Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast. Doctor Erison, it's an absolute
Speaker 1: pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you
Speaker 1: for taking the time to chat with me. Good to
Speaker 1: be here, Scott. You have been through a lot. You
Speaker 1: live through the Great Depression, World War Two, the McCarthy
Speaker 1: witch hunts, the civil rights movement, and the years of
Speaker 1: sexual liberation. All that must have had an impact on
Speaker 1: your work in social psychology. I would guess, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: do you think attracted you to social psychology? Do you
Speaker 1: think when you were a little kid, do you remember
Speaker 1: just being fascinated with the way people treated each other
Speaker 1: and things relating to social dynamics. Yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I grew up in a small city population about thirty
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand, Revere, Massachusetts, just northeast of Boston. It
Speaker 1: was a blue collar city and it was virulently anti Semitic,
Speaker 1: and we lived in a neighborhood I think we were
Speaker 1: the only Jewish family in the immediate neighborhood. And so
Speaker 1: my first real contact with social psychology was getting pushed
Speaker 1: around or beaten up on the way home from Hebrew
Speaker 1: school at night. So I sort of got acquainted with
Speaker 1: the dynamics of prejudice when I was like nine years old,
Speaker 1: when these gangs of you know who were like fourteen
Speaker 1: fifteen years old were sort of pushing me around and
Speaker 1: calling me dirty Jew. I was wondering why they hated
Speaker 1: jew so much, and wondering why they hated me so
Speaker 1: much when they didn't even know me, and wondering if
Speaker 1: they got to know me better and began to like me,
Speaker 1: would that mean that they might hate other Jews less
Speaker 1: than they already did. And of course I didn't realize
Speaker 1: it when I was nine years old, but these are
Speaker 1: profound social psychological questions, and so I was very curious
Speaker 1: about that, about how it is that I didn't do
Speaker 1: anything to harm these kids, and yet they had a
Speaker 1: built in hatred for me. And I think that is
Speaker 1: an incredibly interesting dynamic that you know, I wasn't happy
Speaker 1: when it was happening, but it really got me interested
Speaker 1: in how the human mind work, and whether prejudice is
Speaker 1: built in or whether you have to learn it, and
Speaker 1: questions like that, which are powerful questions, which are you know,
Speaker 1: where the answers are not clear. But when I went
Speaker 1: to college and I decided to majure in economics because
Speaker 1: my father was unemployed during the Great Depression and couldn't
Speaker 1: support a family, I didn't know what to major in.
Speaker 1: I was loving college, but I didn't know that I
Speaker 1: had to declare a major, and I thought, well, i'd
Speaker 1: major in something practical. You know, I've learned something about
Speaker 1: the way the economy works, but I wasn't particularly liking it.
Speaker 1: And then I happened to wander into a class by
Speaker 1: Abraham Maslow. He was teaching introductory psychology in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: one or fifty two, whenever that was. I walked into
Speaker 1: the class because I happened to be with a fellow
Speaker 1: student or an attractive young woman that I was trying
Speaker 1: to impress, and I wanted to sense some time with her,
Speaker 1: and she had that class or I went in with
Speaker 1: her and I sat there and as I was talking
Speaker 1: about the causes of prejudice, and th oh, my god.
Speaker 1: For the first time, I realized that there was a
Speaker 1: whole area, a whole science of psychology where you could
Speaker 1: ask questions like that and try to answer them, and
Speaker 1: that really excited me. I don't know how it is
Speaker 1: with other people, but when I was nineteen years old,
Speaker 1: the word psychology the only thing it meant to me
Speaker 1: was psychotherapy. If someone said do you want to be
Speaker 1: a psychologist? I thought that meant do you want to
Speaker 1: do psychotherapy? And even today, you know, some of my relatives,
Speaker 1: my aunts and uncles, when I first became a psychologist,
Speaker 1: they wondered, how come you don't have clients, you know?
Speaker 1: And so I didn't know there was a whole area
Speaker 1: of psychology like to study something like prejudice, that that's
Speaker 1: all I stuff in social psychology. And there wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of that at Brandeis. I mean, people the faculty
Speaker 1: speculated about things like that, but there was no one
Speaker 1: doing social psychological research there. And it wasn't really until
Speaker 1: I got to Stanford and met Leon Festinger that I
Speaker 1: realized what the promise was, what one could really do
Speaker 1: as a social psychologist. But I was interested in the area,
Speaker 1: and Maslow really ignited that interest because there was a
Speaker 1: kind of his notion of humanistic psychology overlapped with things
Speaker 1: like why people hate each other or love each other?
Speaker 1: And how does that come about? And he had a
Speaker 1: fresh perspective on that. Elliot Aarnson, WHOA. I mean, can
Speaker 1: we just step back a second here. First of all, Maslow,
Speaker 1: you went to his lecture and you suddenly forgot about
Speaker 1: this beautiful young girl that didn't end up being the
Speaker 1: one you married it. But but so his lecture must
Speaker 1: have been really captivating. I mean, I thought I could
Speaker 1: hold hands. It was a big room that had about
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty students in it, and I thought
Speaker 1: if we sat in the back of the room, we
Speaker 1: could hold hands. But after about ten minutes I dropped
Speaker 1: her hand. I fout of taking notes because Maslow was
Speaker 1: much more fascinating than she was. I mean, I just
Speaker 1: to you, yeah, I mean, this is just everything you've said,
Speaker 1: is just all these series of events. You know, you
Speaker 1: do talk about the role of luck in your book,
Speaker 1: you ask even and you set up your fastening autobiography
Speaker 1: as saying was a lot of this luck wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: what are all these factors that go into the calculus
Speaker 1: of this. You know, you may maybe if it weren't
Speaker 1: for that inspiring moment, it might have taken a little
Speaker 1: bit longer for you to realize there was a field
Speaker 1: dedicated to this stuff. But am I right in saying
Speaker 1: that Maso was partly responsible for finding your wife? Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a different way, in a different way yet, right, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we I mean I knew who she was, Vera, but
Speaker 1: we traveled in different circles. I mean I was with
Speaker 1: the dumb guys and Vera was I saw her at
Speaker 1: a distance and thought she was pretty smart and traveled
Speaker 1: with you know, her friends were really the intelligentsia of
Speaker 1: a class. But when I decided to major in psychology
Speaker 1: and I switched from economics to psychology, Maslow hired us,
Speaker 1: both of us because I think he considered us the
Speaker 1: top students. He really liked her. She was a better
Speaker 1: student than I was, and he hired us both to
Speaker 1: sort of be his secretaries, file clerks and things of
Speaker 1: that sort. Maslow, you know, it was a very small
Speaker 1: psychology department. There are only four or five faculty members,
Speaker 1: and Maslow was the chair, and they didn't even give
Speaker 1: him a full time secretary, so he could You know,
Speaker 1: both Vera who we came, My wife and I were
Speaker 1: on work study scholarships. In other words, they gave us
Speaker 1: a scholarship of that covered most of our tuition, but
Speaker 1: for women board and stuff like that, we had to work,
Speaker 1: and so Maslow was able to employ us as his
Speaker 1: I used to type letters for him and file things
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And that's how Vera and I
Speaker 1: got to know each other initially. And then occasionally he
Speaker 1: would invite us over his house for dinner, two or
Speaker 1: three times in our senior year, and I thought it
Speaker 1: was because he wanted to bring us together a little more.
Speaker 1: Vera was dating one of the graduate students in psychology,
Speaker 1: and many years later, after we were married for a
Speaker 1: long time, Vera and I went back to Brandeis to
Speaker 1: give a talk. I went to give a talk, and
Speaker 1: this may have been around nineteen ninety and Rick Morant
Speaker 1: was there. He had been one of our teachers. He
Speaker 1: came to my talk and he said afterwards, when we
Speaker 1: were chatting, he said, at the beginning of every psychology
Speaker 1: faculty meeting, they brought up the issue of who's ahead
Speaker 1: in the Vera sweepstakes, Elliott or this guy Norby who
Speaker 1: had been dating and that was pretty funny. That was
Speaker 1: the topic of the day. Who was Vera smiling at
Speaker 1: more favorably? At this time, I didn't even know we
Speaker 1: were in competition, but apparently the faculty did. And I
Speaker 1: think Maslow kind of thought that I might be good
Speaker 1: for Vera. He liked me, but he really loved Vera.
Speaker 1: I think Vera was his absolute favorite, he thought. He
Speaker 1: once told me Maslow did. There was a party at
Speaker 1: Maslow's house and I had little too much to drink,
Speaker 1: and I used to have a pretty sharp tongue. It
Speaker 1: was kind of sarcastic. And the next day Maslow, on
Speaker 1: a couple of days later, math Will call me into
Speaker 1: his office and gave me a little lecture saying that
Speaker 1: I had to be a little more careful of the
Speaker 1: way I related to people. And I remember this very distinctly.
Speaker 1: He said, you bite. He says, you don't have any venom.
Speaker 1: He said, I don't think you're out to really hurt people,
Speaker 1: but you have a very you have a sharp bite,
Speaker 1: and you really ought to control that. And that was
Speaker 1: the major interpersonal advice he ever gave me, and I
Speaker 1: think it was good. I think he was right that
Speaker 1: my way of being at that time was very self protective,
Speaker 1: and I would I could be pretty tough talking and
Speaker 1: I took that advice very seriously, and it was it
Speaker 1: was well meant. But he really loved very He thought
Speaker 1: that she was very special, and she was very She
Speaker 1: had she had and still had as an incredible serenity
Speaker 1: about her that I think that Matheow saw and really
Speaker 1: cherished about her. Well, it sounds like you got very
Speaker 1: lucky with there. I hope you mean that in the
Speaker 1: broadest a general way. I do I do with Matheow.
Speaker 1: With There. College was a time, more so then than now,
Speaker 1: where you know where a person. It was a period
Speaker 1: of time where you found your vocation and your mate,
Speaker 1: and if you were lucky, you found the right vocation
Speaker 1: and the right mate. And that I was incredibly lucky
Speaker 1: in that it was the right vocation and the right
Speaker 1: mate for me, incredibly lucky. That's why you know the
Speaker 1: title of my autobiography is not by chance alone, because
Speaker 1: I really do believe that life progresses by a series
Speaker 1: of lucky breaks or unlucky breaks, and then it's not
Speaker 1: by chance alone, a person needs to figure out from
Speaker 1: all the things that are happening. I'll just talk in
Speaker 1: terms of myself, but of all the things were happening
Speaker 1: to me, growing up in poverty, growing up in an
Speaker 1: anti Semitic neighborhood, suffering from that, getting an education, and
Speaker 1: discovering social psychology, all of those things with a series
Speaker 1: of breaks that you needed to figure out, is this
Speaker 1: the path that I should be taking? Is will this
Speaker 1: lead somewhere? So you get breaks, good breaks, bad breaks
Speaker 1: in the as I fumbled my way through life and
Speaker 1: stumbled my way through life, how do you take advantage
Speaker 1: of whatever breaks you get. At the beginning of my
Speaker 1: senior year, when I started to apply to graduate school,
Speaker 1: I thought I would want to be a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 1: I thought that was a career pathway that I could follow,
Speaker 1: And I applied to a number of schools in clinical
Speaker 1: psychology and was admitted with a fellowship to a few
Speaker 1: of them, and then decided about in January of my
Speaker 1: senior year that I really didn't want to do psychotherapy
Speaker 1: for a living, and so I turned them down. And
Speaker 1: then I didn't know what to do. I thought I
Speaker 1: would be a teacher, you know, I thought my goal
Speaker 1: would be to get a master's degree somewhere and maybe
Speaker 1: try to teach at a prep school, you know, something
Speaker 1: a little bit above a public high school. But I
Speaker 1: didn't really have a clear notion of what I wanted
Speaker 1: to do with my life, and so I just followed
Speaker 1: my nose and it led to interesting places. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: amazing that that one lecture you attended by Masos to
Speaker 1: happen to be the one that he talked about discrimination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet he saw in you some similarities to himself,
Speaker 1: because you were painfully shy as a young man, as
Speaker 1: as a boy growing up, and so was he described
Speaker 1: being painfully shy as well. And is that right? You
Speaker 1: used to dream of being Captain Marvel. Now. One that
Speaker 1: I dreamt about is that on Saturdays in those days,
Speaker 1: there was since there was a double feature at the
Speaker 1: movie theater and a cereal and Captain Marvel was in
Speaker 1: a cereal form. I read him in comic books and
Speaker 1: saw him in the movies. So I used to tie
Speaker 1: a towel around my neck like a cape and say
Speaker 1: the magic word shazam. That turned a little innocuous shy
Speaker 1: billy Batson into this really strong powerful guy who could
Speaker 1: fly Captain Marvel. And I was a shy kid and
Speaker 1: very I didn't have a lot to say. And I
Speaker 1: come from a very large family of aunts and uncles.
Speaker 1: My mother was one of ten children, my father was
Speaker 1: one of seven children, so I had like seventeen uncle
Speaker 1: our aunts, and we had these big family meetings. And
Speaker 1: I was this very shy little boy. And so I
Speaker 1: came home from the movies once and I got on
Speaker 1: the edge of my porch, which was about ten feet
Speaker 1: off the ground, and I said Shazam, and I leaped off,
Speaker 1: and I didn't land right, and I kind of strained
Speaker 1: my leg and ankle. And so the next day was
Speaker 1: a Sunday, and there was a family meeting and everybody
Speaker 1: was there and I kind of go limping in and
Speaker 1: what happened to Elliott? And somebody said, oh, he thought
Speaker 1: he was Superman and jumped up and thought he could
Speaker 1: fly off the porch, and they all started laughing, and
Speaker 1: I remember sitting really embarrassed and feeling like crying and saying,
Speaker 1: not Superman, Captain Marvel, you know exactly. It's a portant
Speaker 1: difference that actually is a very poor difference for the
Speaker 1: fact that you got hurt. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, look,
Speaker 1: there was the pivotal moment where you kind of realized
Speaker 1: that you weren't destined to be painfully shy your whole life.
Speaker 1: And it seemed like when you became a mic man
Speaker 1: on the boardwalk, you started working on the boardwalk, and
Speaker 1: then you got upgraded to the mic man. Can you
Speaker 1: tell our listeners a little bit about that story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of jobs on the boardwalk when
Speaker 1: I was about fourteen years old and fifteen and sixteen,
Speaker 1: and one of the jobs was working at the Pocarino
Speaker 1: table it's just giving change. And one night, the mic man,
Speaker 1: who was usually a guy in his forties, so it
Speaker 1: was a rainy night and it was late and we
Speaker 1: were supposed to be open until about midnight, but it
Speaker 1: was like eleven o'clock and it was hardly anyone on
Speaker 1: the boardwalk. So he said to me, Hey, kid, why
Speaker 1: don should take over the mic And I thought, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is my big chance. So I got up there
Speaker 1: and I had I had actually thought about this for
Speaker 1: a while, and I liked the mic man, and I
Speaker 1: liked the way he worked. It was he's very important
Speaker 1: because there's a loudspeaker outside, and if you can attract
Speaker 1: people into that place where the pokermino tables were, the
Speaker 1: sooner you break the ice. If people look in and
Speaker 1: there's nobody. It's like if you walking by a restaurant
Speaker 1: and you're looking for a place to eat, and at
Speaker 1: seven point thirty at night it's empty. You don't want
Speaker 1: to go in there. You think, ow, it's probably a
Speaker 1: cam me place. You walk by and there's nobody in there,
Speaker 1: you don't want to come in. So the mic man,
Speaker 1: if he's good, will break the ice early by getting
Speaker 1: a few people in. West there a few people and
Speaker 1: it begins to exponentially multiply. So it was totally empty.
