CHAPTER EIGHT
Becoming a Texan
Elliot at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine, 1971 (top). Neal, Julie, and Hal: “Can we have your permission to sneak out at night?”
The decade I spent in Austin, 1965 to 1974, was arguably the most tumultuous era of the twentieth century. It was an exciting time to be alive, and a particularly exciting time to be a social psychologist. The Vietnam War was raging, and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. Students across the country were staging sit-ins, love-ins, and protests of all kinds. “Make love, not war!” protesters shouted, and many of them were practicing what they preached (sometimes in public). The civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement were constantly in the news, raising consciousness—a term that was exactly right—not only of obvious and blatant forms of prejudice and discrimination but also of the more subtle forms of which even good liberals were oblivious. After all, when Gordon Allport and I had had our lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, freely discussing anti-Semitism and racial prejudice, it did not occur to us to be equally outraged that female faculty had to enter the club through the back door.
These social changes seemed attainable to some, utopian to others, and dangerously anarchic to many. When, in 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on students at Kent State who were peacefully demonstrating against the war—killing four, wounding nine, and paralyzing one for life—many Americans were outraged, while many more thought that the students got what was coming to them. In that atmosphere, especially at a university, nobody remained neutral. In the aftermath of the Kent State shootings, thousands of University of Texas students decided to march to the capitol in downtown Austin to stage an antiwar demonstration. In response, the Texas Rangers, a tough, conservative corps of lawmen, announced that they would be there in force to “maintain order,” and everyone knew what that meant. Several Rangers had openly expressed hostility to what they regarded as the unpatriotic excesses of student demonstrations against the war, announcing that they would be only too happy to break some heads in the interest of keeping the peace. For their part, most of the student leaders were defiant and talked as if they were determined to provoke the Rangers. The situation was a tinderbox; the major TV networks sent their top reporters down to cover what they were sure would be a photogenic riot. Although I endorsed the students’ protest, I worried about their safety, so, along with a handful of other faculty members, I offered to help out as an organizer and marshal.
We went to the students’ meeting the night before the march. It was a mob scene, with hotheads exciting the crowd with cries of “Fuck the pigs!” and the crowd shouting back “Yeah! Right on!” A few of my colleagues and I spoke, cautioning the students against giving the Rangers any ammunition (as it were) for turning the peace march into a violent melee. We exhorted them to make their protest in a clear and forceful way but without doing anything blatantly provocative that might put their lives at risk. Our words were received with a smattering of polite applause but not so much as a single “Right on.” When I left the meeting, I was not sure which way the students would go. The next day I set off for the demonstration with trepidation and a heavy heart, but it went off peacefully, without incident. Although vociferous, the students did nothing to give the lawmen reason to use their batons. Or guns. The TV crews packed up and left, apparently concluding that the nonriot was not newsworthy.
The social changes erupting across America made many of us aware of problems in the university, which, in a sense, is a microcosm of the larger society. The University of Texas was a first-rate institution with amazingly low tuition rates for residents of the state; any Texas high school graduate with decent grades could come to Austin and obtain an excellent education virtually without charge. Yet when I arrived there, the student body was almost completely lily-white; even the football team, with aspirations to a national championship, had only one black player. When I talked with a few of the black and Latino students in my classes about this, they told me that minority students were reluctant to apply to UT because they saw Austin as an unfriendly place. And they were right; it was unfriendly, primarily because blacks and Latinos had difficulty finding housing near campus. There were plenty of available rooms, but most landlords refused to rent to minorities.
Clearly, the first step toward a solution was to make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against black and Mexican American students. Thus, when the Austin City Council decided to discuss a fair-housing proposal, my colleague Bob Helmreich and I attended their meeting and addressed the council members, endorsing the proposal from the standpoint of equal educational opportunities at the university. To bolster our argument, a week before the meeting I conducted a simple field experiment: I sent students to answer ads for housing near campus. Time after time, when a well-dressed, well-spoken African American or Mexican American student asked to see one of the listed apartments, he or she was informed that it had already been rented. An hour later I would send an Anglo student to the same location, and he or she would immediately be shown the apartment. The large discrepancy in responses to these students could only have been due to the landlords’ prejudices, and that was the evidence I presented to the Austin City Council. That night the council passed the ordinance by a slim margin. It was the first fair-housing ordinance in any major city south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The local bigots were furious. One night at two o’clock our phone rang. On the other end of the line was a man with a gravelly voice who called me a “nigger lover” and said, “We know where you live, and we know you have four kids. Make sure, if your door-bell rings at night, that you’re the one who answers the door, because one of us will be there with a double-barreled shotgun and we don’t want any of your kids to get hurt.” When I reported this threat to the Austin Police Department, the desk sergeant informed me that there was nothing they could do about it.
“Besides,” he said, “the guy on the phone is probably just trying to scare you.”
“He is succeeding,” I replied.
Our family lived in fear for several weeks, but gradually we realized that the sergeant had guessed right; the gravelly voiced guy did not show up, and we resumed breathing. Nonetheless, it was our first close encounter with the rage and resistance that bigots freely express. But our intervention study, which may have contributed to the fair-housing law, was worth it. The number of minority students at the university increased sharply the following year.
My experience at the city council and with the gravelly voiced guy reawakened in me a need that had been lying dormant for fifteen years: finding ways that I could combine doing good research with doing good. I didn’t have to wait long. In 1971 the Austin public schools were finally desegregated, and all hell broke loose. African American, Anglo, and Mexican American youngsters were in open conflict; fistfights were breaking out among these groups in corridors and school yards throughout the city.
Austin’s effort to desegregate its schools was a delayed response to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In that decision the Court overruled the prevailing law that segregation of blacks and whites was acceptable as long as their educational facilities were “equal.” The Court decreed that “separate but equal” was inherently unconstitutional because even if white schools and black schools were the same, the mere act of being segregated had a negative effect on the self-esteem of minority children that “might never be undone.” I remember the exhilaration that so many of us felt at the time. Abe Maslow was practically dancing around his office. “This is the beginning of the end of prejudice!” he exclaimed. The reasoning seemed self-evident: If segregation lowers self-esteem, then integration should raise it; once the self-esteem of minority children was raised, their academic achievement would improve. Moreover, given the assumption that prejudice is based largely on ignorance and unflattering stereotypes, bringing minority kids and white kids together should decrease their reciprocal animosity.
Before long it became clear that desegregation was not going to be easy and was not automatically going to produce the hoped-for results. In most places it was typically followed by turmoil in the community and hostility in the classroom. Prejudice in the schools was actually increasing, and the self-esteem and performance of minority kids were not improving. The situation in Austin was typical, albeit more dramatic, of what was happening across the country.
In the midst of this uproar, the assistant superintendent of schools called me to ask if I had any ideas about what could be done. He wanted an end to the violence; I wanted to know why desegregation was not producing the benefits we had anticipated. Our interests dovetailed, and I accepted the challenge.
The first step was to find out what the hell was going on in those classrooms. I sent my graduate students to systematically observe fifth- and sixth-grade classes in two elementary schools. “Sit in the back of the classroom and say nothing,” I instructed them. “After a while, the kids will forget you are there. As you observe, take nothing for granted. Some things are so common that it is easy to miss their importance. A good way to avoid that mistake is to imagine that you are a visitor from Mars and have never been in a classroom before; you are observing everything these earthlings do for the first time. Write every observation down. Then rank-order your list in terms of the frequency of each behavior.”
When they brought me their observations, one thing leaped out at us, something that anyone who has ever attended traditional public schools takes for granted. The typical classroom is a highly competitive place in which students vie with one another for the attention and praise of the teacher. In Austin, as in most communities, in this competition the minority kids were virtually guaranteed to lose. The previous law, “separate but equal,” had been separate all right, but things had never been equal. The schools that the black and Latino kids had been attending prior to desegregation were substandard; as a result, their reading skills were approximately one full grade level behind those of the Anglo kids. So when the teacher would call for the answer to a question, it was the white kids who raised their hands, hoping to be called on, and the minority kids who squirmed in their seats, trying to look invisible. The competitive structure of the classroom, coupled with the uneven playing field, confirmed and magnified the children’s existing stereotypes of each other. The Anglo kids saw the minority kids as stupid and lazy; the minority kids saw the Anglo kids as arrogant and pushy.
