Elliot Aronson

Elliot Aronson is an American social psychologist whose research and teaching connected cognitive dissonance, prejudice reduction, and cooperative learning.

Jigsaw classroom: A cooperative learning method in which students become responsible for teaching one part of a lesson to their peers. Aronson developed this method to reduce racial tension and improve learning in desegregated classrooms.
Effort justification: The tendency to value an outcome more when obtaining it required substantial effort. Aronson’s dissonance research examined how costly effort can strengthen commitment.
Leon Festinger: An American social psychologist who formulated cognitive dissonance theory. Festinger introduced the theory that Aronson later refined around self-concept.
Festinger's cognitive dissonance experiments: Experiments showing that people may change attitudes after acting against them for insufficient external reward. These experiments established the research problem Aronson later linked to threats to self-concept.
Cognitive dissonance: The discomfort that arises from holding inconsistent beliefs, attitudes, or behavior. Aronson helped connect dissonance theory to self-concept and everyday social behavior.
Self-concept: The set of beliefs a person holds about their own attributes, identity, and abilities. Aronson emphasized threats to self-concept as a source of cognitive dissonance.
Muzafer Sherif: A social psychologist known for research on group conflict, norms, and cooperation. Sherif’s work on intergroup relations parallels Aronson’s efforts to reduce prejudice through structured cooperation.
Attitude: A relatively enduring evaluation of a person, object, group, or idea. Aronson studied how attitudes shift when behavior and beliefs become inconsistent.
Prejudice: An unfavorable attitude toward people based on their membership in a social group. Reducing prejudice was a central goal of Aronson’s classroom interventions.
Induced compliance: A situation in which people are persuaded to behave in ways that conflict with their private attitudes. Aronson’s research used induced compliance to study how people resolve attitude–behavior conflict.

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