Speaker 1: So I had this in my mind. I had this
Speaker 1: spiel worked out. Walk right in, sit in, get a seat,
Speaker 1: get a ball, play poker, poker frinicle five cents. It
Speaker 1: takes five cents to play and win a game. Come
Speaker 1: on in and play poker. Hey, there are three kings
Speaker 1: on table number twenty seven. Pay off that luck he
Speaker 1: went to. Hey there's a full house on table number fourteen.
Speaker 1: Pay off that luck they went to. It was nobody playing,
Speaker 1: It was empty, But I kept that spill going because
Speaker 1: it was fun and what could have hurt. A few
Speaker 1: people looked walk by, heard what I was saying, looked in,
Speaker 1: there was nobody there, started to laugh and then came
Speaker 1: in and started to play. Then I kept going, and
Speaker 1: then a few more people came in, and the next
Speaker 1: thing I knew, they were like it seemed like half
Speaker 1: the people who were on this whole expanse of the
Speaker 1: boardwalk were in the Polkerno room playing pokerino. The guy
Speaker 1: who ran the place was a guy named Abe Shaw
Speaker 1: who was blind, interestingly enough, and he had a reputation
Speaker 1: he could come into that arcade and he could guess
Speaker 1: how many people were playing pokerino. If there's like thirty
Speaker 1: five tables, he could tell how many people were playing
Speaker 1: by the sound of the balls and the sound the
Speaker 1: money going into the slots and stuff like that. And
Speaker 1: he said, it's like eleven thirty at night, rainy night.
Speaker 1: And he saw it was busy suddenly, and he said,
Speaker 1: who's on the mic? And I said, I was that
Speaker 1: kid parents, and he hired me on the spot. I
Speaker 1: was upgraded from sixty cents an hour to two and
Speaker 1: a half dollars an hour to be the relief mic. Man,
Speaker 1: and that was Now that didn't make me feel unshy.
Speaker 1: It made me feel if I was behind the mic,
Speaker 1: sitting up in that it was like a raised little booths.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to show myself. I couldn't talk in
Speaker 1: class in junior high school. In high school, I was
Speaker 1: I used to stammer and turn red if I was
Speaker 1: called on, but behind the mic when I was sort
Speaker 1: of anonymous. Later I learned that a lot of actors
Speaker 1: like Henry Fonder were shy people, Jimmy Stewart, shy people
Speaker 1: who you who's their acting because they're playing a role
Speaker 1: to get out of themselves and momentarily overcome their shyness.
Speaker 1: And in retrospect that I think that's exactly what I
Speaker 1: was doing. Yeah, And a lot of your research is,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of things that fascinate you. Big
Speaker 1: theme that fascinates you is how to how people can change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I think that that's really right. It's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about your brother Jason for a second,
Speaker 1: because it looks like he was really protected you in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, and you really, I mean it
Speaker 1: shows in your book how much you admired him, and
Speaker 1: you know, even on the one hand, you wanted to
Speaker 1: exert your independence, may be almost embarrassed that he had
Speaker 1: to fight the bullies. At the same time, he still
Speaker 1: very very much looked up to him, right, Yeah, well
Speaker 1: he was I think everybody feels almost everybody feels that
Speaker 1: way about their big brother. He was two and a
Speaker 1: half years older than I was, and he was big
Speaker 1: and strong and smart and a very good athlete, and
Speaker 1: very had a lot of self confidence. And he did
Speaker 1: protect me from bullies a little bit. And also he
Speaker 1: taught me how to play baseball and how to dribble
Speaker 1: a basketball and all of that stuff that was very important.
Speaker 1: I became a pretty good baseball player. I actually it's
Speaker 1: the one thing I excelled in when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and I became a better baseball player even than my brother.
Speaker 1: But he was the one who got me to really
Speaker 1: take it seriously, so that we'd be playing on this
Speaker 1: baseball field that was just full of pebbles and little
Speaker 1: rocks and pieces of glasses. I was terrible field in
Speaker 1: a slummy area, and he would hit me ground balls,
Speaker 1: and what I would try to do stand on the
Speaker 1: side and maybe backhanded, because I was definitely afraid that
Speaker 1: the ball would take a bad hop and hit me
Speaker 1: in the face. And he taught me to get in
Speaker 1: front of the ball and to move my body always
Speaker 1: to get is if I could to get in front
Speaker 1: of the ball, because if the bolt like a bad hop,
Speaker 1: chances I would hit me on the chests land in
Speaker 1: front of me, and I could still pick it up
Speaker 1: and throw the guy out. So I used to play
Speaker 1: shorts up and second base and I really got good
Speaker 1: at it, and Jason did that for me. Jason, but
Speaker 1: Jason was superb in the family. He was the guy
Speaker 1: who was full of jokes, and he could sing, it
Speaker 1: could dance, he could do all kinds of things, and so,
Speaker 1: like I mentioned family meetings before, when we entered a
Speaker 1: family gathering, it would be Hey, it's Jason's here, Hi Elliott,
Speaker 1: And so I kind of resented that a little bit,
Speaker 1: but he deserved it. He was great. And the big
Speaker 1: thing he did, the greatest thing he did for me
Speaker 1: was get me to go to college. I didn't think
Speaker 1: I was smart enough to go to college. I was
Speaker 1: doing pretty well in high school mostly be's nc's, a
Speaker 1: very few a's, more c's than a's, so I was
Speaker 1: probably had a B r B minus average. And my
Speaker 1: father died when I was a junior in high school
Speaker 1: and we didn't have any money anyway, and he died
Speaker 1: in debt, and the family. Jason was already in college
Speaker 1: in the very first class that was admitted to Brandeis
Speaker 1: University when Brandeis first opened, and he loved college and
Speaker 1: he was excelling in college. And he was a sophomore
Speaker 1: when my father died, and I was a junior in
Speaker 1: high school, and the family got together and they decided
Speaker 1: that as long as Jason was already they were worried
Speaker 1: that they would have to support my mother and my
Speaker 1: sister and me, and they didn't want to do that.
Speaker 1: So as I look at it now, they thought, okay,
Speaker 1: Jason can continue in college, but Elliott, when he graduated
Speaker 1: from high school, should go to work at the Ford
Speaker 1: Motor Company that was nearby. And I thought that's probably
Speaker 1: a good idea. You know, they paid well. And Jason
Speaker 1: in effect said, screw that, Elliot's going to college. And
Speaker 1: then they said, well, what do you mean, who's going
Speaker 1: to support your mother and sister? And Jason said, my
Speaker 1: mother can work. She worked before she was married, she
Speaker 1: can work now. She never worked while she was married.
Speaker 1: But she could do that, and she did, and he
Speaker 1: was absolutely right, and she thrived when she worked. And
Speaker 1: I didn't know whether it was a good idea or not.
Speaker 1: At the time, I didn't feel like I could be
Speaker 1: a good student, and I wasn't a good student in
Speaker 1: high school because I was bored and the teachers were
Speaker 1: lousy and it was a but when I did I
Speaker 1: ended up at Brandeis also with a work study scholarship.
Speaker 1: The only reason I went there was because it was
Speaker 1: the only place that offered me a scholarship. And the
Speaker 1: only reason they offered me a scholarship was because they
Speaker 1: just were just starting and my essay he scores were
Speaker 1: really high, even though my grades were only mediocre, and
Speaker 1: they took a chance on me, and I went to
Speaker 1: the one place that gave me a scholarship. And going
Speaker 1: there was very interesting because my brother who had preceded
Speaker 1: me through grade school, junior high school, in high school,
Speaker 1: who as a star student, also preceded me at Brandeis.
Speaker 1: And at Brandeis he was he you know, was the
Speaker 1: first president of the first class at Brandeis. He was
Speaker 1: the editor. He ended up being the editor of the yearbook.
Speaker 1: He was the director of the first variety show and
Speaker 1: all of that stuff, and then I came in his
Speaker 1: footsteps and needed to excel in my own way. And
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting phenomenon. It sounds like he was
Speaker 1: kind of your guardian angel. He was in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, in a lot of ways. Well, let's fast
Speaker 1: forward to your PhD work at Stanford and this amazing
Speaker 1: encounter you had with Leon Festjer, who, by all accounts
Speaker 1: he was a bit of a jerk, right, No, No,
Speaker 1: he was nothing like a jerk. Okay. He was brilliant
Speaker 1: and very tough and very demanding, and he could be
Speaker 1: He was very aggressive. He was an aggressive guy who
Speaker 1: if you didn't do things the right way, he could
Speaker 1: come down on you like a ton of bricks. It was.
