1919-1989
Leon Festinger was a prominent American social psychologist. His work in social psychology focused on the impact of the social environment on the formation and change of attitudes, on processes of social comparison by which individuals evaluate their attitudes and abilities, and on the manner in which cognitive inconsistencies cause changes in attitudes and behaviors. He is best known for his work A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), which inspired a great deal of creative research and caused the term cognitive dissonance to become a part of public discourse.
Festinger was born on May 8, 1919, in Brooklyn, New York, and died on February 11, 1989. In 1939 he earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology at the City College of New York, where he became attracted to the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). Festinger went to the University of Iowa to work with Lewin, and earned his PhD there in 1942. In 1945 Festinger joined Lewin in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Lewin died unexpectedly in 1947, Festinger became director of the center and focused his attention fully on social psychology.
Festinger’s main contributions to social psychology occurred over the next twenty years. There are three landmark publications, each of which inspired research by many investigators. The first was "Informal Social Communication," published in Psychological Review in 1950. This article showed how pressures toward uniformity of opinion in small, informal groups could lead to attitude change within the group. The second article, "A Theory of Social Comparison Processes," was published in Human Relations in 1954. In this publication, Festinger used a set of formal propositions to explain the antecedent conditions and the consequences of comparing one’s own attitudes and abilities to those of others. In so doing, he showed how the pressures to uniformity, hypothesized in the earlier article, arose from the process of social comparison.
In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger’s third landmark publication, he hypothesized that any two bits of knowledge held by an individual could have three relationships to one another: they could be irrelevant to one another, consonant if one follows from the other, or dissonant if the obverse of one follows from the other. Festinger hypothesized that cognitive dissonance is an aversive state and that an individual would be motivated to reduce dissonance. Dissonance could be reduced by changing attitudes, altering perceptions and evaluations, or changing one’s own behavior. Because the theory was stated in such simple, general terms, it could be applied to a wide variety of situations. Festinger and his students were creative in finding applications for the theory and in devising incisive experiments to test their predictions. A number of these experiments are reported in Festinger’s second book on dissonance theory, Conflict, Decisions, and Dissonance (1964).
Festinger’s work on dissonance theory was the target of a number of critiques in the early 1960s. Critics attacked the structure of the theory as being too broad and not clearly defining the conditions under which dissonance would occur, as well as the complex experimental protocols employed by dissonance theory researchers. Over the ensuing decade, research replicating and extending earlier findings, as well as conceptual clarifications, notably by Elliot Aronson, effectively rebutted these critiques. As dissonance theory gained scientific acceptance, the term cognitive dissonance came to be used by columnists and other commentators to describe the psychological discomfort that follows the arrival of unwanted or unexpected information or events. This lay use of the term became popular, even though the conditions necessary for the occurrence of the state defined in the theory may not have been met in the situation to which the term was applied.
Subsequently, Festinger’s research interests became focused on different issues. From 1963 to 1979 he studied human visual perception, making unique contributions to the research literature. He then turned his attention to early human history, producing a book, The Human Legacy (1983), in which he analyzed human problem solving and adaptation.
Leon Festinger left a legacy of enduring theoretical formulations, a distinctive style of experimentation in social psychology, and a large number of former students who have forged their own distinguished careers in social psychology.
