1998-1999 award winners.

Abstract

He changed the way we look at everyday life. For his innovative approach to methodology: He showed that experiments can be audacious, precise, imaginative, and impactful. For the dynamic clarity of his writing and teaching: He inspired students to love and appreciate social psychology. For his achievements in applying social psychological wisdom to the areas of energy use, AIDS prevention, and prejudice reduction: He improved the lives of countless people. Elliot Aronson's vision of social psychology as a rigorous science in the service of humanity stands as a beacon for generations of scientists to come." BiographyElliot Aronson grew up in the poor, working-class town of Revere, Massachusetts, in the 1930s and 1940s. His was the only Jewish family in a virulently anti-Semitic neighborhood. At dusk, walking home from Hebrew school, he was occasionally roughed up by gangs of tough guys shouting anti-Semitic epithets. One of his earliest vivid memories involves sitting on the curb at age 9, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, wondering how it was that these kids could hate him so much. They didn't even know him! Were they born hating Jews or did that kind of hatred have to be taught? If they got to know him better, would they like him a little more? If they liked him more, would they hate other Jews less? He didn't realize it at the time, but those were profound social psychological questions.Years later, as an indifferent high school student, Aronson astonished his teachers (and himself) with a very high score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Brandeis University had recently opened its doors and, perhaps because of its newness, took a huge risk by allowing his SAT score to override his poor grades and offering him a work-study scholarship. Without that scholarship, he never would have been able to attend college.Aronson began his college career as an economics major, solely because his father, an uneducated factory worker who had recently died, firmly believed in the value of a college education as a ticket to financial security. That changed one day when Aronson found himself following a pretty young woman into her class, hoping to continue the conversation they'd begun in the coffee shop. The class was Introductory Psychology, and the lecture that day concerned prejudice. Lo and behold, the professor was raising the same questions Aronson had been asking himself as a young boy sitting on the curb. For the first time, he realized that there was an entire science devoted to asking such questions. He switched his major to psychology that same day. The teacher of that class was Abraham Maslow.This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.Receiving an award for a lifetime of scientific dabbling provides me with a powerful impetus (as well as a wonderful excuse) to look over my shoulder, as it were, at some 40 years of my own experiments to ...