Speaker 1: He was very demanding. He had very high standards, and
Speaker 1: he demanded that everybody meet them. And he was scary.
Speaker 1: Everybody was afraid of him. The other professors were afraid
Speaker 1: of him, certainly the graduate students were, and they, most
Speaker 1: of them kept were smart enough to keep away from him.
Speaker 1: So when I was a first year student at Stanford,
Speaker 1: he and I Infestinger and I arrived at the same time,
Speaker 1: he as a young full professor and me as a
Speaker 1: very rather insecure first year graduate student, and I heard
Speaker 1: a reputation and I didn't want anything to do with
Speaker 1: that guy. But there was a guy who was a
Speaker 1: fourth year graduate student. Name was Richard Alpert, who later
Speaker 1: became known as Baba Ramdas. He's the guy who with
Speaker 1: Tim Leary, opened the Age of Aquarius with psychedelic drugs.
Speaker 1: And in those days, in the nineteen fifties, he was
Speaker 1: a graduate student in developmental psychology and I had met
Speaker 1: him earlier and we became friends. And he said he
Speaker 1: came over the house once for dinner. Vera and I
Speaker 1: lived in a small cottage and we had a baby,
Speaker 1: and Vera was pregnant with another baby soon to arrive,
Speaker 1: and Dick came over and said, yeah, you know, it
Speaker 1: was the first year of students. We've got this new guy,
Speaker 1: Festinger who's supposed to be brilliant, and nobody is signing
Speaker 1: up for a seminary. Only three or four students signed up,
Speaker 1: and none of the first year students signed up. I
Speaker 1: think they're all afraid of him. And he said it
Speaker 1: in a very point way, and I thought, oh, he's
Speaker 1: talking to me. He thinks I'm scared of this guy,
Speaker 1: and I want to impress Dick. So I said, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to sign up for that thing. And I
Speaker 1: signed up for it. And everything i'd heard about him
Speaker 1: was true. He was brilliant infesting her and also nasty
Speaker 1: if you came in the least bit unprepared. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reading, and he was supposed to
Speaker 1: really read it and think about it, and then he'd
Speaker 1: come in and ask you a question, and if you
Speaker 1: couldn't really answer it in a reasonable way, he would.
Speaker 1: He was like a prosecuting attorney, and it was really difficult.
Speaker 1: He would reduce people to tears, and it was a
Speaker 1: great learning experience. A because he was developing the theory
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance at that moment, and that's what we
Speaker 1: were dealing with. And B because out of a feeling
Speaker 1: of self preservation, if nothing else, you really had to
Speaker 1: do the stuff you had to. You couldn't be sloppy.
Speaker 1: You couldn't be sloppy thinking. So I'll give you one
Speaker 1: example of festing her inaction. He assigned a term paper
Speaker 1: and I wrote it. I've written many term papers, and
Speaker 1: I figured I could do that easily enough. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: I'm waking up at four o'clock in the morning to
Speaker 1: feed my baby, and so it was. It was a
Speaker 1: tough life, so I didn't do as good a job
Speaker 1: as I might have done. Anyway. I'm walking past his
Speaker 1: office one day on my way to the THA Room
Speaker 1: teaching assistant room where I had a desk. They're like
Speaker 1: five or six deaths there, and I was a teaching
Speaker 1: assistant and introductory psychologia. I'm walking past Leon's office and
Speaker 1: he calls me in aaronson and he signals to me,
Speaker 1: and I said yeah, and he says, stack of stuff
Speaker 1: on his desk and including seven or eight of us
Speaker 1: in that seminar. And he pulls my turn paper out
Speaker 1: from the stack and he holds it up between his
Speaker 1: summer and forefinger at arm like, turns its head away
Speaker 1: and hands me the paper and says, I believe this
Speaker 1: is yours, all right? So I took it, and I said,
Speaker 1: I guess you didn't like it very much? He says
Speaker 1: he gave me a look which anyone who ever worked
Speaker 1: with him knew that looked very well. It was sort
Speaker 1: of like it was like what it was a mixture
Speaker 1: of contempt and pity. Right. The contempt is that he's
Speaker 1: contemptuous of you for wasting his time, and the pity
Speaker 1: is he feels bad for you that you were born
Speaker 1: brain damage, felt like and he said, that's fact. I
Speaker 1: didn't like it very much. So I took the paper
Speaker 1: and I walked to my down the car to where
Speaker 1: my office was with it. I had a desk, and
Speaker 1: I was really afraid to open it because of all
Speaker 1: of the marks and you know, corrections and arrows and
Speaker 1: the shit that I would find in there. And I
Speaker 1: opened it and there wasn't a single mark on it,
Speaker 1: nothing blank, just the way I handed it in. So
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, what is this? So I took
Speaker 1: the paper and I gathered all my courage and I
Speaker 1: walked into his often excuse me, doctor Festinger. But there
Speaker 1: must be some mistake because you didn't write anything on
Speaker 1: my paper. How am I supposed to know what I
Speaker 1: did wrong? But then he gives me this look again,
Speaker 1: contempt and pity, and he says, what, you don't have
Speaker 1: enough respect for your own thinking to follow your ideas
Speaker 1: through to the illogical conclusion, and you expect me to
Speaker 1: do that? This is graduate school Sonny not kindergarten. Wow.
Speaker 1: Took the paper, walked back to my office, called up Vera,
Speaker 1: and I said, hey, honey, you know those cartons we
Speaker 1: haven't finished unpacking yet. Don't bother. I may not be
Speaker 1: here for very long, thinking you know, what should I do?
Speaker 1: Should I withdraw from the seminar or should I Then
Speaker 1: I reread the paper, and I tried to reread it
Speaker 1: through Festinger's eyes, and it was a half baked, lousy job.
Speaker 1: So I figured, Okay, I can do better than that.
Speaker 1: And it was sort of like a real conflict situation
Speaker 1: because I really hated his ass and was afraid of him,
Speaker 1: and at the same time he was clearly brilliant. Everything
Speaker 1: his reputation was absolutely right. He was a terrible person
Speaker 1: and brilliant, and I thought I can learn something from
Speaker 1: this guy. So I really worked on that paper for
Speaker 1: three or four days, very hard, and then I walked
Speaker 1: into his office, put it on his desk and said,
Speaker 1: maybe you'll like this one better. To his credit, he
Speaker 1: must have read it right away, because twenty minutes later
Speaker 1: he came into where I was sitting at my desk,
Speaker 1: put the paper in front of me, sat on the
Speaker 1: corner of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder
Speaker 1: and said, now this is worth criticizing. Oh man, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of grad students may have, you know, totally
Speaker 1: shrunken from that experience. And you kept going, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the temptation to shrink away was high. But what you know,
Speaker 1: what he said at that moment was so important to
Speaker 1: me because it was it was it's funny. I love
Speaker 1: to tell that story. I actually told it. When he died,
Speaker 1: I told that story, and his memorial service, his wife,
Speaker 1: his widow, asked me to give the eulogy. And when
Speaker 1: I told that story, there were about twenty people in
Speaker 1: the audience that practically fell off their chairs laughing because
Speaker 1: similar things happened to them when they worked with Festinger
Speaker 1: over the years. I bet. But what he was telling
Speaker 1: me beautifully was if you're not willing to work to
Speaker 1: your full potential, then I don't want to have anything
Speaker 1: to do with you. But if you give me everything
Speaker 1: you have, then I will give you the most precious
Speaker 1: thing that I have, which is my critical ability, and
Speaker 1: we can work together. But I don't want anything to
Speaker 1: do with you unless you're going to really do it.
