The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research.
[1] Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology,[2] although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations,[3] a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult.
[6] Despite his preeminence in social psychology, Festinger turned to visual perception research in 1964 and then archaeology, history, and the human evolutionary sciences in 1979 until his death in 1989.
"[9] Festinger attended Boys' High School in Brooklyn, and received his BS degree in psychology from the City College of New York in 1939.
[10] He proceeded to study under Kurt Lewin at the University of Iowa, where Festinger received his MA in 1940 and PhD in 1942 in the field of child behavior.
[19] After graduating, Festinger worked as a research associate at Iowa from 1941 to 1943, and then as a statistician for the Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots at the University of Rochester from 1943 to 1945 during World War II.
[23] In 1945, Festinger joined Lewin's newly formed Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor.
"[26] Yet, this endeavor "started as almost an accident"[27] while Festinger was conducting a study on the impact of architectural and ecological factors on student housing satisfaction for the university.
[29] Indeed, Festinger's seminal 1950 paper on informal social communication as a function of pressures toward attitude uniformity within a group cites findings from this seemingly unrelated housing satisfaction study multiple times.
[33] Festinger also received considerable recognition during this time for his work, both from within the field, being awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1959,[34] and outside of the field, being named as one of America's ten most promising scientists by Fortune magazine shortly after publishing social comparison theory.
[35] Despite such recognition, Festinger left the field of social psychology in 1964, attributing his decision to "a conviction that had been growing in me at the time that I, personally, was in a rut and needed an injection of intellectual stimulation from new sources to continue to be productive.
"[37] Writing in 1983, four years after closing his laboratory, Festinger expressed a sense of disappointment with what he and his field had accomplished: Festinger subsequently began exploring prehistoric archaeological data, meeting with Stephen Jay Gould to discuss ideas and visiting archaeological sites to investigate primitive toolmaking firsthand.
[42] Festinger's next and final enterprise was to understand why an idea is accepted or rejected by a culture, and he decided that examining why new technology was adopted quickly in the West but not in the Eastern Byzantine Empire would illuminate the issue.
The team showed that the formation of ties was predicted by propinquity, the physical proximity between where students lived, and not just by similar tastes or beliefs as conventional wisdom assumed.
The group studied a small apocalyptic cult led by Dorothy Martin (under the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book), a suburban housewife.
The messages purportedly said that a flood spreading to form an inland sea stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico would destroy the world on December 21, 1954.
[citation needed] Festinger's seminal 1957 work integrated existing research literature on influence and social communication under his theory of cognitive dissonance.
[61] In the experiment, subjects were asked to perform an hour of boring and monotonous tasks (i.e., repeatedly filling and emptying a tray with 12 spools and turning 48 square pegs in a board clockwise).
"[65] Cognitive dissonance spawned decades of related research, from studies focused on further theoretical refinement and development[66] to domains as varied as decision making, the socialization of children, and color preference.
[67] 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.
"[73] One of the greatest impacts of Festinger's studies lies in their "depict[ion] 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.