Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist

271 Pages·2016·2.03 MB·English

by  Elliot Aronson

Table of Contents

Praise
ALSO BY ELLIOT ARONSON
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - Growing Up in Revere
CHAPTER TWO - Boardwalk Morality
CHAPTER THREE - Learning to Learn
CHAPTER FOUR - A Wesleyan Honeymoon
CHAPTER FIVE - Becoming a Social Psychologist
CHAPTER SIX - Outside Harvard Yard
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Warmth of Minnesota
CHAPTER EIGHT - Becoming a Texan
CHAPTER NINE - The Winds of Change
CHAPTER TEN - The Roller Coaster
Acknowledgements
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS BY ELLIOT ARONSON
INDEX
Copyright Page
PRAISE FOR
NOT BY CHANCE ALONE

“An illuminating account of how a great thinker with insatiable curiosity overcame a difficult
childhood through his love of social science.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Elliot Aronson is our modern day Horatio Alger as revealed in this charmingly inviting memoir by
one of psychology’s premier contributors. This master storyteller weaves his personal narrative in
and around the events and people that marked his life path that was destined for greatness, without
help from the vicissitudes of chance.”
—PHIL ZIMBARDO, PAST PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION;
AUTHOR OF THE LUCIFER EFFECT

“This is more than a delightfully written, warm, and wise autobiography by one of our greatest social
scientists; it is also an unusually candid and thoughtful look at the way important new insights are
born, mature, and come to be employed. Aronson’s account of his lifelong relationship with Leon
Festinger, first as student and collaborator and then as lifelong friend, is a must read for anyone who
wants to get to the heart of social psychology.”
—LEE ROSS, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF THE
PERSON AND THE SITUATION

“Absolutely wonderful. Elliot Aronson has long shown that he can write engagingly for a wide
audience, and in Not by Chance Alone he has outdone himself. Not only was I captivated by
Aronson’s truly inspirational life story, but I also learned so much about the people, theories, and
experiments that helped define the field of social psychology.”
—ELIZABETH LOFTUS, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-
IRVINE; PAST PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

“Arguably, Elliot Aronson is first and foremost a very gifted teacher. The clarity he brings to that
enterprise is evident in his success as a distinguished researcher and as a writer (witness the
enormous popularity of his engaging treatise on social psychology, The Social Animal ). And it is
well manifested in this fascinating life story of a professor’s quest to improve the human condition
by understanding the social forces that so powerfully influence our lives. For those interested in an
inside look at the joys and frustrations of an intellectual life, this book is a wonderful read.”
—LUDY T. BENJAMIN, JR., PRESIDENTIAL PROFESSOR OF TEACHING EXCELLENCE,
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

“Aronson’s candid autobiography is an instructive and enjoyable read. In addition, the volume offers
an informed perspective on the sweeping development of social psychology as a discipline over the
past six decades.”
—THOMAS F. PETTIGREW, RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA CRUZ

“Elliot Aronson’s done it again—revealed deep human insights from a deeply human story.”
—ROBERT B. CIALDINI, AUTHOR OF INFLUENCE: SCIENCE AND PRACTICE
ALSO BY ELLIOT ARONSON

The Social Animal

Social Psychology (with Tim Wilson and Robin Akert)

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (with Carol Tavris)

Age of Propaganda (with Anthony Pratkanis)

Nobody Left to Hate

The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with Ruth Aronson)

The Handbook of Social Psychology (with Gardner Lindzey)

The Jigsaw Classroom (with Shelley Patnoe)

Methods of Research in Social Psychology (with Phoebe C. Ellsworth, J. Merrill
Carlsmith, and Marti Hope Gonzales)

TO MY MOST
IMPORTANT
MENTORS:
Jason Aronson
Abraham Maslow
David McClelland
Leon Festinger
Vera Aronson
We work in the dark,
We do what we can,
We give what we have.
Our doubt is our passion,
And our passion is our task.
The rest is the madness of art.
—HENRY JAMES
INTRODUCTION

Elliot at ten and fifty-two.

In 1954, in my senior year at Brandeis University, I heard an invited lecture by
the distinguished nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard reminisced about how in
the 1930s, when he was teaching at the University of Berlin, he gradually
realized that Hitler’s Germany was no place for a Jew. One day he packed a
small valise, hopped on a train, and fled the country. The train was practically
empty. The next day the train was jam-packed, and it was stopped at the border
and forced to turn back. Szilard’s moral of the story was “You don’t have to be
much smarter than the average person—only a little bit smarter.” In this
instance, only one day smarter.

Well, maybe. My guess is that you also have to be incredibly lucky. As I
reflect on my life, Szilard’s story comes to mind because, as a psychologist, I am
well aware that memory is an imperfect historian, and it tends to be imperfect in
a self-serving direction. My aim is to be truthful, but what is the truth?

As I see it, there are essentially two ways to write an autobiography. One is to
take credit for every good outcome: “I was smart enough to go to this prestigious
university and choose to marry that wonderful woman and study with this
professor and go to that leading graduate school so that I could apprentice
myself to that prominent scholar, and then I wisely accepted that perfect job.”
The other way is to attribute everything to the vicissitudes of chance: “My God,
I have been incredibly lucky. At every step of the way I simply happened to be
in the right place at the right time.” But both accounts are true. In my own case,
most of the good things that happened to me were the result of being in the right
place at the right time—in my career, in my choice of a life partner, and in the
friendships and professional relationships I formed—and I also was adept at
making pretty good use of the opportunities that presented themselves to me.

In my life the professional and the personal have been inextricably
intertwined. The Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy witch hunts, the
civil rights movement, the years of sexual liberation and the clarion call to
“make love, not war,” women’s liberation, the extremes of political correctness
on the Right and the Left—all of these events left a deep impression on me,
though sometimes I found myself out of step with the times. I loved the human
potential movement and its efforts to “break down barriers” between people in
the 1960s and 1970s, but that philosophy crashed and burned during the “respect
my boundaries” 1980s. My active, highly visible commitment to civil rights and
freedom of speech got me death threats and charges of being a “nigger lover” in
Austin, Texas, where I was instrumental in bringing about a fair-housing
ordinance. That same commitment also brought me protests and charges of being
a “racist” in Santa Cruz, California, where I protected the right of Arthur Jensen
to present his justifiably unpopular argument that racial differences in IQs are
innate.

Social psychology, a field that examines how circumstances, generations,
cultures, ideas, and guiding principles get inside individuals and shape their
actions, has infused my life. It has provided me with a powerful lens through
which I have been able to view the events around me and understand myself, my
family, and my times. How, I wondered, does any man become a good father if
his own father was absent, physically or psychologically? Traditionally,
psychology has emphasized the power of genetics or of early childhood
experiences—you will become your father whether you want to or not. In
contrast, social psychology attempts to understand the power of your
generation’s influence, your own experiences, and how you interpret them.
When I was fourteen, I was a pretty good baseball player and a member of a
championship team. Yet although we played some of our games on weekends
close to home, my father never came to see me play. He loved baseball, but not
enough to come to one of our games. It didn’t bother me at the time, because, in
those days, hardly anybody’s father came to see his kid play. When I became a