Speaker 1: And that was a great lesson to me as a
Speaker 1: student and eventually as a professor. That and you know
Speaker 1: earlier when we were talking about Maslow, Maslow really believed
Speaker 1: that his time was absolutely precious and he doled it
Speaker 1: out very, very carefully. I think Festinger believed the same thing,
Speaker 1: but it was in a different way. And Festinger was
Speaker 1: really scrutinized the person he was working with. And if
Speaker 1: you met him halfway, if you gave him everything you had,
Speaker 1: he gave you everything. He had everything. You could call
Speaker 1: him at three o'clock in the morning and say, hey,
Speaker 1: I just got an idea, and he would be right
Speaker 1: there with you. And I just felt enormously privileged for
Speaker 1: a while. I mean, at that moment we became teacher
Speaker 1: and student. Within a year we were like colleagues, and
Speaker 1: within a couple of years we were close friends. It
Speaker 1: was the meshing was incredible, not by chance alone. It
Speaker 1: was by chance that Dick Albert came over the house
Speaker 1: for dinner and challenged me to take that seminar. It
Speaker 1: was not by chance that I hung in there and
Speaker 1: that I took the ship. And I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: there are some tough Thawns around this particular rose, but
Speaker 1: the rose is worth it, and let's see how hard
Speaker 1: I can work, and let's see how far this takes me.
Speaker 1: And Festinger was brilliant. He was a great mentor not
Speaker 1: to everybody. There were a lot of really smart, good
Speaker 1: graduate students who Festinger had nothing to do with because
Speaker 1: they didn't meet his standards. But once you met them,
Speaker 1: the rewards were enormous, absolutely enormous. And the guy was
Speaker 1: so critical and so discerning that if he thought I
Speaker 1: was good, then that was a huge boost to my
Speaker 1: self esteem. Then I guess I must be good. I
Speaker 1: remember when I was finishing up at Stanford after three
Speaker 1: or four years, and I was in the job market
Speaker 1: and I had offers from some really great universities. And
Speaker 1: when I said to him, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm good enough for this the big time. And
Speaker 1: he said, well, you know, you've done three really good experiments.
Speaker 1: You know where that puts you among social psychologists in
Speaker 1: the field? About it the ninety nine according to his standards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought, wow, And he doesn't bullshit. Okay, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: said it's probably true, and I get and of course
Speaker 1: it is true. How many what's the Irish number of
Speaker 1: really good experiments that anyone does. You know, some people
Speaker 1: publish a lot, but if you take away the chaff,
Speaker 1: if you take away all the crap that people do
Speaker 1: just to get promoted and just so you know, it
Speaker 1: will count up. Some people do a couple of hundred experiments,
Speaker 1: but there maybe the really good ones have done six
Speaker 1: or seven really good experiments that change the way we
Speaker 1: think about the field. That's rare. What do you make
Speaker 1: of the so called replication crisis in social psychology that
Speaker 1: everyone's talking about in the field. Well, I think it's real,
Speaker 1: but there are so many threads to that. One one
Speaker 1: thread is that a lot of people. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I'm worried about in social psychology is the
Speaker 1: tendency what I call the tetification of psychology. And that's
Speaker 1: not edification, vacation. I know. You mean people are trying
Speaker 1: to do cute, easy, charming studies that will get them
Speaker 1: on the TED show that they can talk about in
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes in a charming way. Like, for example, you
Speaker 1: know that if you get into the power pose, it
Speaker 1: really affects your testosterone level, et cetera and makes you
Speaker 1: more successful. That is very you know, that is flashy
Speaker 1: and attractive, but it will get you on the Ted
Speaker 1: Show and maybe sell a book, but it's not If
Speaker 1: it doesn't hold up, it's because not because people are
Speaker 1: intentionally dishonest, but because they may cut a few corners
Speaker 1: and not really do the experiments the way they in
Speaker 1: the in the tightest possible way. And if that doesn't
Speaker 1: if that those things don't replicate, then that's a problem.
Speaker 1: And I think we need to train our graduate students.
Speaker 1: This is a tough one. This is a tough sell.
Speaker 1: To root for the null hypothesis. That is the way
Speaker 1: to go. If you're a researcher, you root for the
Speaker 1: null hypothesis, and you, as the experiment should be the
Speaker 1: hardest one to convince that there is a significance level there.
Speaker 1: Then and your actual hypothesis is valid. But if there
Speaker 1: are errors, if there are mistakes, if there are things
Speaker 1: in there that aren't exactly right, you want to be
Speaker 1: the first to know that, so you ought to. If
Speaker 1: you're sure of it, you don't have to replicate. Let
Speaker 1: people who don't believe it try to replicate it, and
Speaker 1: that's the best kind of replication anyway. If they are
Speaker 1: motivated to prove that you're wrong. They're going to do
Speaker 1: the experiment in a very tough way, and so replication
Speaker 1: is really important. But what's even more important is doing
Speaker 1: it right to begin with. And forget about getting tenure,
Speaker 1: forget about looking good, forget about getting on the Ted Show.
Speaker 1: Make sure ever comes out of your fucking laboratory is
Speaker 1: as good as it can possibly be and can stand
Speaker 1: up to scrutiny. Yeah, for sure. It seems like the
Speaker 1: cognitive distance theory has stood the test of time in
Speaker 1: Fester's theory. Now you have done work yourself on this theory, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, I think it's incredible that he sent
Speaker 1: you his manuc he let you read his manuscript before
Speaker 1: it was even published. He kind of asked for your feedback.
Speaker 1: I think that's incredible. But you've done some of your
Speaker 1: own work on that, and in this book you wrote
Speaker 1: called mistakes were made, but not by me. You kind
Speaker 1: of apply cognitive distance theory to some practical issues more
Speaker 1: so than he Didvestnger did. And one of the issues
Speaker 1: you tackled was why so many people can do such harmful, foolish,
Speaker 1: self defeating our cool things and still sleep soundly at night.
Speaker 1: Could you unpack a little bit how cognitive distance theory
Speaker 1: helped sheds the light on that. Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know anyone who says I'm an evil person. You see,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing these evil acts. People do things and
Speaker 1: then they justify them. And the scheme I developed is
Speaker 1: it's like a shape, like a pyramid. And let's just
Speaker 1: take a simple example that any college student will understand readily.
Speaker 1: Let's assume that you're taking an important exam and you
Speaker 1: know that if you do well on that exam, you're
Speaker 1: going to be able to go to graduate school, and
Speaker 1: if you don't do well, you probably won't, and you
Speaker 1: really are highly motivated to go to graduate school. When
Speaker 1: you study hard for the exam and you walk into
Speaker 1: the exam and you absolutely pull a blank. You look
Speaker 1: at the questions and it's as if it's from a
Speaker 1: course you never took before. And yet the other people
Speaker 1: seem to be writing away and they're answering the questions
Speaker 1: and everything, and you really panic, and you look around
Speaker 1: and you notice you have to be sitting behind the
Speaker 1: smart person in the class, who also happens to have
Speaker 1: large legible handwriting. The question is do you cheat or
Speaker 1: don't you cheat? And if there are two people taking
Speaker 1: the exam, and let's say that initially, if you ask
Speaker 1: them about their opinion about cheating, let's say they're almost identical.
Speaker 1: They both believe that you shouldn't do it. But it's
Speaker 1: not the worst thing in the world. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of things worse than that. That it's a victimless crime.
Speaker 1: And so they both are sort of in the middle,
Speaker 1: like at the top of the pyramid, but they are
Speaker 1: a little bit apart, and one of them decides to
Speaker 1: cheat and the other one decides not to cheat. Whichever
Speaker 1: way they go, they are doomed to experience cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1: The person who decided not to cheat is giving up
Speaker 1: going to graduate school. That's the cognition I really wanted
Speaker 1: to go to graduate school, and I could have gone
Speaker 1: there if only I had cheated. Is dissonant with the
Speaker 1: cognition I didn't cheat. The person who decided to cheat saying,
Speaker 1: I'm an honest, honorable person, and yet I did this
Speaker 1: dishonest thing. So how do they reduce dissonance, Well, they
Speaker 1: both feel the same way about cheating to begin with,
Speaker 1: but once they make their decision, it's almost as if
Speaker 1: they're sliding down two opposite ends of the pyramid, so
Speaker 1: that the person who cheated is trying to convince himself
Speaker 1: that everybody does it. A person would be really a
Speaker 1: fool not to do it. It's a victimless crime. There's
Speaker 1: no problem with it. It's I'm not hurting anybody, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a terrific professor or a doctor,
Speaker 1: a lawyer or whatever if only I have the chance,
Speaker 1: and I will pay back to society, and everything is great,
Speaker 1: and their attitude to cheating softens tremendously, so that if
Speaker 1: you get to them a few days later, they think
Speaker 1: cheating is nothing. It's everybody does it. The other guy
Speaker 1: is motivated to convince himself that cheating is a terrible
Speaker 1: thing to do because my decision has cost me going
Speaker 1: to graduate school, so that a few days later, or
Speaker 1: even a few hours later, their attitudes are enormously different.
Speaker 1: And this is the aspect of distance theory, which I
Speaker 1: call self justification, which means that people can do all
Speaker 1: kinds of things and justify it one step at a time.
Speaker 1: Congressmen can accept what amounts to a bribe from a
Speaker 1: major corporation in order to push through legislation which favors
Speaker 1: that corporation, and he convinces himself that he really did
Speaker 1: it for the public. Go would one step at a time.
Speaker 1: This is how distance works in the real world, how
Speaker 1: it works. And my aim in writing that book was
Speaker 1: to drag Festing, or maybe kicking and screaming, into the
Speaker 1: real world. Festinger didn't care about the real world. He
Speaker 1: treated experiments in social psychology the way someone would treat
Speaker 1: a chess problem. How do you solve this interesting problem
Speaker 1: about how the human mind works? Not how do you
Speaker 1: account for what congressmen do? How do you account what
Speaker 1: police do in police interrogations? How they can get innocent
Speaker 1: people to confess to a crime that they didn't even
Speaker 1: commit so they can close the case. How does that
Speaker 1: come about? How That's what the book is about. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ways to apply this theory, a
Speaker 1: lot of things that happen in the real world that
Speaker 1: Festinger was uninterested in, but that I'm very interested in.
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, I really loved writing
Speaker 1: that book because it does bring what was to some
Speaker 1: of us, or a lot of people who are non
Speaker 1: social psychologists, would seem like an esoteric thing about how
Speaker 1: the mind works but it brings it right into their
Speaker 1: everyday life. Oh absolutely. And I'm wondering how do individual
Speaker 1: differences play a role here? I mean, what about people
Speaker 1: who like really don't have guilt at all, Like you know,
Speaker 1: like what about like psychopaths, psychopaths of cognitive distance? No, yeah,
Speaker 1: they has that been studied? I don't know it might be,
Speaker 1: but it's almost perfectly clear to me that it takes
Speaker 1: somebody like our president. He doesn't even seem to remember
Speaker 1: what he said last week, are yesterday or an hour ago?
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't seem to register. And I think
Speaker 1: that that it's hard to know where his self esteem
Speaker 1: level is. I think that I regard him as having
Speaker 1: a self esteem that's both high and fragile, meaning that
Speaker 1: he thinks he's terrific. It's not based on very much
Speaker 1: as oppoth to someone who has high self esteem that's
Speaker 1: really well grounded, that he's really done a lot and
Speaker 1: self esteem is very high. But maybe, like we were
Speaker 1: talking before, like Abraham mas Well or Leon Festinger or
Speaker 1: something like that, who's really solid in their regard for
Speaker 1: themselves because it's based on a lot of really good evidence.
Speaker 1: I think that Trump's behavior smacks of someone who really
Speaker 1: thinks he's terrific but is not sure, and so anytime
Speaker 1: someone disagrees with him, that person becomes his enemy. Anytime
Speaker 1: someone says something nice about him, he wants to embrace
Speaker 1: that guy. This is a guy who really is very needy,
Speaker 1: needful of things that help him. Bold stir his high
Speaker 1: opinion of himself, which isn't based on very much except
Speaker 1: that he seems to have a lot of money. So I, uh, well,
Speaker 1: tell me about this other study that you kind of
Speaker 1: you know, there's this Dale Carnegie's book is very famous
Speaker 1: and he has all this advice, and one of his
Speaker 1: advice on making friends and being successful is to do
Speaker 1: out praise lavishly. But you did research, sing that's not correct, right, Well,
Speaker 1: it's maybe correct, but it's as far as it goes.
Speaker 1: But what we found was that people will like someone
Speaker 1: more if they begin if the other person begins by
Speaker 1: with a negative attitude toward the target person, and then
Speaker 1: it gradually becomes more positive. That really works much better
Speaker 1: in terms of winning friends and influencing people. Then if
Speaker 1: they always doled out praize lavishly for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 1: one of which is that it becomes you trust it
Speaker 1: more if it looks like the guy wasn't just trying
Speaker 1: to impress you or shine you on. And secondly, the
Speaker 1: guy seems much more discriminating if he can dislike you
Speaker 1: and then gradually changes, that is much more meaningful. And
Speaker 1: the same thing works in reverse. You dislike a person
Speaker 1: more if they begin by liking you or saying nice
Speaker 1: things to do, and gradually the more they get to
Speaker 1: know you, the more they dislike you. That really can
Speaker 1: be very irritating, and that leads to a lot of
Speaker 1: dislike on the target person's behalf. And that was an
Speaker 1: experiment I did a great many years ago with Darwyn Linder,
Speaker 1: showing that the gain of esteem and the loss of
Speaker 1: esteem much more powerful than constant esteem. Okay, let's get
Speaker 1: to your perhaps most seminal work. You've done a lot
Speaker 1: of great work, and that's the Jigsaw classroom intervention. The
Speaker 1: context behind this intervention is fascinating because it's this newly
Speaker 1: desegregated schools in Austin, Texas, which created violence and aggression
Speaker 1: between different ethnic groups. And you know you were called
Speaker 1: in to observe this classroom, is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well we were called in to do something okay, and
Speaker 1: the school was in the whole school system was in crisis.
Speaker 1: So we did go in and we observed some classrooms,
Speaker 1: and what we concluded was what everybody knows who's ever
Speaker 1: been in the school system, that the classroom is a
Speaker 1: very competitive place. And if you're looking at an elementary
Speaker 1: school classroom, the kids are, you know, raising their hands,
Speaker 1: and if someone comes up with the right answer, there's
Speaker 1: a groan, and they're competing. They don't want the other
Speaker 1: person to do well. They want to do well. They
Speaker 1: want to show the teacher how smart they are. So
Speaker 1: that's one thing very competitive. Second thing is in Austin,
Speaker 1: as in any other place that's newly desegregated, if there
Speaker 1: is residential segregation, which there usually is in most American cities,
Speaker 1: where the blacks and Mexican Americans live in the lousy
Speaker 1: part of town and the whites live in a better
Speaker 1: part of town, the kids don't really know each other.
Speaker 1: They haven't interacted much before desegregation and the school system
Speaker 1: in the lower class parts of town. Histor where race
Speaker 1: and ethnicity is correlated with social class, certainly in Austin,
Speaker 1: the white kids lived in a middle class area and
Speaker 1: their school system was good. The black and Mexican American
Speaker 1: kids lived on the other side of Interregional Highway thirty five,
Speaker 1: and they lived in their shacks. Their schools were lousy,
Speaker 1: and so when they entered, like let's say they enter
Speaker 1: the fifth grade, the black kids and the Mexican American
Speaker 1: kids are reading at a fourth grade level. The white
Speaker 1: kids are reading at a fifth and sixth grade level.
