Leon Festinger

• 1. Introduction

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  Leon Festinger spent months living a lie among people who believed the world would end on the 21st of December 1954. A suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin had told them she was receiving messages from beings called the Guardians, on a planet called Clarion. A flood would rise from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Medico, drowning everyone. Festinger, an American social psychologist, joined this small apocalyptic group with several assistants and watched. He wanted to know what would happen to true believers when the prophecy failed. The answer, when doomsday came and went, surprised even him. This was the same man who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. He was born on the 8th of May 1919 and died on the 11th of February 1989. Following B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Bandura, he ranked as the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century. So why did a researcher this influential walk away from social psychology entirely? Why did he end his career studying eye movements, ancient toolmaking, and the Byzantine Empire? And how did a study about student housing accidentally reshape an entire science?

• 2. The Reluctant Recruit

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  By his own admission, Festinger arrived at the University of Iowa with no interest at all in social psychology. He came to study under Kurt Lewin, an important figure in modern social psychology, but Festinger was drawn to Lewin's earlier work on tension systems. Lewin's focus had already shifted by the time Festinger appeared. He did not take a single course in social psychology during his entire time there. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Festinger was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alex Festinger and Sara Solomon Festinger. His father, an embroidery manufacturer, had "left Russia a radical and atheist and remained faithful to these views throughout his life." Festinger himself considered himself a freethinker and an atheist. He attended Boys' High School in Brooklyn and earned his BS in psychology from the City College of New York in 1939. At Iowa he pursued his own path, studying level of aspiration, working on statistics, and building a quantitative model of decision making. He even published a laboratory study on rats. He received his MA in 1940 and his PhD in 1942, both in the field of child behavior. Festinger explained his early indifference plainly. "The looser methodology of the social psychology studies, and the vagueness of relation of the data to Lewinian concepts and theories, all seemed unappealing to me in my youthful penchant for rigor." The conversion would come later, and it would come almost by accident.

• 3. Becoming A Social Psychologist

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  In 1945 Festinger joined Lewin's newly formed Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. As he put it, he "became, by fiat, a social psychologist, and immersed myself in the field with all its difficulties, vaguenesses, and challenges." Stanley Schachter, his student and research assistant at the time, recalled the period with awe. "I was lucky enough to work with Festinger at this time, and I think of it as one of the high points of my scientific life." The turning point in Festinger's research "started as almost an accident," while he was studying how architectural and ecological factors affected student housing satisfaction. Alongside the housing findings, he and his collaborators noticed something unexpected. The degree of friendship within a group of residents correlated with the similarity of opinions within that group. That observation raised questions about communication and the development of group standards. His seminal 1950 paper on informal social communication cites the housing study multiple times. After Lewin's death in 1947, Festinger moved with the research center to the University of Michigan in 1948. He went on to the University of Minnesota in 1951, and then to Stanford University in 1955, carrying his new questions with him.

• 4. Neighbors And The Stairway

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  Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back studied how college students living in married student housing at MIT chose their friends. Conventional wisdom assumed shared tastes or beliefs drove friendship. The team showed instead that propinquity, the physical proximity between where students lived, predicted who befriended whom. People simply tend to befriend their neighbors. Functional distance mattered too, and the example became famous. In a two-storey apartment building, a person living on the lower floor next to a stairway is functionally closer to upper-floor residents than other lower-floor neighbors are. Those lower-floor residents near the stairs were more likely to befriend people upstairs. Friendships, the researchers concluded, often grow from passive contacts, the brief meetings that happen while coming and going. Closer physical and functional distance simply makes those chance encounters more likely. This proximity effect, also called propinquity, remains the contribution that connects Festinger to social network theory.

