Mark Zanna, FRSC (March 4, 1944 – February 22, 2020) was a social psychologist at the University of Waterloo.
While at Princeton University, Zanna and Joel Cooper conducted a landmark experiment that resolved the discrepancy in favor of cognitive dissonance.
[1] Zanna also demonstrated the existence of self-fulfilling prophecies within intergroup interactions.
Zanna and his fellow researchers demonstrated that it was actually non-verbal cues on the part of white interviewers that elicited poor performance from African American candidates.
In a subsequent experiment, the researchers demonstrated that white candidates performed just as poorly when the interviewer treated them the way the previous African American candidates had been treated.