Speaker 1: In terms of reading and comprehension. We tested this and
Speaker 1: that's what we found. So you bring black kids and
Speaker 1: Mexican American kids into a highly competitive situation where they're
Speaker 1: guaranteed to lose, and what came about after just a
Speaker 1: few weeks is this situation exacerbated the existing stereotypes. The
Speaker 1: white kids thought the black kids and the Mexican American
Speaker 1: kids were stupid or lazy or both because they weren't
Speaker 1: doing well, and the Mexican American kids thought that the
Speaker 1: white kids would show offs and teachers pets and arrogant
Speaker 1: and all of that stuff. The stereotypes were exacerbated. And
Speaker 1: you know, we concluded after observing classrooms for about a
Speaker 1: week that if someone had intentionally designed a situation that
Speaker 1: would make desegregation fail to do the things we were
Speaker 1: hoping that it would do. That is to decrease prejudice,
Speaker 1: to increase the self esteem of black and Mexican American kids,
Speaker 1: and it would be a situation where the minority kids
Speaker 1: could learn more than they do. You know, remember the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decision in nineteen fifty four that ordered desegregation.
Speaker 1: Part of their decision was based on some research in
Speaker 1: social psychology showing that the mere fact of being segregated
Speaker 1: into their own schools had a negative effect on the
Speaker 1: self esteem of minority kids. So that the concept from
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety six in the case of plus E versus Ferguson,
Speaker 1: the concept of separate but equal was erroneous because segregation
Speaker 1: itself made the situation unequal, even if the schools and
Speaker 1: the teachers and the facilities were indeed equal, which they weren't.
Speaker 1: But even so, just the fact that being segregated producers
Speaker 1: the lowering of self esteem makes it unequal. And that's
Speaker 1: why in nineteen fifty four they over turned plus versus
Speaker 1: Ferguson in the case of Brown versus Board of Education.
Speaker 1: So we expected these terrific results that weren't happening. And
Speaker 1: when because I was living in often at the time
Speaker 1: when it was desegregated. My students and I, my graduate students,
Speaker 1: and I could see why it wasn't happening, why the
Speaker 1: good effects that we were hoping for with these segregations
Speaker 1: just weren't taking place. And so we made a simple intervention.
Speaker 1: We changed the dynamics of the classroom from a competitive
Speaker 1: one to a cooperative one where we formed six person
Speaker 1: groups that were had to cooperate with each other in
Speaker 1: order to learn the lesson of the day. They had
Speaker 1: to listen to each other, they had to talk to
Speaker 1: each other, they had to help each other, they had
Speaker 1: to accept help from each other. And within a few weeks,
Speaker 1: these small groups, groups that were inter racial and inter
Speaker 1: ethnic and intergender groups, they were as diverse as we
Speaker 1: could make them. They were functioning like a really first
Speaker 1: rate basketball team where you passed the ball around until
Speaker 1: you find an open man and it doesn't matter who
Speaker 1: scores the basket because you are a team. And we
Speaker 1: found that after only six weeks in this cooperative situation
Speaker 1: that we invented self esteem of minority kids increased, their
Speaker 1: performance on objective exams, improved as opposed to a control condition,
Speaker 1: Their liking for school increased, their prejudice went down, their
Speaker 1: absenteeism went down. We had good behavioral measures. Of course,
Speaker 1: absenteeism is a wonderful measure of how well kids a
Speaker 1: liking school. And in the traditional classrooms, absenteism was at
Speaker 1: the level that would always always had. In the Jigsaw classrooms,
Speaker 1: this absenttheism was way down. The whole atmosphere shifted. It
Speaker 1: was a highly successful intervention and it made desegregation work
Speaker 1: the way it was supposed to work. Is it still used?
Speaker 1: Is your intevidual still used today? Yeah, it's used. It's
Speaker 1: was disappointing in the sense that I thought, hey, look
Speaker 1: where you have a way of making desegregation work and
Speaker 1: making school a happier, more productive place. Yeah, it has been,
Speaker 1: and we thought it would be universally adopted, but it wasn't,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't because the educational system is highly conservative
Speaker 1: and it doesn't change easily. So it's being used. And
Speaker 1: I have a website called Jigsaw which shows people how
Speaker 1: to use it, and they can take all the material
Speaker 1: out of it that they want to. It's all free
Speaker 1: of charge and it gets a lot of hits from teachers,
Speaker 1: so I know people are using it, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: achieved the success and the universality that I would have
Speaker 1: hoped for maybe someday. Yeah, you know, I just figure
Speaker 1: I'm a researcher, I'm not a change agent, and I
Speaker 1: was at a choice point of you know, do I
Speaker 1: really wanted to vote a lot of time to going
Speaker 1: around to schools and training teachers and getting school superintendents
Speaker 1: excited about but that would have taken me away from
Speaker 1: what I'm joy doing most research. Well, hopefully some educators
Speaker 1: will listen to this podcast and inspired to use it.
Speaker 1: I thought them It's right on the website. It easily.
Speaker 1: That's great. I mean, it's very clear that this shifting
Speaker 1: the environment from this competitive environment to cooperative is sort
Speaker 1: of it's a no brainer that that's the kind of
Speaker 1: education system we need to get the best out of students.
Speaker 1: But its unfathomable that I wouldn't be widely adapted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll be wrapping up this interview. You've been
Speaker 1: so generous with your time. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: This Social Animal, which is one of your also monumental
Speaker 1: works in which you now have additions with two of
Speaker 1: your sons, Hal and Josh that you've you've worked on with.
Speaker 1: First of all, I want to why do you think
Speaker 1: it's such a popular book, and also tell people what
Speaker 1: Aaronson's first law is. I'll start with the first law,
Speaker 1: which I said with tongue in cheek. You know, Arison's
Speaker 1: first law like Newton's first law. You know, I was
Speaker 1: making fun of myself, but it's true. And the first
Speaker 1: law is that people who do crazy things are not
Speaker 1: necessarily crazy. And all that means is it's another way
Speaker 1: of saying that the situation is extremely powerful, and we
Speaker 1: know that it has powerful effects on us. And I
Speaker 1: like to point to the Milgram experiment on obedience as
Speaker 1: that the premiere example of a really well done piece
Speaker 1: of research, over and over and over again, in different
Speaker 1: countries with men, women, children, upper class, lower class, blacks, whites, green, yellow,
Speaker 1: two out of three people will go all the way
Speaker 1: in blind obedience to authority. That's the situation that's really powerful,
Speaker 1: and it overcomes personality differences and things of that sort.
Speaker 1: We can't find personality differences that would predict who would
Speaker 1: do it and who wouldn't. And that's people who do
Speaker 1: crazy things are not necessarily crazy. People who do immoral
Speaker 1: things are not necessarily immoral, et cetera. That's Arason's first law.
Speaker 1: And you know I have a lot of first laws.
Speaker 1: I don't have any second laws. When I used to
Speaker 1: teach introductory social psychology, I would always come up with
Speaker 1: something and call it Arason's first law until the student's
Speaker 1: caught on to what I was doing. It just means
Speaker 1: this is important. Pay attention, Social Animal. Why is it popular? Well,
Speaker 1: because it was written with passion. I have taught introductory
Speaker 1: social psychology ever since I started teaching. I loved teaching
Speaker 1: that course. I love being the first I liked virginal
Speaker 1: freshmen and sophomorest they're not technically virgins, but people who
Speaker 1: don't know anything about social psychology. I love being the
Speaker 1: first one to introduce them to this field. What a
Speaker 1: metaphor there, Elliott. Well, it's an exciting field. And when
Speaker 1: I was teaching, I never liked any of the textbooks.
Speaker 1: So one of my graduates, my teaching assistants, I used
Speaker 1: to I used to covetch a lot about the textbooks,
Speaker 1: and Skuy Harold Siegel told me, he said, well, why
Speaker 1: don't you write one of your own? Are you kidding?