• 5. How Groups Pull Inward

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  In his 1950 paper, Festinger argued that one major pressure to communicate arises from uniformity within a group. That uniformity, he said, comes from two sources, social reality and group locomotion. People depend on social reality to judge the validity of their attitudes and opinions, and they look to their reference group to establish it. An opinion is valid to the extent that it matches that of the reference group. When discrepancies in opinion appear among members, pressures to communicate arise. Festinger called these messages "instrumental communication," because the communication is a means to reduce discrepancies rather than an end in itself. He contrasted it with "consummatory communication," where communication is the end, such as emotional expression. His 1954 social comparison theory extended this thinking from opinions to abilities. Starting from the premise that humans have an innate drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities accurately, he argued people compare themselves with others. They seek out those close to themselves, because accurate comparison fails when others are too divergent. A chess novice does not measure himself against recognized chess masters, nor a college student against a toddler. Festinger noted one key asymmetry. For abilities there is a unidirectional drive upward, a push to improve, which is largely absent for opinions. He even suggested society fragments into groups of the relatively alike, as people drift toward others who share their views and match their abilities.

• 6. When Prophecy Fails

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  Many members of Dorothy Martin's group quit their jobs and disposed of their possessions to prepare for the end. Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter joined them and watched for months, before and after the predicted date. When the flood never came, Martin claimed the world had been spared by the "force of Good and light" the group had spread. Rather than abandoning their discredited beliefs, members held them more strongly and began proselytizing with fervor. The 1956 book When Prophecy Fails laid out the conditions under which disconfirmation deepens conviction. The belief must be held with deep conviction and tied to the believer's actions. It must have produced actions that are hard to undo. It must be specific enough to be clearly disconfirmed. The believer must recognize the disconfirmatory evidence. And the believer must have social support from other believers. These observations were the first experimental evidence for belief perseverance. Festinger later read the renewed proselytizing as a case of cognitive dissonance at work. By spreading the belief and gaining others' acceptance, members reduced the discomfort of being proven wrong, showing how dissonance could explain complex mass phenomena.

• 7. One Dollar Versus Twenty

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  The theory of cognitive dissonance traces back to rumors after a severe earthquake in India in 1934. Among people who felt the shock but suffered no damage, rumors spread predicting even worse disasters to come. It seemed strange that people would embrace "fear-provoking" rumors. Festinger reasoned the rumors were actually "fear-justifying," giving frightened people a reason to feel afraid. His 1957 work integrated existing research on influence and communication under this idea. Dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, motivates a person to reduce it and reach consonance. People also avoid situations and information likely to increase it. A smoker who knows smoking is harmful can quit, change his beliefs about the risk, or seek out reasons it might help, such as preventing weight gain. Festinger and James M. Carlsmith published their classic experiment in 1959. Subjects spent an hour on dull tasks, repeatedly filling and emptying a tray with 12 spools and turning 48 square pegs clockwise. Some were then asked to tell the next participant, secretly a confederate, that the task was enjoyable. Half were paid $1 for this favor and half were paid $20. Those paid $1 later reported the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20. With little reward to justify the lie, they eased the dissonance by genuinely changing their opinion. The result struck at behaviorism, which held that greater reward should produce greater liking. Later, Bem offered self-perception theory as an alternative, arguing people infer attitudes by observing their own behavior rather than feeling discomfort.

• 8. The Long Departure

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  In 1964 Festinger left social psychology, despite recognition that included the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1959. He blamed "a conviction that had been growing in me at the time that I, personally, was in a rut and needed an injection of intellectual stimulation from new sources to continue to be productive." He turned to the visual system, studying human eye movement and color perception. In 1968 he returned to his native New York City, continuing this work at The New School, then known as the New School for Social Research. He closed his laboratory in 1979, dissatisfied with working "on narrower and narrower technical problems." Writing in 1983, he sounded disappointed in his field and himself. "Forty years in my own life seems like a long time to me," he wrote, judging that progress had not been rapid enough nor the new knowledge impressive enough. He then took up prehistoric archaeology, meeting with Stephen Jay Gould and visiting sites to study primitive toolmaking firsthand. That work became his book The Human Legacy, on how humans evolved and built complex societies. He saw it not as abandoning psychology but as returning to its fundamental concerns. His final question was why a culture accepts or rejects an idea, which he hoped to illuminate by examining why new technology spread quickly in the West but not in the Eastern Byzantine Empire. Diagnosed with cancer before he could publish it, he chose not to pursue treatment. An obituary in the American Psychologist judged it "doubtful that experimental psychology would exist at all" without him.