Elliot Aronson - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Aronson grew up in extreme poverty in Revere, Massachusetts, during the Great Depression. His was the only Jewish family in the neighbourhood, and it was not rare for Aronson to be bullied on the way home from Hebrew school by anti-Semitic gangs. He belief that every life progress is based on actions of luck, opportunity, talent, and intuition together.Although his high school grades were mediocre, his SAT scores were high enough to earn him a work/study scholarship at Brandeis University. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Brandeis in 1954 (where he was a protégé of the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow). He went on to earn a Master's degree from Wesleyan University in 1956 (where he worked with David McClelland), and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1959 (where his doctoral advisor and mentor was the experimental social psychologist Leon Festinger).

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