Leon Festinger - Legacy

Legacy

Social comparison theory and cognitive dissonance have been described by other psychologists as "the two most fruitful theories in social psychology." Cognitive dissonance has been variously described as "social psychology's most notable achievement," "the most important development in social psychology to date," and a theory without which "social psychology would not be what it is today." Cognitive dissonance spawned decades of related research, from studies focused on further theoretical refinement and development to domains as varied as decision making, the socialization of children, and color preference.

In addition, Festinger is credited with the ascendancy of laboratory experimentation in social psychology as one who "converted the experiment into a powerful scientific instrument with a central role in the search for knowledge." Indeed, an obituary published by the American Psychologist stated that it was "doubtful that experimental psychology would exist at all" without Festinger. Yet, it seems that Festinger was wary about burdensome demands for greater empirical precision. Warning against the dangers of such demands when theoretical concepts are not yet fully developed, Festinger stated, "research can increasingly address itself to minor unclarities in prior research rather than to larger issues; people can lose sight of the basic problems because the field becomes defined by the ongoing research." He also stressed that laboratory experimentation "cannot exist by itself," but that "there should be an active interrelation between laboratory experimentation and the study of real-life situations."

However, perhaps one of the greatest impacts of Festinger's work lies in their "depict of social behavior as the responses of a thinking organism continually acting to bring order into his world, rather than as the blind impulses of a creature of emotion and habit," as cited in his Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. The characterization of man as a creature of habit conditioned by stimulus-response reinforcement processes was championed by behaviorism, which had dominated psychology until that time. Psychology as practiced by behaviorists focused only on the observable, i.e., behavior and external rewards, with no reference to cognitive or emotional processes. Yet, theories like cognitive dissonance could not be explained in behaviorist terms. For example, according to behaviorism, liking was simply a function of reward, and thus greater reward would produce greater liking, but Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment clearly demonstrated greater liking with lower reward (subjects paid $1 to say that they liked to experiment actually came to like the experiment better than those paid $20), a result that required acknowledging cognitive processes to explain. Thus, with Festinger's theories and the research that they generated, "the monolithic grip that reinforcement theory had held on social psychology was effectively and permanently broken."