← The Psychology Podcast
The Psychology Podcast
A Legacy of Social Psychology w/ Dr. Elliot Aronson & Dr. Joshua Aronson
01:18:12
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- [00:00]
Joshua Aronson
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
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- [02:05]
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Welcome to Today.
- [02:07]
Joshua Aronson
From back to school to tackling your.
- [02:09]
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To do list, the Today show is your best start to the day.
- [02:12]
Joshua Aronson
It's a new season and every morning we're here to help you take it all along as the forecast calls for football all across the country, blockbuster stars.
- [02:22]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Live concerts, and so much more.
- [02:24]
Elliot Aronson
Wake up to where it's all happening.
- [02:26]
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We're getting back to all of it and the best way to start is together.
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Watch the Today show weekday mornings at 7am on NBC.
- [02:35]
Elliot Aronson
And if you're if your hypothesis is that the situation causes the guards to behave brutally, which that's what it was. That was the Hypothesis, you don't tell them to behave brutally because then your independent variable becomes your dependent variable. You are instructing them to behave the way you're predicting they're going to behave. It's not good research.
- [03:10]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Today, it's an absolute pleasure and honor to have the legendary social psychologists Joshua and Elliot Aronson on the podcast. Elliot Aronson, who is Joshua's father, is 93 years old and originator of the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative learning technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. Dr. Elliot Aronson is the only person in American Psychological association history to have won all three of its major awards for writing, for teaching, and for research. In 2007, he received the William James Award for lifetime Achievement from the APA in which he was cited as the scientist who fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life. Eliot's son Joshua is also a prominent social psychologist, conducting pioneering research on stereotype threat with his colleagues. Joshua is an associate professor of Applied psychology at NYU and directs the Mindful Education Lab, a group of psychologists and neuroscientists dedicated to using research to improve the environments and psychological functioning and learning of people confronted with stress. Both Elliot and Joshua are co authors of the book the Social Animal, which is a classic textbook within psychology. It was a real honor and delight to chat with them about their life and work. So, without further ado, I bring you doctors Elliot and. And Joshua Aronson. So, Elliot and Josh, so great to have you on this podcast. I'm a longtime admirer of both of your research and you are related, is that right?
- [04:41]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are related. I'm the son. I know he looks much younger than me, but I am the son.
- [04:48]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [04:49]
Scott Barry Kaufman
How does that work?
- [04:51]
Joshua Aronson
I don't know. California lifestyle.
- [04:54]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [04:55]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Elliot, you look great. It's so great to have you on. And you guys have spent. And devote your whole lives. You devote your whole lives to the field of social psychology. Can you just explain a little bit to our listeners? Like what is social psychology? What are the parameters around that?
- [05:09]
Elliot Aronson
What is social psychology? It's the way people relate to each other. And the center of social psychology is social influence. How we influence each other and ways of influence. Even historical figures influence us. Our parents influence us. Our teachers influence us. The media certainly influences us. And it determines prejudice, it determines love, it determines hate, it determines all the major aspects of human life and existence. And that's why I love it. I love doing research in this area because it's enlightening. How do people relate to each other? What causes prejudice? Can prejudice be reduced by any interventions? Can education help? These are really vital issues throughout history and certainly as vital today as they've ever been.
- [06:20]
Joshua Aronson
Oh yeah. I might add to that that the center of social psychology has always been considered to be social influence. But I think that it also embodies, if you look at all the research that just the question of what is the experience of being a human being in a social context? What does it feel like to walk into a room and be of a different race? What does it feel like to be. To. To have everybody think you have a learning disability? What is it that. That kind of experience, whether, whether the people are actually in the room with you or not, it's.
- [06:57]
Elliot Aronson
It.
- [06:58]
Joshua Aronson
Social psychology deals with the experience of. Of that.
- [07:02]
Elliot Aronson
It really also tells us a lot about how the human mind works. By studying social psychology, we understand how people feel, think how they feel, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, how they justify their own behavior. They justify their mistakes. How a great many people, especially those in politics, tend to justify their mistakes and how that leads them to make deeper and deeper mistakes. The notion of staying the course sounds attractive, but the notion of digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole cognitively doesn't sound attractive. But it's the same process.