Our intervention was a simple one, consisting of restructuring the dynamics of the classroom from competitive to cooperative. We invented a technique that created small interdependent groups, designed to place students of different ethnic backgrounds in a situation where they needed to cooperate with one another in order to understand the material. We called it the jigsaw classroom, because the process was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, with each student contributing a vital piece to the total picture. For example, if the topic was “The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt,” each child in the small group was assigned a paragraph describing a phase of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life. Each child’s task was to study that paragraph alone, and then rejoin the group and report its contents to the others. The only access each child had to all the paragraphs and information, therefore, was by paying close attention to what each of the other children in the group had to say. Immediately after the jigsaw session, the teacher gave a written exam on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt.
As we were setting up this design, I worried about what would happen if one kid, perhaps one who couldn’t read very well, really did screw up. Then everyone in his jigsaw group would hate him even more. I remembered how I felt as a boy when the least-talented baseball player, the one chosen last for the team, would be put in deep right field. The poor kid stands there praying no one will hit the ball to him, and then he’s suddenly sent an easy fly ball with the bases loaded—and drops it. Every kid’s nightmare! I immediately thought of a way of ensuring against such a calamity in our classroom: After the students read their own paragraph a few times and learned it pretty well, they would join an “expert” group. This expert group would consist of one member from each of the jigsaw groups, all of whom had been assigned the identical paragraph. They would then rehearse their selection together, allowing the slower students to get up to speed, before rejoining their original team. The expert group made it difficult for a child to screw up completely by simply not understanding the assignment. Of course, it didn’t make each child’s performance flawless, nor did it eradicate a child’s nervousness, but it did protect every child from being a drag on his or her classmates.
And so we began our pilot study, comparing a sixth-grade classroom divided into jigsaw groups with a control classroom structured as usual. At first the children simply repeated their competitive strategies, but in a few days they realized that their competitive behavior had abruptly become dysfunctional. Take the example of a Mexican American boy whom I will call Carlos. English was his second language, and, although he was fluent, he spoke with an accent that often evoked taunting or derisive laughter among the Anglo kids. So he usually kept quiet in class. But when we introduced jigsaw, he could no longer avoid talking; he was required to present the paragraph he had learned.
When Carlos began to recite his piece of the puzzle (Eleanor Roosevelt’s middle years), he had learned the paragraph well, but he was nervous and frequently stumbled and mumbled. Initially, some of the other children sighed audibly or looked away; one called him stupid. In a competitive classroom this kind of behavior often succeeds in throwing your opponent off balance. But in a jigsaw classroom the kids soon understood that their disparaging remarks and gestures would keep them from learning the piece of the puzzle that Carlos was struggling to give them—and would thus prevent them from getting a high grade on the exam. They had to learn to be patient, to listen carefully, and to prompt Carlos by asking the kinds of questions that would help him articulate the information he had. In the process they learned that Carlos was smarter and nicer than they had previously thought.
Within a week of instituting jigsaw, there was a discernible positive change in the classroom atmosphere. Visiting teachers in specialties such as art and music were among the first to notice it; they would spontaneously ask the classroom teacher what it was that he or she had been doing differently. After six weeks we documented the changes empirically. We asked the children to rate how much they liked their classmates—all of them, not just those in their jigsaw group. We also asked them how much they liked school, and we validated their responses against their attendance records.
The formal data confirmed our casual observations: Compared to students in traditional classrooms, students of all ethnicities liked school more (absenteeism significantly declined) and liked each other more—across and within ethnic lines. For white students self-esteem and test performance remained constant. But the minority students in jigsaw classrooms showed a significant increase in self-esteem, and their test performance averaged nine percentage points higher than those of minority students in traditional classrooms. This difference was highly significant both statistically and meaningfully. A black sixth grader might be earning a score of 72 on an exam in a traditional classroom, but his counterpart in a jigsaw classroom would earn an 81.
One of my graduate students, Diane Bridgeman, subsequently found that children in jigsaw classrooms also develop a greater ability to empathize with others than children in traditional classrooms do. Why? In a jigsaw classroom students must pay close attention to their teammates so that they can ask good, helpful questions; as a side effect of this process, they learn to put themselves in the other children’s shoes. I was excited by this finding because learning to empathize is at least as important as learning geography or history.
The jigsaw method proved to be teacher-proof. In replicating this study we used a stringent test, and we stacked the cards against jigsaw: We assigned to the control condition those teachers whom their principals had designated as being the best in each of the schools. Thus, the improved performance of children in the jigsaw classrooms could not be attributed to superior teaching but only attributed to the method itself. Over the years, as we continued to implement the jigsaw technique, the findings remained the same. Moreover, the schools that adopted this approach became more truly integrated. We had taken photos of the playgrounds during recess, so we had clear evidence of who was hanging out with whom. Whenever they had free time, students in traditional schools were clustering in groups according to race or ethnicity. Students in jigsaw schools were more likely to mingle interracially.
I was elated. At long last, I had produced a scientifically sound answer to the question I had asked myself when I was nine years old, sitting on that curbstone in Revere, nursing my bloody nose and my split lip. I had shown that prejudice can be overcome, and that children of different ethnic backgrounds can learn to like one another. What it takes is not simply increased contact but the right kind of contact. As Gordon Allport had written in The Nature of Prejudice, “While it may help somewhat to place members of different ethnic groups side by side on a job, the gain is greater if these members regard themselves as part of a team.” I knew the truth of this observation personally, given my experience with my baseball teammates in Revere. Most of those guys had regarded Jews with suspicion and distrust. Once we began to cooperate as a team, however, those feelings dissolved. We came to understand and like one another, developing an affection and respect that persisted long after the baseball season ended.
My students and I published our results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but I wanted our technique to be known not just to other psychologists but also to the general public, especially teachers and parents. So I wrote up our findings in a nontechnical way and submitted the article to the popular magazine Psychology Today, where it was featured prominently, complete with full-color photos. I made a few hundred copies, sent them to school superintendents all over the country, and offered to train teachers free of charge. Then I sat back and waited for the requests to come pouring in.
How naive! You can’t give something away if nobody wants it, and not many wanted it. When I followed up with phone calls, most of the superintendents and principals explained that they were doing just fine and didn’t need an outsider to come into their schools and set up some new method. One of them was unusually candid. “Do you know what would happen if we instituted your technique?” he said. “My phone would be ringing off the hook with complaints from parents. ‘Do you mean to tell me that my child is being taught by some black kid? What are we paying the teachers for?’” It dawned on me that I had been invited to intervene in Austin only because the schools were in crisis. In most school systems anything short of crisis was doing just fine by their standards.
I felt I was riding a roller coaster, elation followed by a disillusioning plummet. I had found a reliable, virtually foolproof technique for reducing prejudice and raising academic achievement in our schools, and I couldn’t give it away. My friends and colleagues tried to reassure me. “That’s the way bureaucracies are,” they said. “There is nothing you can do about it.” Somehow, I did not find their words reassuring.
And so the jigsaw technique languished for nearly fourteen years. Then, in 1984, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Civil Rights Commission singled out Austin as a model city in which school desegregation had worked in the manner intended. The commission gave much of the credit to the jigsaw classroom, and I began getting requests from all over the country to train teachers.
Although, over the next several years, I trained hundreds of teachers in dozens of school districts, jigsaw has not entered the mainstream of American education; it remains a small drop in a very large bucket. How come? Here we have an easy-to-use, cost-effective, empirically based intervention that works and that teachers enjoy using. Why is it that jigsaw failed to capture the attention of Congress or the Department of Education? My best guess is that it did not fit either a right-wing or a left-wing political agenda. The Left is committed to the idea that only massive and expensive systemic changes can make a difference in the lives of most disadvantaged children. The Right believes that it is futile to expend resources of any kind on children whose poor academic performance stems either from genetic inferiority or from deficient parenting. As a citizen I was deeply disappointed and regret that I was not a more effective advocate for jigsaw. As a social psychologist, however, perhaps I should not have been surprised that useful empirical findings often fall by the wayside if they run counter to the prevailing political ideologies.
