Elliot Aronson

Elliot Aronson (born 1932) is a prominent American social psychologist, born in Revere, Massachusetts, renowned as a creative methodologist who conducts carefully crafted experiments on the causes and consequences of human social behavior, building on the legacy of Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger. He earned his bachelor's degree at Brandeis University, where Abraham Maslow mentored him, and his doctorate at Stanford University in 1959 under Festinger. He held faculty positions at Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he has been professor emeritus since 1994. His textbook The Social Animal is widely used, and he coedited two editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology.