berkeley and had joined the Harvard faculty about the same time I had. I didn’t know Tim well, but I liked what I knew; he was smart, energetic, and interesting, exuding charisma and a touch of mystery. Undergraduates passed along juicy rumors about him, most of which were flat-out wrong, greatly exaggerated, or maliciously distorted.  One rumor that was definitely true, however, was that Tim had been experimenting with mind-altering drugs. On a visit to Mexico he had ingested some hallucinogenic mushrooms that he claimed had expanded his consciousness in powerful and positive ways. The hallucinogenic effects may have been temporary, but his excitement about the experience was permanent. He believed the mushrooms had the potential to improve humanity and change the world, and that was what Tim and Dick wanted to discuss with me over lunch that day. Tim said that the psychoactive ingredients of the mushroom had recently been synthesized into a drug called psilocybin, and he and Dick wanted to conduct some experiments with it. They thought they might begin with graduate students at divinity schools in the Boston area.  “This drug will give them a religious experience beyond their wildest dreams,” Dick said.  “And,” Tim added, “just imagine what will happen when we feed psilocybin to hard-core convicts! In a matter of months, we may be able to virtually empty our prisons!”  “All this from a little mushroom?” I asked.  Tim’s eyes flashed with anger. “It’s a little mushroom that opens the heart as well as the mind. It’s a little mushroom that usually makes people feel their connection to other people. It’s a little mushroom that I’m convinced will reduce violence and stands a chance of making war obsolete.”  My question may have been glib, but it had struck Tim as sacrilegious. I was taken aback by their fervor, which was messianic to say the least. I couldn’t decide whether their ideas were grand or grandiose.  After an awkward pause Dick said, “We want to be as scientifically correct as we can possibly be with this research. You know a lot about how to do experiments. How can we design this one so that it is tight enough to be published in JASP?”  I told them what it would take to get published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, our field’s most eminent journal. I told them about experimental design and procedure, including the importance of a placebo condition, the elegance of the double-blind procedure, and why it would be essential to test one person at a time (to eliminate the possibility of social influence and emotional contagion). I saw Tim and Dick exchange a look that conveyed “Boy, is this guy square!” They then patiently explained to me why most of my suggestions would be impossible for them to implement. Their primary reason was the overriding importance of what they called “set and setting”—mental set being a person’s expectations about the drug and setting being the immediate environment in which the person is taking the drug.  “For example,” said Tim, “if you put on a white coat and administer this stuff in the confines of a mental hospital, people are likely to have scary hallucinations; they’ll think they are losing their minds. But if a group of friends is sitting around in a comfortable living room with a fire blazing in a fireplace, their hallucinations are likely to be exciting rather than scary.”  “Besides,” said Dick, “if we administer psilocybin on several occasions to convicts about to be released on parole from Concord Prison, and then we compare their recidivism rate to a group on parole who didn’t get psilocybin, isn’t that good enough?”  “Well, if you can have truly random assignment of convicts to the two conditions, and if you can control for everything except the drug, then it just might pass muster.”  “What do you mean by everything?”  “I mean everything. For example, all that sitting around by the fireplace with a congenial group of people might contribute to their wanting to stay out of prison. If that setting is in the experimental condition, it also needs to be in the control condition.”  Dick and Tim nodded. There was a long silence. Then Dick said, “Well, there goes JASP.”  In retrospect, one thing about my behavior during that meeting puzzles me. At no time did I raise any concerns about possible harm that the ingestion of psilocybin might cause participants in their research. In 1961 psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin were perfectly legal, and social scientists were well aware of the anthropological studies of cultures that used peyote, coca leaves, marijuana, and other mind-altering substances the way we in the West drank alcohol, with no adverse effects. But the synthesized drugs, in which the active ingredients were extracted and distilled, were so new that nothing was known about possible long-term effects on the brain. So, at that time, it was not unreasonable for a cautious person to have some concerns about possible decrements in thinking and memory. Fortunately, a half century later, it is known that the occasional ingestion of psychedelics has no discernible harmful effects. At least I cannot remember any!  