Leon Festinger: biography of this social psychologist.

Summary of the life and career of Leon Festinger, researcher in social psychology.

Considered one of the leading psychologists of the twentieth century, Leon Festinger's life is quite interesting, but also anecdotal.

Although at the beginning he was not very interested in social psychology, with the passage of time he ended up becoming a social psychologist and, in addition, he would be the father of two of the great theories within this field.

Let's discover the life of this researcher, his professional career and his two main theories, by means of a biography of Leon Festinger.

Brief biography of Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger is one of the greatest social psychologists of the 20th century, even though he did not want to be one at first.

In fact, for him, this branch of behavioral science was too lax, something that did not interest him much. However, although as a young man he was more interested in statistics applied to psychological science, he would end up making a significant contribution to social psychology. It is not surprising that he is the fifth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century, surpassed only by B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud and Albert Bandura.

Early years

Leon Festinger was born in New York, United States, on May 8, 1919, to a Jewish family.He was born in New York, United States, on May 8, 1919, in the bosom of a Jewish family of Russian origin. From his childhood we know that he attended the Boys' High School in Brooklyn.

At the age of 20, in 1939, he received his degree in psychology at the City College of New York. He later moved to the University of Iowa, where he studied under Kurt Lewin and received his doctorate in child psychology in 1942.

As a young man, Festinger was not at all interested in social psychology and, in fact, never trained to be a social psychologist. and, in fact, never took any training in his entire life to become a social psychologist. Going to Iowa he was only interested in Lewin's work on systems in tension. However, it so happened that by the time Festinger transferred to the institution, Lewin took a more social psychology-oriented view.

Despite this surprise, Festinger continued to study under Lewin's tutelage, although he did not give up his interest in social psychology. did not give up his interest in statistics and the level of aspiration as a psychological construct, developing a quantitative model of decision making.. The young Leon Festinger considered that social psychology was a psychological branch with a research method that was too vague, and that he wished to work in more "rigorous" and "concrete" branches.

Festinger would work as a research associate at Iowa from 1941 to 1943 and, after that, he would work as a statistician in the Aircraft Pilot Selection and Training Committee at the University of Rochester, specifically between 1943 and 1945. These were the hard years of the Second World War in which psychological research was in great demand, not only to know the aptitude of the pilots, but also to know the aptitude of the pilots.not only to know the aptitude of the combatants, but also to discover ways to psychologically destabilize the enemy.

Adulthood and professional career

In 1943 Leon Festinger married Mary Oliver Ballou, a pianist with whom he would have three children: Catherine, Richard and Kurt. Although the marriage brought three children into the world, it eventually dissolved and Festinger would later remarry in 1968, this time to Trudy Bradley, a professor of social work at New York University.

In 1945 Festinger joined Kurt Lewin's newly created Group Dynamics Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor.at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was at this institution that Festinger would inadvertently become a full-fledged social psychologist. It was also at MIT that he began his research on social communication and peer pressure, which marked an important turning point in his interests in psychology.

After Lewin's death in 1947 Festinger went to work at the University of Michigan in 1948. He later moved to the University of Minnesota in 1951, and then went to Stanford University in 1955. It was in these years that Leon Festinger would write his most influential article on the theory of social comparison and also on the theory of cognitive dissonance.. These two theories are among the most important contributions in the field of social psychology of the twentieth century.

Thanks to this he gained much reputation and recognition, being awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association. His impact was also great outside the field of psychology, being considered one of the ten most relevant scientists in the United States by the magazine Fortuneshortly after he published his theory on social comparison.

Despite his growing fame, Leon Festinger decided to change his focus of study in 1964, preferring to investigate the visual system, especially eye movement and color perception. In 1968 he returned to his native New York, continuing to study perception at the New School for Social Research. However, he would eventually close his laboratory in 1979.

Final years

In 1983, four years after closing his laboratory, Festinger expressed some dissatisfaction with what he and his field had achieved. He felt that, despite forty years of work in social psychology, little had really been accomplished.. Moreover, he felt that many social issues that needed to be addressed psychologically had been neglected, and that attention had been given to rather trivial matters.

Motivated by this disagreement, he decided to set out to study the fossil record and contact Stephen Jay Gould, a geologist and evolutionary biologist, to discuss ideas about the evolution of human behavior and to visit archaeological sites. His intention was to learn more about how early humans behaved socially from the remains of their tools. His efforts resulted in the publication of his book "The Human Legacy" (1983) in which he described how humans evolved and developed into more complex societies.