The course I most enjoyed teaching was Introductory Social Psychology. I got a great kick out of being the first person to awaken college freshmen and sophomores to the excitement and promise of this discipline. But at Texas I was becoming increasingly impatient with the existing textbooks. It’s not that they weren’t scholarly enough, or that they were inaccurate, or that they didn’t have enough graphs, tables, charts, or references. If anything, they had too much of that stuff. But these books were simply not addressing the problems that our students were most concerned about—the war in Vietnam, the racial divide, political assassinations, and other major events affecting their lives. No wonder that most of my students found the texts dull and irrelevant.
I did a fair amount of complaining about the limitations of existing textbooks. One day one of my teaching assistants, having grown weary of my constant kvetching, said, “Why don’t you write one of your own?” I dismissed the idea out of hand. I’m afraid that my response was somewhat snobbish. “I’m a scientist,” I said. “We scientists shouldn’t be wasting our time writing textbooks.” Instead, I prepared a few rough essays on my favorite topics, linking experimental research to contemporary social problems in a personal way and telling stories from my own life, and I assigned these readings as a supplement to the formal textbook we were using. Before I knew it, I had a rough draft of a brief but punchy textbook in social psychology. I called it The Social Animal.
Because I didn’t know I was writing a textbook, I got to do one of the things I loved most in writing: speaking in my own voice, using the first-person singular, as if I were talking directly to students. In the first chapter I enunciated what I rather grandly referred to as “Aronson’s First Law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.” (That’s just one of my many First Laws; there never was a second.) Of course, I was mocking myself by assigning it the status of a First Law, but the statement itself was dead serious, reflecting what I regard as the essence of social psychology, namely, that the social situation can exert a powerful impact on human behavior. Situations can make sane people do crazy things, moral people do immoral things, smart people do stupid things, and brave people do cowardly things. If we, the observers, are unaware of the social circumstances that evoke those actions, we are tempted to conclude that they are caused by some deficiency in the character or sanity of the person doing them.
The book was published in 1972, and much to my delight, it was an immediate success. It is now in its eleventh edition, has been translated into fourteen foreign languages, and has received many awards. Naturally, I loved the praise and the response of my colleagues, but most gratifying of all is the number of people who have written to tell me that it was because of reading The Social Animal as an undergraduate that they decided to become a social psychologist.
It was exhilarating to be part of a psychology department that was growing in excellence and achieving national prominence. Gardner Lindzey proved to be an excellent chair with an impeccable eye for talent. Among the many dynamic faculty members he hired was Michael Kahn, whom Gardner lured from Yale to take over the huge introductory psychology course. Michael and I had originally met at Harvard, when he was a graduate student in clinical psychology, and we became close friends. By the time he came to Texas, he was not only a superb teacher but also a trained T-group leader. (The T in T-group means “training,” short for “sensitivity training.”) T-groups were invented by Kurt Lewin, who is generally considered to be the father of experimental social psychology. (I always referred to him as my “intellectual grandfather” because he was Leon Festinger’s mentor.)
Actually, Lewin had invented the T-group by accident. He wanted to know whether small-group discussions might lead to creative solutions to social problems, so he assembled about fifty educators and divided them into small groups. To assess the groups’ success, Lewin asked several of his graduate students to observe the groups during the day and then, in the evening, to interpret and discuss the dynamics occurring in each one. One evening a few of the educators asked if they could sit in and listen to the graduate students’ observations. One of the educators, upon hearing an observer’s interpretation that she had been angry during a discussion that morning with one of her colleagues, protested vigorously. She hadn’t been angry at all, she said, merely energized by the topic. The observer held his ground—“You sure looked angry to me!”—and the ensuing discussion was lively and illuminating. The next night all fifty of the educators showed up and gleefully joined the discussion, frequently disagreeing with the interpretations of the trained observers.
Lewin was quick to grasp the significance of this event. A group that forms to discuss how to solve a problem can benefit enormously by taking time out to discuss its own feelings and intentions, and the members do not need training in group dynamics to do this. Indeed, the participants themselves are much better observers of their own process because each is privy to his or her own intentions. This information is not easily available to outside observers, no matter how astute and well trained they are. Over time, what evolved was the agenda-less group—a group that met with no formal plan and no problems to discuss other than its own dynamics, with the goal of helping members communicate with each other more effectively and learn how they are perceived by others. The T-group quickly became the vanguard of the human potential movement.
Lewin thus produced not only many of the nation’s most eminent experimental social psychologists but also the first generation of T-group leaders. Over the years the two camps parted company. When, as a graduate student, I had asked Leon for his opinion of T-groups, he greeted my question with a sneer. He was contemptuous of them because he saw them as having dubious value and little or nothing to do with social psychology. When I expressed my own skepticism about T-groups to Michael Kahn, he said, “Hey, you’re a scientist. Why not find out for yourself? I’m about to start a T-group in Austin. Join us. Afterward you can tell me what’s wrong with it.” It was an invitation I couldn’t refuse. I went, I participated, I loved it. I decided to learn more, and the place to learn more was the National Training Laboratory founded by Lewin’s students in Bethel, Maine. In 1967 I spent a summer there as a participant, the following summer as an intern, and one summer later I was a leader.
But Festinger’s skepticism was not entirely unfounded. During the 1960s and 1970s encounter groups (as they were commonly called on the West Coast) attracted a lot of thrill-seeking participants and plenty of goofy practitioners. Many groups were based on dubious theorizing and bad psychology, led by self-appointed tin-pot gurus. Some of their methods were foolish, others coercive. But at their best, when conducted by competent leaders well trained in group dynamics, T-groups provided participants with illuminating exercises and insights that they could take away with them. These skills made them better friends to their friends, better teachers to their students, better bosses to their employees, better parents to their children, better spouses.
What I loved most about the T-group was its emphasis on straight talk: helping members identify the difference between their feelings and their opinions and judgments of others and to be clear in their expression of those feelings rather than disguising them as insults, blame, or false flattery. There was no agenda; there was no focus on past experiences or childhood traumas. The emphasis was on the “here and now.” In one T-group I led, a middle-aged man I’ll call Tim confronted a slightly younger man, whom I’ll call Peter, and said, “I’ve been listening to you and watching you for three days, and I think you’re a phony.”
What’s wrong with that observation? Isn’t Tim simply stating his honest feeling about Peter? Well, no. The key to our understanding of this encounter rests on the term “feeling”; Tim was not expressing a feeling, he was expressing a judgment. By “feelings” I do not mean a hunch or hypothesis, as in “I feel it’s going to rain today”; I mean anger, joy, sadness, happiness, annoyance, fear, discomfort, warmth, hurt, envy, excitement, and the like. So I asked Tim what his feelings were about Peter.
“Well, I feel that Peter is a phony,” he said.
“And what does that do to you?”
“It annoys the hell out of me.”
Now another member of the group intervened and asked, “What kinds of things has Peter done that annoy you?” After some probing by the group, Tim admitted he got annoyed whenever Peter showed affection to any of the women in the group. On further probing it turned out Tim was “annoyed” by Peter’s attractiveness to women. Eventually, Tim owned up to feelings of envy: Tim wished he had Peter’s charm and popularity with women. But, as many people do, Tim had initially masked this feeling of envy, transforming it in his mind into disdain. He was protecting his ego; Tim had learned over the years that if he admitted to feeling envious of another man, it would have made him vulnerable and appear weak. By expressing disdain, however, Tim put himself one up. Although his behavior was successful in protecting his ego, it blocked his ability to understand his authentic feelings and their cause. And it was blocking his ability to communicate directly and effectively.
In this society most of us glide through life protecting ourselves; in effect, each of us wears a suit of behavioral armor, to minimize how much other people can hurt us. But sometimes we become so successful at hiding our true feelings from others that we hide our feelings from ourselves as well. The group leader makes it possible for members to remove that armor by creating a climate of safety. Group members feel free to express their vulnerabilities without fear of being attacked or mocked.