Did Tim and Dick succeed in emptying our prisons? Obviously not. They did manage to complete their experiment, such as it was, with parolees, although, as predicted, their procedure was too loose to be accepted for publication in a refereed journal. But the Harvard administration was not pleased with their activities. Two years after our lunch conversation, both men were summarily fired: Dick for involving undergraduates in the project, against the terms of their agreement with the administration, and Tim for failing to meet his teaching obligations.  I had no idea that Tim and Dick were heralding the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and that they would become its major spokesmen, though, after they left Harvard, they would go in different directions: One would seek world peace and mind-altering experiences through drugs, the other through spirituality. Tim Leary took the drug route. He was soon to become a cultural icon, exhorting students and other young adults to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” President Richard Nixon would call him “the most dangerous man in America,” and the government would eventually imprison him for the possession of a few ounces of marijuana. Dick Alpert was to live and study in India for several years, returning to America as Baba Ram Dass, a spiritual leader who sought to expand people’s consciousness without the aid of chemicals. In 1980 I invited him to give a guest lecture to my social psychology class at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Sporting a long gray beard and flowing white robes, he sat cross-legged on a table and held three hundred students spellbound for ninety minutes. Afterward, my dear friend the holy man and I spent several hours reminiscing about the old days at Harvard. I reminded him of the night that, in his quest for tenure, he had flicked on the lights in his office, hoping Harry Murray would notice. He beamed at me beatifically and said that although his dismissal from Harvard had been a bitter pill at the time, he had achieved a different and a far richer kind of tenure.  Early in the spring of 1961, at a faculty cocktail party, Dave McClelland came over to me. After a few minutes of chitchat, he drew closer, lowered his voice, and said, “You and I haven’t had a chance to talk much this year. Are you happy here at Harvard?”  “Well,” I said, “I have great students, and we are doing some research that is exciting the hell out of me.”  “Yes, I’ve heard. I’m proud of you, of course. But I hope you realize that you didn’t answer my question.”  Dave was astute. Although I was happy with my courses, with my students, and with the research my students and I were doing, I felt there was something missing.  “The truth is,” I said, “I can’t get over feeling like an outsider.”  “Is that all? Hell, everybody at Harvard feels like an outsider.”  “Really? Even Gordon Allport?” I was kidding, but Dave wasn’t.  “Especially Gordon Allport,” he replied.  Up until that moment, I thought that my vague discontent was only my problem and that it would eventually fade. But even if Dave was only partly right, I knew my feeling was likely to stay with me for as long as I remained in Cambridge. I wondered briefly if that was how I wanted to live for the next few years.  But Dave had set the stage. Several weeks later Stan Schachter phoned and asked me if I would consider taking a job at the University of Minnesota. Stan had been Leon Festinger’s first and most distinguished student. Although he and I had barely met, I liked him a lot and thought of him as my intellectual uncle, so I did not reject the idea out of hand. Besides, Minnesota had a strong social psychology program. Leon had taught there before going to Stanford, and Harold Kelley, a first-rate social psychologist, had taught there for several years before leaving for UCLA in 1960. I liked the idea of being in the same department with Stan, and I told him so.  “Well, actually,” Stan said, “last week I accepted a professorship at Columbia. We were thinking of you as my replacement.”  “What’s going on at Minnesota? Why is everybody leaving? Is there something you aren’t telling me?”  Stan assured me that there was nothing wrong. It was just that as a native New Yorker, he missed the city terribly and yearned to get back there, and that Hal Kelley had always wanted to live in California. “Believe me, the University of Minnesota is a great place,” he said, “especially for a social psychologist. It’s just that losing both of us within two years puts the social psychology program in jeopardy. That’s why I am coming to you. You are the young guy who can hit the ground running and scoop up the baton without missing a step. I predict that in two years it will be your program, and nobody will even remember that Hal and I were ever here.”  “Yeah, fat chance!”  “Okay, a slight exaggeration. Do me a favor. Come and visit us. Give a colloquium. Meet the faculty. See for yourself. I guarantee that you will like it.”  Stan was right. The atmosphere was relaxed, and the faculty, though no less distinguished than the scholars at Harvard, were charming and warm, immediately making me feel like a valuable person and a grown-up—a sharp contrast to my experience in Cambridge. Minnesota also had another attraction: the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations, with its own research budget. It had several rooms, beautifully outfitted with all the equipment you could want—one-way mirrors, tape recorders, sound systems—and such a contrast to the one research room I had at 9 Bow Street. On the final day of my visit Stan accompanied me into the office of the department chair, Kenneth MacCorquodale. Kenneth was a fastidious guy whose office was immaculate; Stan was a famous slob, whose office accumulated anything he happened to deposit there. As usual, Stan had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and as usual he was oblivious to the growing length of ash, which eventually fell, as it often did, onto Kenneth’s office rug. Kenneth complained, and Stan said, “Come on, Corky, don’t be such an old lady.” Kenneth turned to me and told me about the trip the two friends had taken together through Europe the previous summer, a cheer-up trip for Stan, who was recently divorced.  “Every time we stopped at a hotel,” he said, “Stan would empty his pockets onto the dresser: in addition to the loose change, there was all kinds of debris—a couple of old cigarette butts, a half of a movie ticket, two empty matchbook covers, some lint. Then the next morning, Stan would sweep them up carefully into his hand and put them all back into his pocket.”  And then, while I was still laughing, Kenneth turned to me and said, “The job is yours if you want it. What would it take to bring you here?”  I was taken aback. I was not accustomed to that kind of directness, or to faculty who combined joking and storytelling with serious job matters. That was sure not the way they did things at Harvard. I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “I don’t know what to say. Why don’t you make me the best offer you can? I will discuss it with Vera and give you an answer within a few weeks.”  Shortly after I got home I received a formal letter from Kenneth informing me that the university was offering me an associate professorship, with tenure, plus the directorship of the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations. It was an incredible offer, given that I was only twenty-nine years old and had held a Ph.D. for only two years. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the directorship. So I phoned Stan and told him my qualms about accepting an administrative job. He was reassuring. “Don’t be a schmuck!” he shouted. “The only thing being director means is that you get to decide how the money gets spent. I did it for years, and I’ll bet you a million dollars that I hate administrative work even more than you do. Take the fucking job, I implore you, if for no other reason than to relieve my guilt at walking out on them.”  I phoned Leon to chat about it. “What are your misgivings?” he asked.  “Well, the main thing is that Harvard attracts some of the best students in the world. Will they be that good at Minnesota?”  “You don’t need Harvard; you will attract great students wherever you teach.”  “Me?”  “You! Take the job. That’s an order.”  Vera and I discussed the issue up, down, and sideways. On a personal level Boston was home for me—the Red Sox, the Revere Beach Boardwalk—and it had become a real home for Vera. Both of our families were there: my mother, who still lived in the house where I had grown up; my sister, Paula; Vera’s sister, Lili, who had followed us to Cambridge; and their parents. Vera’s mother and father, who had come to the United States via Israel, were living with us in Arlington. They were an enormous help, caring for our three children and Vera, who was then pregnant with our fourth, and they were not about to uproot themselves again to move to Minnesota. My own mother was doing well; after my father’s death, she had slowly begun to enjoy her independence. She was proud of my being a professor at Harvard, though she was never quite clear on the concept of what a “professor” did, let alone what kind of psychologist didn’t have patients. One afternoon in the middle of the week I went to see her. Her sister called, and my mother told her she couldn’t talk just then as I was visiting. My aunt had obviously asked, “How could Elliot get time off from his job to do that?” I heard my mother respond, “You know how it is in the professor business. They don’t pay much, but you can’t beat the hours.”  So Vera and I had many personal reasons to stay. But we both knew that I would be forced to leave Harvard in two or three years anyway; why postpone the inevitable? Why not do it now when I could go to a great job? I called MacCorquodale and accepted the offer. He wanted me to come that September, but I said that would be impossible. First, our baby was due in August; we did not want to move with a newborn, and Vera would need some recovery time. Second, I was reluctant to leave my three graduate advisees high and dry. In academia there are two kinds of professors: the trees, who stay rooted to one spot forever, and the nomads, who change universities with some regularity, either for personal reasons or for professional opportunities. If I was going to become a nomad, I did not want to be one of those who could heartlessly abandon their students.  Kenneth and I struck a compromise: I would come midyear. Within a few months I had gotten Merrill started on his dissertation and had helped him secure an assistant professorship at Yale, Tony Greenwald had begun working with Walter Mischel and Gordon Allport, and John Darley had agreed to join me as my chief research assistant. By January, when baby Joshua was five months old, Vera and I were ready to pull up stakes once more and move with our four children to the icy upper Midwest.  One night that August, just before Joshua was born, the phone rang at ten o’clock. In our family, whenever the phone rang after eight, it portended bad news, and this was no exception. It was Jason, calling to tell me he had been diagnosed with cancer in his right shoulder and that he was about to undergo surgery to amputate his shoulder and arm. I went straight to the airport and caught a night flight to Chicago. On the plane I kept picturing Jason without his shoulder and wishing it weren’t true, hoping that there had been some horrible mistaken diagnosis. Five days later, on my return flight home, I wished it were only the shoulder he would lose.  A few days after the surgery an intern had told Jason’s wife, Erica, and me, in confidence, that the cancer had metastasized throughout Jason’s body and that my brother would not have long to live. Jason didn’t know. In those days doctors rarely told patients the truth, if the truth was bad news. I hated concealing it from him. I knew that Jason was the kind of person who deserved to know the truth, no matter how grim. But his physician and Erica decided that it would be better if he didn’t know. I figured it was their call, so I went along with the conspiracy of silence and allowed Jason to believe that the surgery had been a success.  In September Jason came to Boston. He wanted to visit our mother and sister and meet his newest nephew. I invited him to give a guest lecture in my social psychology course, to talk about social influence from his perspective as a political scientist. He eagerly accepted: “I thought you’d never ask!” (As a Revere kid like me, he held Harvard in the highest esteem.) Jason gave a great lecture, keeping the students enthralled with examples of political influence and chicanery from ancient Athens to contemporary Chicago. He frequently dashed to the blackboard, writing with his left hand, as effortlessly as though he been a lefty from birth. The students loved him. As we walked out of the classroom, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You see? My dream came true. We did get to teach at the same college.”  During his visit he complained of shortness of breath and wondered aloud what could be causing it. I suspected that the cancer had spread to his lungs, and in that moment I could no longer continue the charade of silence. He had a right to know, a right to decide how he wanted to spend whatever time was allowed to him. And so I told him. He sighed deeply and was quiet for several minutes. The first words out of his mouth were not about him but about me. He thanked me for having the guts to tell him. “It must have been a heavy burden for you,” he said, “to have carried that secret all these weeks.”  When Jason and I were growing up in Revere, baseball and poker were more than games; like working on the boardwalk, they provided constant lessons in what it is to be a mensch. Once, when we were in our early teens, we were in the stands, watching a high school baseball game. The batter struck out swinging hard on three straight pitches. As he walked toward the bench he looked disdainfully at the barrel of his bat, as if it had let him down. Jason yelled out, “It’s not the bat, asshole!” I laughed. Jason’s crack was funny, but it was also a lesson in taking responsibility. It echoed his admonition when he was teaching me how to play poker. I had been dealt three terrible hands in a row and, at the fourth, had whined, “Another crappy hand!” Jason shot me a stern look and said, “Never, ever complain about the hand you are dealt. It’s the law of averages; good hands, fair hands, terrible hands, they will even out in the long run. Any idiot can win when he is dealt a full house. The trick to poker is to play the hand you are dealt in the best possible way. You can win with a lousy hand, if you play it right.”  Jason died four months after his last visit to Boston, having just turned thirty-two. He spent those months surrounded by the people he loved most. Because Jason’s friends were uncommonly bright, sophisticated, and articulate, his apartment was the closest thing to a literary-philosophical salon I had ever seen. I wanted to hang out with my brother as much as I could without shortchanging my family or my students, so I spent that fall commuting almost every weekend between Cambridge and Chicago.  Late one night, asleep on Jason and Erica’s living room couch, I heard a sound coming from the kitchen. It was about three o’clock, and Jason was fussing with the teakettle. As we sat together drinking a cup of tea, he said, “Look how life takes care of things. I always thought that I would be afraid of death, but at the end, because the pain is so intense, I can feel myself getting ready to let go.” My brother was dealt the lousiest hand imaginable, and he played it right, to the end.  在线阅读网：http://www.yUedu88.com/