Elliot Aronson
Personal Information
Description
Elliot Aronson is a social psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He has previously taught at Harvard, the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota. As a researcher, he is best known for his groundbreaking research on social influence and persuasion as well as for the invention of the jigsaw classroom (a strategy for reducing prejudice in public schools). He has written 22 books including The Social Animal, Age of Propaganda (with Anthony Pratkanis), Nobody Left to Hate, The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with his 7-year-oldgranddaughter, Ruth Aronson, and Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me (with Carol Tavris). Aronson is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have received all three of its highest awards: For Distinguished Research, Distinguished Teaching, and Distinguished Writing. In 1981, he was named Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Among his other awards are the Gordon Allport prize for his contributions to inter-racial harmony and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2007). Recently, his peers named him as one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th Century. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology as well as President of the Western Psychological Association [Source]
Books
The social animal
From the influential and hugely popular "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author of "Bobos in Paradise" comes a landmark exploration of how human beings and communities succeed.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
At some point we all make a bad decision, do something that harms another person, or cling to an outdated belief. When we do, we strive to reduce the cognitive dissonance that results from feeling that we, who are smart, moral, and right, just did something that was dumb, immoral, or wrong. Whether the consequences are trivial or tragic, it is difficult, and for some people impossible, to say, “I made a terrible mistake.” The higher the stakes—emotional, financial, moral—the greater that difficulty. Self-justification, the hardwired mechanism that blinds us to the possibility that we were wrong, has benefits: It lets us sleep at night and keeps us from torturing ourselves with regrets. But it can also block our ability to see our faults and errors. It legitimizes prejudice and corruption, distorts memory, and generates anger and rifts. It can keep prosecutors from admitting they put an innocent person in prison and from correcting that injustice, and it can keep politicians unable to change disastrous policies that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives. In our private lives, it can be the death of love. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) examines: - Why we have so much trouble accepting information that conflicts with a belief we “know for sure” is right. - The brain’s “blind spots” that make us unable to see our own prejudices, biases, corrupting influences, and hypocrisies. - Why our memories tell more about what we believe now than what really happened then. - How couples can break out of the spiral of blame and defensiveness. - The evil that men and women can do in the name of God, country, and justice -- and why they don’t see their actions as evil at all. - Why random acts of kindness create a “virtuous cycle” that perpetuates itself. Most of all, this book explains how all of us can learn to own up and let go of the need to be right, and learn from the times we are wrong—so that we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again.