Among his later work he sought to understand what motivated a culture to reject or accept a new idea.. He tried to relate this to the development and evolution of various societies throughout history, comparing how the acceptance or rejection of the same idea in two different cultures had led to changes in the mentality of its members. He was working on a book about it but, unfortunately, Cancer caught him before he could publish anything. He decided not to undergo treatment, and died on February 11, 1989.

Theories of Leon Festinger

As we have already mentioned, there are two fundamental theories with which Festinger contributed significantly to the field of social psychology: the theory of cognitive dissonance and the theory of social comparison.

Cognitive dissonance theory

People have all kinds of beliefs, there is no doubt about that. However, what happens when two or more of these strongly held beliefs come into conflict? We feel uncomfortable because our value system is no longer in harmony and is now in tension. For example, if we consider ourselves anti-racist but discover that our favorite singer is openly racist, it is clear that we are not going to be indifferent.

We call this conflict between two or more contradictory beliefs cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, there is in each person a certain tendency to maintain coherence and harmony between his or her behaviors and beliefs. When this coherence is broken, dissonance is produced, which causes discomfort in the person..

To stop feeling uncomfortable, the person will have to change some of the factors that provoke this dissonance. There are usually three ways to reduce cognitive dissonance.

1. Changing attitudes to create greater coherence

One of the ways to reduce cognitive dissonance is to changing or eliminating one of the beliefs, behaviors or attitudes, especially the one that initiated the discomfort.. This way is really difficult to apply, since it implies changing, a process that is very difficult for us.

For example, if we have just discovered that our favorite singer is racist and we are anti-racist, what we would do would be to stop idolizing that singer and not continue listening to his music or even throw all the discography we have of him in the trash.

2. Acquire new information that reduces the dissonance.

This option consists of incorporating a new belief or attitude that reduces the tension between previous beliefs. It consists of reducing the discomfort by looking for something new that allows us to justify our attitudes..

In the case of the example, it would consist of looking for information that allows us to understand why he says he is a racist, in what kind of environment he grew up and to evaluate if we are really acting appropriately by canceling or rejecting him because of his ideas instead of his music.

3. Reduce the importance of beliefs

This third option consists of reducing the value of the beliefs or ideas we hold, justifying behaviors that, although they may be harmful, make us happy.. In other words, it consists of relativizing beliefs in order to reduce the tension between them.

In the case of the racist singer, it would be to think that the fact that the singer is racist is not so bad, considering that, after all, everyone is to a greater or lesser extent racist and the fact that he has recognized it is not a reason to reject it.

Social comparison theory

Leon Festinger's other major contribution to social psychology is his 1954 social comparison theory. This theory is based on factors such as personal self-evaluation and self-concept. Festinger argued that we are constantly comparing ourselves to others.We are not only a good or a bad concept of ourselves based on what we see or perceive from other people. Our perception of our abilities is, in reality, a mix between what we really master and what we believe we have.

Our self-concept is directly linked to what we perceive others to have, which we use as a kind of a "self-concept".We use it as a kind of standard of what is right and wrong to be. Of course, this self-concept will change depending on the context in which we find ourselves. Depending on the characteristics of other people and how such traits are perceived as positive or negative, our view of ourselves will consequently be more favorable or unfavorable.

This can be clearly seen with the canon of beauty, both masculine and feminine. Although it is true that in recent years a more open image of what is understood by beautiful men and women has been accepted, the truth is that the traditional canon continues to exert a lot of weight: men must be muscular and women must be slim, so it is socially acceptable for men to go to the gym to gain muscle mass and for women to reduce their percentage of fat.

This is clearly visible in the media, especially in movies and hygiene advertisements. This makes guys who are not lean and women who are slightly overweight look less desirable, undervalued and may even develop eating behavior problems or, at the very least, body dysmorphia.

But But one should not make the mistake of thinking that the social comparison theory is limited to body image.. More intellectual, economic and social aspects are also taken into account. For example, a child who goes to school and it turns out that his classmates are children of parents with more money than his own, seeing that they have better quality backpacks, pencil cases and clothes will not be able to avoid feeling bad about it.

Bibliographical references:

• Festinger, L. (1983). The Human Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Festinger, L. (Ed.). (1980). Retrospections on Social Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.