Speaker 1: And I'm a researcher. Researchers don't write textbooks. And then
Speaker 1: I started to write these things as handouts to my students,
Speaker 1: just so supplemental lectures. And the next thing I knew
Speaker 1: I had a few things that could be called chapters,
Speaker 1: and publishers started to get interested, and so then I
Speaker 1: kept writing until I had nine chapters of what I
Speaker 1: considered the essence of social psychology. And I wrote it
Speaker 1: not because i wanted to write a textbook, but because
Speaker 1: I'm a teacher, and I wanted to give the students
Speaker 1: more than I could give them just by lecturing to them,
Speaker 1: because it lecture only lasts an hour. And it came
Speaker 1: out really I liked it. I liked the way it
Speaker 1: came out, and you know, the examples from my own
Speaker 1: family and for my life and things like that, and
Speaker 1: it reads like it was written by a person, a living,
Speaker 1: breathing person, not a mechanical machine. When I first started teaching,
Speaker 1: textbooks were written like one study after another, here's a phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and then this one did it, and that one did it,
Speaker 1: and that one did it. Whoa, And so that's how
Speaker 1: I wrote it. And I think passion is a good thing.
Speaker 1: In writing, and nobody wants wants to read a book
Speaker 1: that or even a journal article. The experiment that did this,
Speaker 1: the experiment that did that, Yeah, screw that. I did it.
Speaker 1: And so we used the first person. And in my
Speaker 1: textbook in The Social Animal, it's all written, this is
Speaker 1: what I think. And it does read well. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not the most popular in the world because it
Speaker 1: doesn't have the requisite fifteen chapters. It only has nine
Speaker 1: chapters because I only wrote about the material that I
Speaker 1: really feel passionately about. So it's a boutique book. Well
Speaker 1: but around. It's been around for I don't know, forty
Speaker 1: five years. I'd say it's a classic in psychology. So
Speaker 1: you must be pretty proud of your children. You know.
Speaker 1: I've had the pleasure of personally getting to know your
Speaker 1: son Josh, and you know, he's carrying on the torch
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways with the stereotype threat and
Speaker 1: you know, and and kind of studying effects of certain
Speaker 1: per secons on minority students and things like that. But
Speaker 1: you have four children. He must be so proud of
Speaker 1: all of them. Oh yeah, I mean they're good people.
Speaker 1: And Josh is terrific. He's a very good social psychologist
Speaker 1: he does. He does really interesting research and does it
Speaker 1: well and does it with prudence, prudence and passion. And
Speaker 1: he's a terrific teacher too. He cares about his students.
Speaker 1: He really works hard at preparing his lectures. He's really
Speaker 1: a great professional. I have another son, Hal, who's a sociologist,
Speaker 1: but who's working primarily as a as a solar expert.
Speaker 1: He goes to Africa and installs his solar collectives and
Speaker 1: clinics so that if you happen to need an operation
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, electricity often fails and
Speaker 1: kind of tough to have your appendix being taken out
Speaker 1: and the lights go out and they're working by candlelight.
Speaker 1: And he brought solo electricity to Africa, invented a thing
Speaker 1: called the solar suitcase, which like a piece of carry
Speaker 1: on luggage which has everything you need to light up
Speaker 1: an entire room. And so he's done great work. I
Speaker 1: have a son, Neil, who was a firefighter and paramedic
Speaker 1: who was right there in the trenches with you know
Speaker 1: where things are really happening, harmobile accidents, homeless people in
Speaker 1: the streets, drugged overdoses. Whatever firefighters take care of firefighting
Speaker 1: is one of the things, only one of the things
Speaker 1: they do. And my daughter Julie was an educational evaluatorship.
Speaker 1: Interestingly ironically enough, she would go classrooms and evaluate what
Speaker 1: they were doing, sometimes including teachers who were using the
Speaker 1: jigsaw classroom. So it's a being interested in people and
Speaker 1: doing good important things. Is it's a family business. I
Speaker 1: really like the way each of my kids is doing
Speaker 1: it in their own way. And you know, I have
Speaker 1: a granddaughter who's started college and I don't usually give advice,
Speaker 1: but I told her, you know, forwards, be good and
Speaker 1: do good. You said, like's a roller coaster right in
Speaker 1: your book. It is, so I'm not even gonna bother
Speaker 1: asking you what was your most proud moment or what
Speaker 1: was your most you know as you make a career
Speaker 1: in the book is that it was all part of
Speaker 1: this big roller coaster that you just kind of accept
Speaker 1: every moment right live every moment. And you know, look,
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you what was my proudest moment. I
Speaker 1: can't even tell you what's the best thing I've ever done.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I do know that you know,
Speaker 1: you live your life in the best way that you can,
Speaker 1: and you accept the potholes that you can't do much about.
Speaker 1: You know, going blind was a difficult experience losing my eyesight.
Speaker 1: That happened about seventeen, eighteen years ago. And you play
Speaker 1: the hand, your dealt in the best way you can
Speaker 1: play it. That's an elaboration on be good and do good.
Speaker 1: You play the hand in the best And that's another
Speaker 1: thing I learned from my brother. You know that I'll
Speaker 1: end with this story, Okay, okay, my brother who when
Speaker 1: he was thirty one years old caught lung cancer and
Speaker 1: died a very painful death at thirty two. But once
Speaker 1: when he was in high school, when he was about
Speaker 1: seventeen years old, he used to play a lot of
Speaker 1: poker with a bunch of guys his own age. And
Speaker 1: I was about fourteen, and he once let me sit
Speaker 1: in and play with the big guys. As everybody knows
Speaker 1: that the difference between being seventeen and being fourteen is
Speaker 1: enormous in terms of being welcome and playing something like
Speaker 1: in a poker game which was not high stakes, but
Speaker 1: high stakes for me and I I got dealt three
Speaker 1: or four really crappy hands in a row, and after
Speaker 1: the fourth one, I said, Jesus Christ, I keep getting
Speaker 1: these crappy cards. And I further reached across the table,
Speaker 1: grabbed me by the shirt front and practically lifted me
Speaker 1: out of the chair and said, look it, any asshole
Speaker 1: can win at this game if you're dealt a full house.
Speaker 1: The trick of this game is to win, to do well,
Speaker 1: even if you dealt a lousy hand. Your job is
Speaker 1: to play the hand as well as it can possibly
Speaker 1: be played, no matter what your cards look like. I
Speaker 1: never want to hear you complain again. And then he
Speaker 1: got dealt a terrible hand, thirty one years old and
Speaker 1: you get lung cancer. That's a pretty bad hand he
Speaker 1: was dealt. So it's a terrific lesson. Life is full
Speaker 1: of less Playing the hand that your dealt as well
Speaker 1: as you can play it is a good one. There's
Speaker 1: a good thing to carry around with you. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for sharing that story. Anything you still want
Speaker 1: to accomplish research wise, No, I'm done with research. I
Speaker 1: just hope the field does its job and overcomes this
Speaker 1: latest bump in the road, this crisis you mentioned about replication.
Speaker 1: I was invited to hear the irony. I was invited
Speaker 1: to give a TED talk just a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: It sat on my computer for a while before I
Speaker 1: finally said, no, I can't. I don't. I don't try
Speaker 1: to summarize my any project in eighteen minutes because it
Speaker 1: ends up being perforce. But you might get a book deal. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: I already once had one of those. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: feel like No, it's you take away all the nuances,
Speaker 1: you take away all the difficult parts of it, and
Speaker 1: then you present it, and it's I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: some of those things are very good, but I think
Speaker 1: in general it's done our field a lot of harm. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for such a comprehensive We didn't do an
Speaker 1: e team minute interview, did we. We did a very
Speaker 1: long interview, so long, so thank you to take Okay,
Speaker 1: what do you say? What do you say? Took however
Speaker 1: long you had to take it did. I think we
Speaker 1: got in a lot about you. Really, from the bottom
Speaker 1: of my heart, thank you for the work you've done
Speaker 1: for the field. I consider you a legend in psychology.
Speaker 1: I think you will long be remembered, you know, one
Speaker 1: hundred tutor years from now as a pioneer in the field.
Speaker 1: So thank you for all the incredible work that Okay, Scott,
Speaker 1: good to talk to you. Thank you so good to
Speaker 1: talk to you too. Thank you so much for listening
Speaker 1: to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I
Speaker 1: hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as
Speaker 1: I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in
Speaker 1: some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast
Speaker 1: dot com.