In 1945, Festinger moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to join Kurt Lewins Research Center for Group Dynamics as an assistant professor. He then entered the University of Iowa, where he studied with the German-born social psychologist Kurt Lewin and obtained a Ph.D. in 1942. So how did Festinger test this out? Create your account. Inconsistency in cognition: Cognitive dissonance. Behaviorists focused only on the observable, i.e., behavior and external rewards, with no reference to cognitive or emotional processes.Zukier, 1989, pp. This change is usually in the direction of greater uniformity. In Extending Psychological Frontiers: Selected Works of Leon Festinger, edited by Stanley Schachter and Michael Gazzaniga. Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959 With Festingers theories and the research that they generated, "the monolithic grip that reinforcement theory had held on social psychology was effectively and permanently broken. The methodology of studying rumor transmission. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Renowned social psychologist, Leon Festinger, and his research team (1954) became interested in this case and decided to infiltrate and study the group to see ." A theory of social comparison processes. In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festingers 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. Coren, S., & Festinger, L. (1967). 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. For example, liking was simply a function of reward according to behaviorism, so greater reward would produce greater liking; Festinger and Carlsmiths experiment clearly demonstrated greater liking with lower reward, a result that required the acknowledgement of cognitive processes. WebLeon Festinger was an American social psychologist. As a result, he did not take a single social psychology course and chose instead to focus on Lewins earlier work. She has also worked as an ocean and Earth science educator. From 1963 to 1979 he studied human visual perception, making unique contributions to the research literature. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Retrieved April 27, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/festinger-leon. Dissonance, Hypocrisy, and the Self-Concept. In Cognitive Dissonance, edited by Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills, 103126.