Elliot Aronson - The Social Animal

Books by Elliot Aronson

Handbook of Social Psychology (with G. Lindzey), 2nd ed., 19681969

Theories of Cognitive Consistency (with R. Abelson et al.), 1968

Voices of Modern Psychology, 1969

The Social Animal, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2011, 2018

Readings About The Social Animal, 2019, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2011

Social Psychology (with R. Helmreich), 1973

Research Methods in Social Psychology (with M. Carlsmith & Ellsworth), 1976

The Jigsaw Classroom, 1978

Burnout: From Tedium to Personal Growth (with A. Pines & D. Kafry), 1981

Energy Use: The Human Dimension (with P. C. Stern), 1984

The Handbook of Social Psychology (with G. Lindzey), 3rd ed., 1985

Career Burnout (with A. Pines), 1988

Methods of Research in Social Psychology (with Ellsworth, M. Carlsmith, & Gonzales), 1990

Age of Propaganda (with A. R. Pratkanis), 1992, 2000

Social Psychology: Volumes 1, 2, & 3 (with A. R. Pratkanis), 1992

Social Psychology: The Heart and the Mind (with T. Wilson & R. Akert), 1994

Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine, 2000

Social Psychology: An Introduction (with T. Wilson, R. Akert, & S. Sommers), 2002, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016

The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with Ruth Aronson), 2006

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) (with Carol Tavris), 2007, Rev. ed., 2015

Not By Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist, 2010

Books by Joshua Aronson

Improving Academic Achievement, 2002

The Scientist and The Humanist (with M. H. Gonzales and C. Tavris) 2010

Twelfth Edition

The Social Animal

Elliot Aronson

University of California, Santa Cruz

with Joshua Aronson

New York University

Vice President, Social Sciences and High School: Charles Linsmeier

Director of Content and Assessment, Social Sciences: Shani Fisher

Executive Program Manager: Christine Cardone

Assistant Editor: Melissa Rostek

Executive Marketing Manager: Katherine Nurre

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Director of Media Editorial, Social Sciences: Noel Hohnstine

Assistant Media Editor: Nik Toner

Director, Content Management Enhancement: Tracey Kuehn

Managing Editor: Lisa Kinne

Senior Content Project Manager: Vivien Weiss

Project Manager: Priyanka Sharma, Lumina Datamatics, Inc.

Media Producer: Eve Conte

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Photo Editor: Sheena Goldstein

Director of Design, Content Management: Diana Blume

Cover and Text Design: Victoria Tomaselli

Composition: Lumina Datamatics, Inc.

Cover Drawing: Tom Durfee

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962739

ISBN-13: 978-1-4641-7871-9 (EPUB)

2018, 2012, 2008, 2004 Worth Publishers

All rights reserved.

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The Story of This Book

Saul Steinberg, Untitled drawing , ink on paper.

Originally published in The New Yorker , May 29, 1965.

In 1970, when I was a relatively young professor at the University of Texas, I received an offer I couldnt refuse. I was invited to spend the year in a beautiful location, while being awarded my full academic salary and doing absolutely nothingnot a bad deal!

The location was a rustic hilltop on the edge of the Stanford University campus, a short drive from San Francisco, my favorite city in the world. The institution on the gorgeous hill is a think tank called the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In addition to a years salary, the good folks at the Center for Advanced Study provided me with an office, all the secretarial help I might need, access to a very good library, free lunch, and the opportunity to schmooze with a couple of dozen distinguished scholars, if I chose to or notin case I preferred to hang out in the theater district of San Francisco or go skiing in the High Sierras. There were no strings attached.

So there I was, with a whole year in which to do anything my heart desired, and what did I do? I chose to barricade myself in my office on the hill and write this book. How come? If theres a single reason, its that, a few months earlier, I heard myself tell 600 students in my introductory social psychology class that social psychology is a young scienceand, in retrospect, that semi-apology made me feel like a coward.

Let me explain: We social psychologists are fond of saying that social psychology is a young scienceand, relative to most scientific disciplines (e.g., biology, astronomy), that is an accurate statement. Of course, astute observers have been making interesting pronouncements and proposing exciting hypotheses about social phenomena at least since the time of Aristotle, but these pronouncements and hypotheses were not seriously tested until well into the twentieth century. The first systematic social psychological experiment was conducted by Norman Triplett in 1898 (he measured the effect of competition on performance), but it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that experimental social psychology really took off, primarily under the inspiration of Kurt Lewin and his talented students.

In a deeper sense, however, for me to have stated that social psychology is a young science was something of a cop-outa way of pleading with my students not to expect too much from us. Specifically, it was my way of dodging the responsibility for, and avoiding the risks inherent in, applying our findings to the problems of the world we live in. In this sense, stating that social psychology is a young science was akin to confessing that we might not be ready to say anything important, useful, or relevant to the lives of my students.

But after reflecting on that statement for a while, I came to realize that it was not only cowardly, but it was also misleading; in fact, I didnt really believe that social psychology was irrelevant to our lives. I didnt believe it in 1970, and I certainly dont believe it now. So, when I was handed that wonderful opportunity to take time off, I was determined to set the record straight. The purpose of this book was and still is to spell out the relevance that social psychological research might have for helping us understand and perhaps begin to solve some of the most important problems besetting contemporary society.

Most of the data discussed in this volume are based on experiments; most of the illustrations and examples, however, are derived from current social problemsincluding prejudice, propaganda, war, alienation, aggression, unrest, and political upheaval. This duality reflects two of my own biasesbiases that I cherish. The first is that the experimental method is the best way to understand a complex phenomenon. It is a truism of science that the only way to really know the world is to reconstruct it. That is, to truly understand what causes what, we must do more than simply observe; rather, we must be responsible for producing the first what so that we can be sure that it really caused the second what. My second bias is that the only way to be certain that the causal relations uncovered in experiments are valid is to bring them out of the laboratory and into the real world. Thus, as a scientist, I like to work in a laboratory; as a citizen, however, I like to have windows through which I can look out upon the world. Windows, of course, work in both directions; we often derive hypotheses from everyday life. We can best test these hypotheses under the sterile conditions of the laboratory. At the same time, in order to keep our ideas from becoming sterile, we must take our laboratory findings back out through the window to see if they hold up in the real world.