But what if Tim hates Peter; should he express his hatred? What if Tim believes that Peter is an evil person; should he express that belief?
Despite our deep involvement in community and political activities, Vera and I did not succeed in becoming authentic Texans. Although we liked Austin and the university, we never quite believed that this was the place where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. So when Hal entered his senior year in high school and began applying to colleges, Vera and I realized that it was time to make a conscious decision. We had always been a close-knit family, and soon our kids would be scattering. Where could we find a place to live that would be so attractive that when our kids were grown, they would like to settle nearby? The short answer was “not Texas.”
The long answer was more complicated. Ideally, we wanted to move to an attractive city, near an ocean, with a temperate climate. That meant the Pacific Coast. One of the universities that I found particularly appealing was the University of California at Santa Cruz, which, though only ten years old, had already achieved a reputation for excellence. Hal liked the sound of it, too; he applied and was accepted. UCSC had been founded on an innovative approach to undergraduate education. It was divided into eight separate colleges, each college contained a few faculty members from each of the academic departments, and each college had a specific theme. Michael Kahn had moved to UCSC a few years earlier, where he joined the faculty of Kresge College as it was about to open its doors. Kresge’s theme was creating a “living learning” community, where students would blend their academic learning with experiential learning in T-groups. It was a natural for Michael, and for me.
In 1974 the founding chancellor of UCSC, Dean McHenry, offered me the position of professor of psychology and provost (administrative head) of Kresge College. The entire Psychology Department, he said, was very enthusiastic about the possibility of my joining them. It was a great offer, except that I did not want to be an administrator. While I was agonizing over the decision, McHenry called me back. “I feel compelled to tell you,” he said, “that several of the women on the Kresge faculty are demanding that we hire a woman as provost. Although they have nothing against you personally, they see this as their opportunity to have the first woman provost, and there are already two good candidates on the short list. But because the great majority of the Kresge faculty voted for you, the job is yours if you want it.” For me, that tipped the balance, and I declined the offer. As appealing as Kresge looked, I thought the women had a reasonable demand, and, besides, I had no desire to begin my career at UCSC by causing a controversy. Two weeks later McHenry phoned to say that they had appointed a woman as provost, and would I entertain an offer to join the Kresge faculty solely as a professor of psychology? I would and I did.
As an added bonus, the city of Santa Cruz had a thriving boardwalk with a rare bona fide wooden roller coaster, very much like the one I grew up with in Revere. My life was coming around full circle.
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Elliot at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine, 1971 (top). Neal, Julie, and Hal: “Can we have your permission to sneak out at night?”
The decade I spent in Austin, 1965 to 1974, was arguably the most tumultuous era of the twentieth century. It was an exciting time to be alive, and a particularly exciting time to be a social psychologist. The Vietnam War was raging, and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. Students across the country were staging sit-ins, love-ins, and protests of all kinds. “Make love, not war!” protesters shouted, and many of them were practicing what they preached (sometimes in public). The civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement were constantly in the news, raising consciousness—a term that was exactly right—not only of obvious and blatant forms of prejudice and discrimination but also of the more subtle forms of which even good liberals were oblivious. After all, when Gordon Allport and I had had our lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, freely discussing anti-Semitism and racial prejudice, it did not occur to us to be equally outraged that female faculty had to enter the club through the back door.
These social changes seemed attainable to some, utopian to others, and dangerously anarchic to many. When, in 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on students at Kent State who were peacefully demonstrating against the war—killing four, wounding nine, and paralyzing one for life—many Americans were outraged, while many more thought that the students got what was coming to them. In that atmosphere, especially at a university, nobody remained neutral. In the aftermath of the Kent State shootings, thousands of University of Texas students decided to march to the capitol in downtown Austin to stage an antiwar demonstration. In response, the Texas Rangers, a tough, conservative corps of lawmen, announced that they would be there in force to “maintain order,” and everyone knew what that meant. Several Rangers had openly expressed hostility to what they regarded as the unpatriotic excesses of student demonstrations against the war, announcing that they would be only too happy to break some heads in the interest of keeping the peace. For their part, most of the student leaders were defiant and talked as if they were determined to provoke the Rangers. The situation was a tinderbox; the major TV networks sent their top reporters down to cover what they were sure would be a photogenic riot. Although I endorsed the students’ protest, I worried about their safety, so, along with a handful of other faculty members, I offered to help out as an organizer and marshal.
We went to the students’ meeting the night before the march. It was a mob scene, with hotheads exciting the crowd with cries of “Fuck the pigs!” and the crowd shouting back “Yeah! Right on!” A few of my colleagues and I spoke, cautioning the students against giving the Rangers any ammunition (as it were) for turning the peace march into a violent melee. We exhorted them to make their protest in a clear and forceful way but without doing anything blatantly provocative that might put their lives at risk. Our words were received with a smattering of polite applause but not so much as a single “Right on.” When I left the meeting, I was not sure which way the students would go. The next day I set off for the demonstration with trepidation and a heavy heart, but it went off peacefully, without incident. Although vociferous, the students did nothing to give the lawmen reason to use their batons. Or guns. The TV crews packed up and left, apparently concluding that the nonriot was not newsworthy.
The social changes erupting across America made many of us aware of problems in the university, which, in a sense, is a microcosm of the larger society. The University of Texas was a first-rate institution with amazingly low tuition rates for residents of the state; any Texas high school graduate with decent grades could come to Austin and obtain an excellent education virtually without charge. Yet when I arrived there, the student body was almost completely lily-white; even the football team, with aspirations to a national championship, had only one black player. When I talked with a few of the black and Latino students in my classes about this, they told me that minority students were reluctant to apply to UT because they saw Austin as an unfriendly place. And they were right; it was unfriendly, primarily because blacks and Latinos had difficulty finding housing near campus. There were plenty of available rooms, but most landlords refused to rent to minorities.
Clearly, the first step toward a solution was to make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against black and Mexican American students. Thus, when the Austin City Council decided to discuss a fair-housing proposal, my colleague Bob Helmreich and I attended their meeting and addressed the council members, endorsing the proposal from the standpoint of equal educational opportunities at the university. To bolster our argument, a week before the meeting I conducted a simple field experiment: I sent students to answer ads for housing near campus. Time after time, when a well-dressed, well-spoken African American or Mexican American student asked to see one of the listed apartments, he or she was informed that it had already been rented. An hour later I would send an Anglo student to the same location, and he or she would immediately be shown the apartment. The large discrepancy in responses to these students could only have been due to the landlords’ prejudices, and that was the evidence I presented to the Austin City Council. That night the council passed the ordinance by a slim margin. It was the first fair-housing ordinance in any major city south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The local bigots were furious. One night at two o’clock our phone rang. On the other end of the line was a man with a gravelly voice who called me a “nigger lover” and said, “We know where you live, and we know you have four kids. Make sure, if your door-bell rings at night, that you’re the one who answers the door, because one of us will be there with a double-barreled shotgun and we don’t want any of your kids to get hurt.” When I reported this threat to the Austin Police Department, the desk sergeant informed me that there was nothing they could do about it.
“Besides,” he said, “the guy on the phone is probably just trying to scare you.”
“He is succeeding,” I replied.
Our family lived in fear for several weeks, but gradually we realized that the sergeant had guessed right; the gravelly voiced guy did not show up, and we resumed breathing. Nonetheless, it was our first close encounter with the rage and resistance that bigots freely express. But our intervention study, which may have contributed to the fair-housing law, was worth it. The number of minority students at the university increased sharply the following year.
My experience at the city council and with the gravelly voiced guy reawakened in me a need that had been lying dormant for fifteen years: finding ways that I could combine doing good research with doing good. I didn’t have to wait long. In 1971 the Austin public schools were finally desegregated, and all hell broke loose. African American, Anglo, and Mexican American youngsters were in open conflict; fistfights were breaking out among these groups in corridors and school yards throughout the city.
Austin’s effort to desegregate its schools was a delayed response to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In that decision the Court overruled the prevailing law that segregation of blacks and whites was acceptable as long as their educational facilities were “equal.” The Court decreed that “separate but equal” was inherently unconstitutional because even if white schools and black schools were the same, the mere act of being segregated had a negative effect on the self-esteem of minority children that “might never be undone.” I remember the exhilaration that so many of us felt at the time. Abe Maslow was practically dancing around his office. “This is the beginning of the end of prejudice!” he exclaimed. The reasoning seemed self-evident: If segregation lowers self-esteem, then integration should raise it; once the self-esteem of minority children was raised, their academic achievement would improve. Moreover, given the assumption that prejudice is based largely on ignorance and unflattering stereotypes, bringing minority kids and white kids together should decrease their reciprocal animosity.
Before long it became clear that desegregation was not going to be easy and was not automatically going to produce the hoped-for results. In most places it was typically followed by turmoil in the community and hostility in the classroom. Prejudice in the schools was actually increasing, and the self-esteem and performance of minority kids were not improving. The situation in Austin was typical, albeit more dramatic, of what was happening across the country.
In the midst of this uproar, the assistant superintendent of schools called me to ask if I had any ideas about what could be done. He wanted an end to the violence; I wanted to know why desegregation was not producing the benefits we had anticipated. Our interests dovetailed, and I accepted the challenge.
The first step was to find out what the hell was going on in those classrooms. I sent my graduate students to systematically observe fifth- and sixth-grade classes in two elementary schools. “Sit in the back of the classroom and say nothing,” I instructed them. “After a while, the kids will forget you are there. As you observe, take nothing for granted. Some things are so common that it is easy to miss their importance. A good way to avoid that mistake is to imagine that you are a visitor from Mars and have never been in a classroom before; you are observing everything these earthlings do for the first time. Write every observation down. Then rank-order your list in terms of the frequency of each behavior.”
When they brought me their observations, one thing leaped out at us, something that anyone who has ever attended traditional public schools takes for granted. The typical classroom is a highly competitive place in which students vie with one another for the attention and praise of the teacher. In Austin, as in most communities, in this competition the minority kids were virtually guaranteed to lose. The previous law, “separate but equal,” had been separate all right, but things had never been equal. The schools that the black and Latino kids had been attending prior to desegregation were substandard; as a result, their reading skills were approximately one full grade level behind those of the Anglo kids. So when the teacher would call for the answer to a question, it was the white kids who raised their hands, hoping to be called on, and the minority kids who squirmed in their seats, trying to look invisible. The competitive structure of the classroom, coupled with the uneven playing field, confirmed and magnified the children’s existing stereotypes of each other. The Anglo kids saw the minority kids as stupid and lazy; the minority kids saw the Anglo kids as arrogant and pushy.
Our intervention was a simple one, consisting of restructuring the dynamics of the classroom from competitive to cooperative. We invented a technique that created small interdependent groups, designed to place students of different ethnic backgrounds in a situation where they needed to cooperate with one another in order to understand the material. We called it the jigsaw classroom, because the process was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, with each student contributing a vital piece to the total picture. For example, if the topic was “The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt,” each child in the small group was assigned a paragraph describing a phase of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life. Each child’s task was to study that paragraph alone, and then rejoin the group and report its contents to the others. The only access each child had to all the paragraphs and information, therefore, was by paying close attention to what each of the other children in the group had to say. Immediately after the jigsaw session, the teacher gave a written exam on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt.
As we were setting up this design, I worried about what would happen if one kid, perhaps one who couldn’t read very well, really did screw up. Then everyone in his jigsaw group would hate him even more. I remembered how I felt as a boy when the least-talented baseball player, the one chosen last for the team, would be put in deep right field. The poor kid stands there praying no one will hit the ball to him, and then he’s suddenly sent an easy fly ball with the bases loaded—and drops it. Every kid’s nightmare! I immediately thought of a way of ensuring against such a calamity in our classroom: After the students read their own paragraph a few times and learned it pretty well, they would join an “expert” group. This expert group would consist of one member from each of the jigsaw groups, all of whom had been assigned the identical paragraph. They would then rehearse their selection together, allowing the slower students to get up to speed, before rejoining their original team. The expert group made it difficult for a child to screw up completely by simply not understanding the assignment. Of course, it didn’t make each child’s performance flawless, nor did it eradicate a child’s nervousness, but it did protect every child from being a drag on his or her classmates.
And so we began our pilot study, comparing a sixth-grade classroom divided into jigsaw groups with a control classroom structured as usual. At first the children simply repeated their competitive strategies, but in a few days they realized that their competitive behavior had abruptly become dysfunctional. Take the example of a Mexican American boy whom I will call Carlos. English was his second language, and, although he was fluent, he spoke with an accent that often evoked taunting or derisive laughter among the Anglo kids. So he usually kept quiet in class. But when we introduced jigsaw, he could no longer avoid talking; he was required to present the paragraph he had learned.
When Carlos began to recite his piece of the puzzle (Eleanor Roosevelt’s middle years), he had learned the paragraph well, but he was nervous and frequently stumbled and mumbled. Initially, some of the other children sighed audibly or looked away; one called him stupid. In a competitive classroom this kind of behavior often succeeds in throwing your opponent off balance. But in a jigsaw classroom the kids soon understood that their disparaging remarks and gestures would keep them from learning the piece of the puzzle that Carlos was struggling to give them—and would thus prevent them from getting a high grade on the exam. They had to learn to be patient, to listen carefully, and to prompt Carlos by asking the kinds of questions that would help him articulate the information he had. In the process they learned that Carlos was smarter and nicer than they had previously thought.
Within a week of instituting jigsaw, there was a discernible positive change in the classroom atmosphere. Visiting teachers in specialties such as art and music were among the first to notice it; they would spontaneously ask the classroom teacher what it was that he or she had been doing differently. After six weeks we documented the changes empirically. We asked the children to rate how much they liked their classmates—all of them, not just those in their jigsaw group. We also asked them how much they liked school, and we validated their responses against their attendance records.
The formal data confirmed our casual observations: Compared to students in traditional classrooms, students of all ethnicities liked school more (absenteeism significantly declined) and liked each other more—across and within ethnic lines. For white students self-esteem and test performance remained constant. But the minority students in jigsaw classrooms showed a significant increase in self-esteem, and their test performance averaged nine percentage points higher than those of minority students in traditional classrooms. This difference was highly significant both statistically and meaningfully. A black sixth grader might be earning a score of 72 on an exam in a traditional classroom, but his counterpart in a jigsaw classroom would earn an 81.
One of my graduate students, Diane Bridgeman, subsequently found that children in jigsaw classrooms also develop a greater ability to empathize with others than children in traditional classrooms do. Why? In a jigsaw classroom students must pay close attention to their teammates so that they can ask good, helpful questions; as a side effect of this process, they learn to put themselves in the other children’s shoes. I was excited by this finding because learning to empathize is at least as important as learning geography or history.
The jigsaw method proved to be teacher-proof. In replicating this study we used a stringent test, and we stacked the cards against jigsaw: We assigned to the control condition those teachers whom their principals had designated as being the best in each of the schools. Thus, the improved performance of children in the jigsaw classrooms could not be attributed to superior teaching but only attributed to the method itself. Over the years, as we continued to implement the jigsaw technique, the findings remained the same. Moreover, the schools that adopted this approach became more truly integrated. We had taken photos of the playgrounds during recess, so we had clear evidence of who was hanging out with whom. Whenever they had free time, students in traditional schools were clustering in groups according to race or ethnicity. Students in jigsaw schools were more likely to mingle interracially.
I was elated. At long last, I had produced a scientifically sound answer to the question I had asked myself when I was nine years old, sitting on that curbstone in Revere, nursing my bloody nose and my split lip. I had shown that prejudice can be overcome, and that children of different ethnic backgrounds can learn to like one another. What it takes is not simply increased contact but the right kind of contact. As Gordon Allport had written in The Nature of Prejudice, “While it may help somewhat to place members of different ethnic groups side by side on a job, the gain is greater if these members regard themselves as part of a team.” I knew the truth of this observation personally, given my experience with my baseball teammates in Revere. Most of those guys had regarded Jews with suspicion and distrust. Once we began to cooperate as a team, however, those feelings dissolved. We came to understand and like one another, developing an affection and respect that persisted long after the baseball season ended.
