Aronson - Not by chance alone: my life as a social psychologist

Table of Contents

An illuminating account of how a great thinker with insatiable curiosity overcame a difficult childhood through his love of social science.

Elliot Aronson is our modern day Horatio Alger as revealed in this charmingly inviting memoir by one of psychologys premier contributors. This master storyteller weaves his personal narrative in and around the events and people that marked his life path that was destined for greatness, without help from the vicissitudes of chance.

This is more than a delightfully written, warm, and wise autobiography by one of our greatest social scientists; it is also an unusually candid and thoughtful look at the way important new insights are born, mature, and come to be employed. Aronsons account of his life-long relationship with Leon Festinger, first as student and collaborator and then as life-long friend, is a must read for anyone who wants to get to the heart of social psychology.

Absolutely wonderful. Elliot Aronson has long shown that he can write engagingly for a wide audience, and in Not by Chance Alone he has outdone himself. Not only was I captivated by Aronsons truly inspirational life story, but I also learned so much about the people, theories, and experiments that helped define the field of social psychology.

Arguably, Elliot Aronson is first and foremost a very gifted teacher. The clarity he brings to that enterprise is evident in his success as a distinguished researcher and as a writer (witness the enormous popularity of his engaging treatise on social psychology, The Social Animal ). And it is well manifested in this fascinating life story of a professors quest to improve the human condition by understanding the social forces that so powerfully influence our lives. For those interested in an inside look at the joys and frustrations of an intellectual life, this book is a wonderful read.

Aronsons candid autobiography is an instructive and enjoyable read. In addition, the volume offers an informed perspective on the sweeping development of social psychology as a discipline over the past six decades.

Elliot Aronsons done it againrevealed deep human insights from a deeply human story.

Social Psychology (with Tim Wilson and Robin Akert)

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (with Carol Tavris)

Age of Propaganda (with Anthony Pratkanis)

The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with Ruth Aronson)

The Handbook of Social Psychology (with Gardner Lindzey)

The Jigsaw Classroom (with Shelley Patnoe)

Methods of Research in Social Psychology (with Phoebe C. Ellsworth, J. Merrill Carlsmith, and Marti Hope Gonzales)

TO MY MOST
IMPORTANT
MENTORS:

HENRY JAMES

In 1954, in my senior year at Brandeis University, I heard an invited lecture by the distinguished nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard reminisced about how in the 1930s, when he was teaching at the University of Berlin, he gradually realized that Hitlers Germany was no place for a Jew. One day he packed a small valise, hopped on a train, and fled the country. The train was practically empty. The next day the train was jam-packed, and it was stopped at the border and forced to turn back. Szilards moral of the story was You dont have to be much smarter than the average persononly a little bit smarter. In this instance, only one day smarter.

Well, maybe. My guess is that you also have to be incredibly lucky. As I reflect on my life, Szilards story comes to mind because, as a psychologist, I am well aware that memory is an imperfect historian, and it tends to be imperfect in a self-serving direction. My aim is to be truthful, but what is the truth?

As I see it, there are essentially two ways to write an autobiography. One is to take credit for every good outcome: I was smart enough to go to this prestigious university and choose to marry that wonderful woman and study with this professor and go to that leading graduate school so that I could apprentice myself to that prominent scholar, and then I wisely accepted that perfect job. The other way is to attribute everything to the vicissitudes of chance: My God, I have been incredibly lucky. At every step of the way I simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. But both accounts are true. In my own case, most of the good things that happened to me were the result of being in the right place at the right timein my career, in my choice of a life partner, and in the friendships and professional relationships I formedand I also was adept at making pretty good use of the opportunities that presented themselves to me.

In my life the professional and the personal have been inextricably intertwined. The Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy witch hunts, the civil rights movement, the years of sexual liberation and the clarion call to make love, not war, womens liberation, the extremes of political correctness on the Right and the Leftall of these events left a deep impression on me, though sometimes I found myself out of step with the times. I loved the human potential movement and its efforts to break down barriers between people in the 1960s and 1970s, but that philosophy crashed and burned during the respect my boundaries 1980s. My active, highly visible commitment to civil rights and freedom of speech got me death threats and charges of being a nigger lover in Austin, Texas, where I was instrumental in bringing about a fair-housing ordinance. That same commitment also brought me protests and charges of being a racist in Santa Cruz, California, where I protected the right of Arthur Jensen to present his justifiably unpopular argument that racial differences in IQs are innate.

Social psychology, a field that examines how circumstances, generations, cultures, ideas, and guiding principles get inside individuals and shape their actions, has infused my life. It has provided me with a powerful lens through which I have been able to view the events around me and understand myself, my family, and my times. How, I wondered, does any man become a good father if his own father was absent, physically or psychologically? Traditionally, psychology has emphasized the power of genetics or of early childhood experiencesyou will become your father whether you want to or not. In contrast, social psychology attempts to understand the power of your generations influence, your own experiences, and how you interpret them. When I was fourteen, I was a pretty good baseball player and a member of a championship team. Yet although we played some of our games on weekends close to home, my father never came to see me play. He loved baseball, but not enough to come to one of our games. It didnt bother me at the time, because, in those days, hardly