1. Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory.
22 Facts About Leon Festinger
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Leon Festinger is known in social network theory for the proximity effect.
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Leon Festinger studied psychology under Kurt Lewin, an important figure in modern social psychology, at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1941; however, he did not develop an interest in social psychology until after joining the faculty at Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945.
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Skinner, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Bandura, Leon Festinger was the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Leon Festinger proceeded to study under Kurt Lewin at the University of Iowa, where Festinger received his MA in 1940 and PhD in 1942 in the field of child behavior.
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However, Leon Festinger continued to pursue his original interests, studying level of aspiration, working on statistics, developing a quantitative model of decision making, and even publishing a laboratory study on rats.
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In 1943, Leon Festinger married Mary Oliver Ballou, a pianist, with whom he had three children, Catherine, Richard, and Kurt.
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In 1945, Leon Festinger joined Lewin's newly formed Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor.
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Yet, this endeavor "started as almost an accident" while Leon Festinger was conducting a study on the impact of architectural and ecological factors on student housing satisfaction for the university.
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Leon Festinger then moved to the University of Minnesota in 1951, and then on to Stanford University in 1955.
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Leon Festinger received considerable recognition during this time for his work, both from within the field, being awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1959, and outside of the field, being named as one of America's ten most promising scientists by Fortune magazine shortly after publishing social comparison theory.
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In 1968, Leon Festinger returned to his native New York City, continuing his perception research at The New School, then known as the New School for Social Research.
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Leon Festinger subsequently began exploring prehistoric archaeological data, meeting with Stephen Jay Gould to discuss ideas and visiting archaeological sites to investigate primitive toolmaking firsthand.
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Leon Festinger described the goal of his new research interests as "see[ing] what can be inferred from different vantage points, from different data realms, about the nature, the characteristics, of this species we call human," and felt bemused when fellow psychologists asked him how his new research interests were related to psychology.
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However, Leon Festinger was diagnosed with cancer before he was able to publish this material.
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Leon Festinger decided not to pursue treatment, and died on February 11,1989.
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Leon Festinger argued that people depend on social reality to determine the subjective validity of their attitudes and opinions, and that they look to their reference group to establish social reality; an opinion or attitude is therefore valid to the extent that it is similar to that of the reference group.
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Leon Festinger further argued that pressures to communicate arise when discrepancies in opinions or attitudes exist among members of a group, and laid out a series of hypotheses regarding determinants of when group members communicate, with whom they communicate, and how recipients of communication react, citing existing experimental evidence to support his arguments.
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Leon Festinger labeled communications arising from such pressures toward uniformity as "instrumental communication" in that the communication is not an end in itself but a means to reduce discrepancies between the communicator and others in the group.
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Leon Festinger stated his main set of hypotheses as follows:.
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Leon Festinger described the basic hypotheses of cognitive dissonance as follows:.
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Yet it seems that Leon Festinger was wary about burdensome demands for greater empirical precision.