My students and I published our results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but I wanted our technique to be known not just to other psychologists but also to the general public, especially teachers and parents. So I wrote up our findings in a nontechnical way and submitted the article to the popular magazine Psychology Today, where it was featured prominently, complete with full-color photos. I made a few hundred copies, sent them to school superintendents all over the country, and offered to train teachers free of charge. Then I sat back and waited for the requests to come pouring in.
How naive! You can’t give something away if nobody wants it, and not many wanted it. When I followed up with phone calls, most of the superintendents and principals explained that they were doing just fine and didn’t need an outsider to come into their schools and set up some new method. One of them was unusually candid. “Do you know what would happen if we instituted your technique?” he said. “My phone would be ringing off the hook with complaints from parents. ‘Do you mean to tell me that my child is being taught by some black kid? What are we paying the teachers for?’” It dawned on me that I had been invited to intervene in Austin only because the schools were in crisis. In most school systems anything short of crisis was doing just fine by their standards.
I felt I was riding a roller coaster, elation followed by a disillusioning plummet. I had found a reliable, virtually foolproof technique for reducing prejudice and raising academic achievement in our schools, and I couldn’t give it away. My friends and colleagues tried to reassure me. “That’s the way bureaucracies are,” they said. “There is nothing you can do about it.” Somehow, I did not find their words reassuring.
And so the jigsaw technique languished for nearly fourteen years. Then, in 1984, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Civil Rights Commission singled out Austin as a model city in which school desegregation had worked in the manner intended. The commission gave much of the credit to the jigsaw classroom, and I began getting requests from all over the country to train teachers.
Although, over the next several years, I trained hundreds of teachers in dozens of school districts, jigsaw has not entered the mainstream of American education; it remains a small drop in a very large bucket. How come? Here we have an easy-to-use, cost-effective, empirically based intervention that works and that teachers enjoy using. Why is it that jigsaw failed to capture the attention of Congress or the Department of Education? My best guess is that it did not fit either a right-wing or a left-wing political agenda. The Left is committed to the idea that only massive and expensive systemic changes can make a difference in the lives of most disadvantaged children. The Right believes that it is futile to expend resources of any kind on children whose poor academic performance stems either from genetic inferiority or from deficient parenting. As a citizen I was deeply disappointed and regret that I was not a more effective advocate for jigsaw. As a social psychologist, however, perhaps I should not have been surprised that useful empirical findings often fall by the wayside if they run counter to the prevailing political ideologies.
The course I most enjoyed teaching was Introductory Social Psychology. I got a great kick out of being the first person to awaken college freshmen and sophomores to the excitement and promise of this discipline. But at Texas I was becoming increasingly impatient with the existing textbooks. It’s not that they weren’t scholarly enough, or that they were inaccurate, or that they didn’t have enough graphs, tables, charts, or references. If anything, they had too much of that stuff. But these books were simply not addressing the problems that our students were most concerned about—the war in Vietnam, the racial divide, political assassinations, and other major events affecting their lives. No wonder that most of my students found the texts dull and irrelevant.
I did a fair amount of complaining about the limitations of existing textbooks. One day one of my teaching assistants, having grown weary of my constant kvetching, said, “Why don’t you write one of your own?” I dismissed the idea out of hand. I’m afraid that my response was somewhat snobbish. “I’m a scientist,” I said. “We scientists shouldn’t be wasting our time writing textbooks.” Instead, I prepared a few rough essays on my favorite topics, linking experimental research to contemporary social problems in a personal way and telling stories from my own life, and I assigned these readings as a supplement to the formal textbook we were using. Before I knew it, I had a rough draft of a brief but punchy textbook in social psychology. I called it The Social Animal.
Because I didn’t know I was writing a textbook, I got to do one of the things I loved most in writing: speaking in my own voice, using the first-person singular, as if I were talking directly to students. In the first chapter I enunciated what I rather grandly referred to as “Aronson’s First Law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.” (That’s just one of my many First Laws; there never was a second.) Of course, I was mocking myself by assigning it the status of a First Law, but the statement itself was dead serious, reflecting what I regard as the essence of social psychology, namely, that the social situation can exert a powerful impact on human behavior. Situations can make sane people do crazy things, moral people do immoral things, smart people do stupid things, and brave people do cowardly things. If we, the observers, are unaware of the social circumstances that evoke those actions, we are tempted to conclude that they are caused by some deficiency in the character or sanity of the person doing them.
The book was published in 1972, and much to my delight, it was an immediate success. It is now in its eleventh edition, has been translated into fourteen foreign languages, and has received many awards. Naturally, I loved the praise and the response of my colleagues, but most gratifying of all is the number of people who have written to tell me that it was because of reading The Social Animal as an undergraduate that they decided to become a social psychologist.
It was exhilarating to be part of a psychology department that was growing in excellence and achieving national prominence. Gardner Lindzey proved to be an excellent chair with an impeccable eye for talent. Among the many dynamic faculty members he hired was Michael Kahn, whom Gardner lured from Yale to take over the huge introductory psychology course. Michael and I had originally met at Harvard, when he was a graduate student in clinical psychology, and we became close friends. By the time he came to Texas, he was not only a superb teacher but also a trained T-group leader. (The T in T-group means “training,” short for “sensitivity training.”) T-groups were invented by Kurt Lewin, who is generally considered to be the father of experimental social psychology. (I always referred to him as my “intellectual grandfather” because he was Leon Festinger’s mentor.)
Actually, Lewin had invented the T-group by accident. He wanted to know whether small-group discussions might lead to creative solutions to social problems, so he assembled about fifty educators and divided them into small groups. To assess the groups’ success, Lewin asked several of his graduate students to observe the groups during the day and then, in the evening, to interpret and discuss the dynamics occurring in each one. One evening a few of the educators asked if they could sit in and listen to the graduate students’ observations. One of the educators, upon hearing an observer’s interpretation that she had been angry during a discussion that morning with one of her colleagues, protested vigorously. She hadn’t been angry at all, she said, merely energized by the topic. The observer held his ground—“You sure looked angry to me!”—and the ensuing discussion was lively and illuminating. The next night all fifty of the educators showed up and gleefully joined the discussion, frequently disagreeing with the interpretations of the trained observers.
Lewin was quick to grasp the significance of this event. A group that forms to discuss how to solve a problem can benefit enormously by taking time out to discuss its own feelings and intentions, and the members do not need training in group dynamics to do this. Indeed, the participants themselves are much better observers of their own process because each is privy to his or her own intentions. This information is not easily available to outside observers, no matter how astute and well trained they are. Over time, what evolved was the agenda-less group—a group that met with no formal plan and no problems to discuss other than its own dynamics, with the goal of helping members communicate with each other more effectively and learn how they are perceived by others. The T-group quickly became the vanguard of the human potential movement.
Lewin thus produced not only many of the nation’s most eminent experimental social psychologists but also the first generation of T-group leaders. Over the years the two camps parted company. When, as a graduate student, I had asked Leon for his opinion of T-groups, he greeted my question with a sneer. He was contemptuous of them because he saw them as having dubious value and little or nothing to do with social psychology. When I expressed my own skepticism about T-groups to Michael Kahn, he said, “Hey, you’re a scientist. Why not find out for yourself? I’m about to start a T-group in Austin. Join us. Afterward you can tell me what’s wrong with it.” It was an invitation I couldn’t refuse. I went, I participated, I loved it. I decided to learn more, and the place to learn more was the National Training Laboratory founded by Lewin’s students in Bethel, Maine. In 1967 I spent a summer there as a participant, the following summer as an intern, and one summer later I was a leader.
But Festinger’s skepticism was not entirely unfounded. During the 1960s and 1970s encounter groups (as they were commonly called on the West Coast) attracted a lot of thrill-seeking participants and plenty of goofy practitioners. Many groups were based on dubious theorizing and bad psychology, led by self-appointed tin-pot gurus. Some of their methods were foolish, others coercive. But at their best, when conducted by competent leaders well trained in group dynamics, T-groups provided participants with illuminating exercises and insights that they could take away with them. These skills made them better friends to their friends, better teachers to their students, better bosses to their employees, better parents to their children, better spouses.
What I loved most about the T-group was its emphasis on straight talk: helping members identify the difference between their feelings and their opinions and judgments of others and to be clear in their expression of those feelings rather than disguising them as insults, blame, or false flattery. There was no agenda; there was no focus on past experiences or childhood traumas. The emphasis was on the “here and now.” In one T-group I led, a middle-aged man I’ll call Tim confronted a slightly younger man, whom I’ll call Peter, and said, “I’ve been listening to you and watching you for three days, and I think you’re a phony.”
What’s wrong with that observation? Isn’t Tim simply stating his honest feeling about Peter? Well, no. The key to our understanding of this encounter rests on the term “feeling”; Tim was not expressing a feeling, he was expressing a judgment. By “feelings” I do not mean a hunch or hypothesis, as in “I feel it’s going to rain today”; I mean anger, joy, sadness, happiness, annoyance, fear, discomfort, warmth, hurt, envy, excitement, and the like. So I asked Tim what his feelings were about Peter.
“Well, I feel that Peter is a phony,” he said.
“And what does that do to you?”
“It annoys the hell out of me.”
Now another member of the group intervened and asked, “What kinds of things has Peter done that annoy you?” After some probing by the group, Tim admitted he got annoyed whenever Peter showed affection to any of the women in the group. On further probing it turned out Tim was “annoyed” by Peter’s attractiveness to women. Eventually, Tim owned up to feelings of envy: Tim wished he had Peter’s charm and popularity with women. But, as many people do, Tim had initially masked this feeling of envy, transforming it in his mind into disdain. He was protecting his ego; Tim had learned over the years that if he admitted to feeling envious of another man, it would have made him vulnerable and appear weak. By expressing disdain, however, Tim put himself one up. Although his behavior was successful in protecting his ego, it blocked his ability to understand his authentic feelings and their cause. And it was blocking his ability to communicate directly and effectively.
In this society most of us glide through life protecting ourselves; in effect, each of us wears a suit of behavioral armor, to minimize how much other people can hurt us. But sometimes we become so successful at hiding our true feelings from others that we hide our feelings from ourselves as well. The group leader makes it possible for members to remove that armor by creating a climate of safety. Group members feel free to express their vulnerabilities without fear of being attacked or mocked.
But what if Tim hates Peter; should he express his hatred? What if Tim believes that Peter is an evil person; should he express that belief?
TIM: “I hate you, Peter; you are evil.” PETER: “No, I’m not.” TIM: “Well, that is the way I see it. I’m just giving you feedback like we’re supposed to do in here.” PETER: “That’s your problem—besides, you’re not so great yourself.”By calling Peter names, Tim sets up the situation in a way that invites Peter to defend himself and to counterattack rather than to listen. But if Tim were to lead with his feelings (“I am hurt and angry”), he would be inviting Peter into a discussion about what he (Peter) might have done to hurt and anger Tim. Speaking straight about feelings, and separating them from judgments, is effective for two reasons. First, a person’s opinions and judgments about another person are purely conjecture. Tim’s opinions about Peter’s being a phony and an evil person may reflect reality, or just as likely, they may not. They are merely Tim’s theories about Peter. Only Peter knows for sure whether he’s being a phony; Tim is guessing. But Tim’s statement that he is feeling envious or angry is an absolute fact. Tim is not guessing about his feelings; he knows them. Indeed, he is the only person in the world who knows them for sure. Peter may or may not care about Tim’s theories or judgments, but if he wants to have a friendship with Tim, he is probably interested in knowing Tim’s true feelings and what role he (Peter) plays in triggering them. Second, when Tim states an opinion or a judgment about Peter, he is saying something about Peter only, but when he states a feeling evoked by Peter’s behavior, he is revealing something about himself as well. Thus, the statement of feeling is a gift of sorts. Metaphorically, it is Tim opening the door to his home and letting Peter in. When Tim states a judgment about Peter, however, he is storming Peter’s barricades and making attributions about Peter’s motives or personality. Peter has good reason to resist this, because Tim has no right to be in his home without an invitation. We all enjoy receiving positive feedback. One of the great insights of T-groups is they teach participants the benefits of negative feedback as well—to see such feedback as valuable information rather than as an attack on the ego. For example, what can Tim and Peter do with the information their exchange in the group has given them? The leader will prod other members of the group to state whether they share Tim’s discomfort with Peter’s behavior. If Tim learns that he is alone in his reaction—“You mean I’m the only one who is feeling envious and hostile about this guy?”—he realizes that he has a problem with men whom women find attractive. But if other men in the group agree with Tim, then Peter has valuable information: There is something about his behavior with women that provokes envy and hostility. Now it is Peter who needs to make a decision about how to behave outside the group: whether to continue as he always has and let other men continue to be envious and perhaps express their envy in hostile ways; or modify his behavior to cause other people (and ultimately himself) less difficulty. The decision is his. Should he decide that his “enviable” behavior is too important to give up, he has still learned the impact it has on other men. In the future he will not be surprised by their responses and less likely to overreact to them. T-groups taught me many lessons that I took into my personal and family life and carried with me ever after. For one, my T-group experience made me finally ready to “hear” the wise words Abe Maslow had offered me so many years earlier, when he told me that my sarcastic qualities and sharp edge, while not “venomous,” were keeping people at arm’s length. At the time, I felt I needed that sharp edge for self-protection and to disguise the pain of shyness. In T-groups, some fifteen years later, I realized I was ready to give it up, and I did . . . most of the time. Needless to say, I did not become a saint. I still enjoy using sarcasm and locker-room humor on occasion, but I do it for fun or to defuse a tense situation. I try to use my “sharp-edged humor” judiciously and with mindful awareness of its possible effects on others. At home the lessons of T-groups helped me become better at communicating my feelings and solving problems. In the early years of our marriage, Vera let me know she could not abide my raising my voice when angry, much less my storming out of the house. Not having a good alternative to that way of expressing anger, I tried to stifle it. In the T-group I learned to talk about feelings of anger in a calm but forceful tone and in a nonblaming, nonhostile manner, in a way that Vera could hear without getting upset. When couples who have been married many years are asked “What is the secret? How do you do it?” they often reply with some banality, such as “We never went to bed mad.” That’s not terrible advice, but it is unrealistic, to say the least. After fifty-five years of marriage, I can attest to the fact that Vera and I went to bed mad on occasion, but we learned never to let a quarrel stew for very long without resolution—talking about what caused it and how to avert it in the future. Our experience in T-groups taught us the benefits not only of expressing anger constructively but also of expressing warmth and affection when we felt it, with a look, a word, or a touch. It taught us how to listen to what the other person was really saying and feeling and to take responsibility for our own words and deeds. Early in our marriage Vera had decided not to pursue a career because she wanted to be a full-time wife and mother, and, indeed, raising four children with the skill and attention she put into it was a full-time endeavor. But in the mid-1960s, with the women’s movement gaining momentum and The Feminine Mystique on people’s minds, she often felt uncomfortable when, at dinner parties or meetings, people would ask her what she did. When she answered that she was a mother and housewife (that was before “homemaker” entered the lexicon), they seemed to lose interest in her, as if being a stay-at-home mom automatically meant that she had nothing interesting to say. Their disdain infuriated me. To anyone who knew Vera, she had plenty to say. But when she decided to become a T-group leader, she was able to expand her considerable talents and intelligence into a new domain. At first we led groups together, which was enormous fun. She was skillful; her presence injected into the group that quality of serenity I had always admired in her. She created an aura that allowed members of the group to feel perfectly secure, even when they were in the throes of anxiety, despair, and other powerful emotions. Later, she went on to lead groups on her own, an experience that put to rest any niggling feelings she had about being “just a mother.” Vera and I even brought T-groups into our family. Every Friday evening, after dinner, we’d spend an hour going over the events of the week. We encouraged the children to bring up any unfinished business, unresolved conflicts, or unhappy feelings (and even happy feelings!) about one another or with us. They loved having this chance to speak up, and we loved discovering some of the things that had been going on behind our backs. Misunderstandings were aired and potential feuds averted. Once eight-year-old Josh said to twelve-year-old Julie that something she’d said had hurt his feelings, and she responded, “Oh, Josh, don’t be silly. I didn’t mean anything by it.” Vera said gently, “Julie, take Josh seriously. Listen to what he is telling you. The fact that you didn’t intend to hurt him doesn’t mean he wasn’t hurt.” What could have been a rift between the two siblings, or Josh’s withdrawal into sulking, ended in greater understanding and, as it did this time, a hug. I want to say a word about hugs. T-groups are frequently caricatured as places where participants believe that hugging is a panacea for whatever ails them and where, as a consequence, people run around dispensing insincere hugs at the drop of a hat. The caricature has some merit. Occasionally, a participant would turn to me and announce that he or she “needed a hug.” As leader, my usual response was to gently remind the person that I was not a vending machine and did not see the value of dispensing hugs as if they were candy bars. I would then try to help the person discover what it was that he or she was feeling that might be making them insecure or anxious, and what they wanted to do about it. Yet the greatest lesson I drew from T-groups was how to become the kind of affectionate, expressive man that my own father never was. “My father never hugged me” is a common lament in our culture nowadays, one that some men use to justify their coldness toward their own children. For me, the fact that my father was inept at expressing affection physically served to strengthen my resolve to be a different kind of father—to give my children and wife what he could not give to his. But I had a lot to learn. When hugging and touching are appropriate, for me there is no better way to convey affection, offer comfort, provide solace. The recent research on the physiological benefits of touch—it lowers blood pressure, reduces pain, and soothes tensions—comes as no surprise to me. As social creatures we crave touch; we need touch. I will remember all my life how deeply moved I felt when my philosophy professor, Aron Gurwitsch, put his hand on my head and said, “Good boy,” or when Leon Festinger squeezed my shoulder and announced that my term paper was worth criticizing. These warm gestures, the first from adult men I admired, helped me realize that real men do touch, and my work in T-groups showed me further its emotional benefits. I felt freed at last from my father’s physical coldness. Since the time my kids were infants to the present day, I love hugging them. And when I watch them unself-consciously showing their affection to Vera and me, to their own kids, to their nieces and nephews, and to their friends, I feel that Vera and I have given them the best of lessons. The family T-groups also helped teach the kids the value of straight talk. Late one night, as we were about to go to bed, Hal and Neal, then ages sixteen and fifteen, approached us with an odd request. They asked permission to sneak out of the house and go roaming with their friends. “What’s roaming?” we asked. “Well,” said Hal, “when their parents go to bed, some friends of ours sneak out of the house, and just wander around the city—from about midnight to three o’clock. We were going to sneak out tonight to meet up with them, but then we worried that you might wake up in the middle of the night, see that we were gone, and get scared.” I smiled. “So you are asking our permission to sneak out unnoticed?” “I know it sounds stupid,” Neal said, “but that’s about it.” “Your friends don’t do anything illegal like vandalism or anything, do they?” “No, I promise,” said Hal. Vera and I looked at each other and gave them the okay. The next morning they told us what had happened. At about two thirty, while on their way home, they were stopped by a patrol car. “Do your parents know you’re out?” the cop had asked them. When they said yes, naturally he didn’t believe them, so he drove them home and walked them to our front door, fully expecting them to be shaking in fear of our reaction. But Hal and Neal were so calm that he asked them again, “Are you sure your parents know you are out?” He guessed they were telling the truth and walked away, probably thinking that we were terrible parents. Hal and Neal never had the desire to go roaming again. “It just isn’t as much fun as we thought it might be,” they said. As for me, I was leading something of a double life. During the week I would be conducting rigorous laboratory experiments at the university; on weekends Vera and I would lead intensive T-groups in the community. All kinds of people attended—ministers, doctors, homemakers, lawyers, contractors, professors, and business-people. My scientific colleagues thought I had lost my mind, and possibly my brain, and could not understand why I was wasting my time leading encounter groups. (They even invited me to give a keynote lecture at a scientific convention with the : “Whatever Became of Elliot Aronson?”) My newfound humanist colleagues, however, could not believe that I was wasting my time conducting sterile laboratory experiments. I myself saw no disconnect. In the course of leading T-groups I was learning about attraction, competition, social influence, and effective communication—central themes in social psychology, after all. Conversely, my ability to bring my training as an experimental social psychologist into the T-group enhanced my ability, I felt, to cut through bullshit to get to the core of an issue and to expose some of the psychological processes that were facilitating or impeding group discussion. At the invitation of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, I began traveling all over Texas, to large cities and small rural towns, with two of my T-group trainees, Jev Sikes and Matt Snapp, leading workshops for teachers. These workshops were the essence of T-groups, focusing on how to communicate effectively to students and how to listen actively to their anxieties and difficulties. The three of us were quite a culture shock for most of these teachers. They would come to the first session, neatly and professionally dressed, and meet us—bearded, casual, informal, looking like those dreaded California hippies. One teacher later told us that when we walked into the lobby of the hotel where the session was to be held, she said to her friend, “Oh, my God, I hope those three guys aren’t going to be in our group.” Ten minutes later she found to her dismay that “those three guys” were the leaders. Yet the teachers listened, participated, and learned. Two years later the TCTA singled out our work for its annual award, a recognition that was particularly gratifying to me. It meant that the teachers in this socially conservative state had come to appreciate the value of humanistic psychology and its promotion of what almost all of them had previously regarded as a “touchy-feely,” even subversive, approach to public education.
Despite our deep involvement in community and political activities, Vera and I did not succeed in becoming authentic Texans. Although we liked Austin and the university, we never quite believed that this was the place where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. So when Hal entered his senior year in high school and began applying to colleges, Vera and I realized that it was time to make a conscious decision. We had always been a close-knit family, and soon our kids would be scattering. Where could we find a place to live that would be so attractive that when our kids were grown, they would like to settle nearby? The short answer was “not Texas.”
The long answer was more complicated. Ideally, we wanted to move to an attractive city, near an ocean, with a temperate climate. That meant the Pacific Coast. One of the universities that I found particularly appealing was the University of California at Santa Cruz, which, though only ten years old, had already achieved a reputation for excellence. Hal liked the sound of it, too; he applied and was accepted. UCSC had been founded on an innovative approach to undergraduate education. It was divided into eight separate colleges, each college contained a few faculty members from each of the academic departments, and each college had a specific theme. Michael Kahn had moved to UCSC a few years earlier, where he joined the faculty of Kresge College as it was about to open its doors. Kresge’s theme was creating a “living learning” community, where students would blend their academic learning with experiential learning in T-groups. It was a natural for Michael, and for me.
In 1974 the founding chancellor of UCSC, Dean McHenry, offered me the position of professor of psychology and provost (administrative head) of Kresge College. The entire Psychology Department, he said, was very enthusiastic about the possibility of my joining them. It was a great offer, except that I did not want to be an administrator. While I was agonizing over the decision, McHenry called me back. “I feel compelled to tell you,” he said, “that several of the women on the Kresge faculty are demanding that we hire a woman as provost. Although they have nothing against you personally, they see this as their opportunity to have the first woman provost, and there are already two good candidates on the short list. But because the great majority of the Kresge faculty voted for you, the job is yours if you want it.” For me, that tipped the balance, and I declined the offer. As appealing as Kresge looked, I thought the women had a reasonable demand, and, besides, I had no desire to begin my career at UCSC by causing a controversy. Two weeks later McHenry phoned to say that they had appointed a woman as provost, and would I entertain an offer to join the Kresge faculty solely as a professor of psychology? I would and I did.
As an added bonus, the city of Santa Cruz had a thriving boardwalk with a rare bona fide wooden roller coaster, very much like the one I grew up with in Revere. My life was coming around full circle.
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