- [07:52]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes. And you put a lot of this research into this seminal book called the Social Animal. When was the first edition of the Social Animal? Elliot, you were the.
- [08:01]
Elliot Aronson
1972. It came out. I wrote it in 70 and 71 and it's now we're working on the 13th edition.
- [08:13]
Joshua Aronson
Wow.
- [08:14]
Elliot Aronson
It was a great experience to write it and just a terrific experience to see how long it's been a major text in the field.
- [08:24]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, it really has been. And you're both co author when you said we both of you are now co authors on it, is that right?
- [08:30]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah. Well, Josh has been helping with me with it over the past, I don't know, 15, 20 years or so.
- [08:39]
Joshua Aronson
I think I started when it was yellow. The COVID changes color. That's the only thing that changes about the outside the appearance of the book. There's no same picture. It just changes color. So what. When did the yellow one come out? That was the first one I helped.
- [08:55]
Elliot Aronson
I think it came out when you were an undergraduate. That was the third edition. Yeah.
- [09:00]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. This book has been sort of in my. This was the first. My first introduction to social psychology was hearing random words at the dinner table that didn't make any sense. Festinger was a common for high frequency word dissonance. Things like that. But then I, when I got into college, I, I took his course and I got the book and it was like, wow, this is what he's been up to all these years. This is really interesting. And it was. Yeah, so that was what. That was 1980. 1980.
- [09:36]
Elliot Aronson
Wow.
- [09:37]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, you mentioned Leon Festinger. There are a bunch of influences and mentors for both of you. I have a little list here from Abraham Maslow, who's an influence on me too, Phil Zimbardo, and may he rest in peace, Ram Dass. How has Ram Dass influenced you guys?
- [09:56]
Elliot Aronson
Ram Dass was a very close friend of mine. We were in graduate school together at Stanford. He was, he was studying developmental psychology and I was studying social psychology. He was a couple years ahead of me and we became very close friends at Stanford. And then he got a job. His first job was teaching at Harvard. And two years later, when I got my PhD, I also was offered a job at Harvard in social psychology. And we renewed our friendship at that time. And I was there. I started in 1959, and I was there until 62 or 63, right around the time that Ram Dass, whose name was Dick Albert, right at that time, hooked up with Tim Leary. And they were supposedly doing a lot of research on psychedelics, mostly psilocybin and lsd, but they were having a very good time with it. And I was actually helping them design experiments on the effectiveness of those psychedelics. But Tim Leary and I didn't get along very well because he, he was hell bent on departing from the science. If they had done some really good research in the early days, we would have been a lot further along in the use of psychedelics for psychotherapy and things like that.
- [11:48]
Joshua Aronson
They really got in the way.
- [11:49]
Scott Barry Kaufman
It's good to see a lot of science now, though, that, you know, John.
- [11:53]
Elliot Aronson
It'S really, it's really starting right now. But there was a lot of negativity around that.
- [12:00]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah, I was going to answer the Ram Dass question because I actually met him once in person. But I knew him through his books and stuff. But I, I got a taste of what he was like before I was born when I came across some of his papers. I was living in the Stanford Prison as. Not as a prisoner, but as Phil Zimbardo's research assistant at the time. And my office was in the Stanford Prison. And instead of commuting home, sometimes I would. I just sleep there. It gave me a real insight into how awful those guys must have had it when they were locked up in that prison, because it was dreadful. This was before you had a cell phone or a smartphone to entertain you. And the lights were hard. So one day there was a desk in there, and out of sheer boredom, in the middle of the night, I ripped open one of the drawers, and there was a stack of letters. And it was like, why would they save these letters written by this. I would call him, like, a brown nosing student. And I was like, God. By halfway through the letter, I did not like the writer of the letter. And then I looked at the signature, and it was Richard Alpert.
- [13:18]
Elliot Aronson
No way.
- [13:19]
Joshua Aronson
Who turned into Ram Dass, who had really introduced me into meditation and the. He kind of took me into that whole world, which I now study in my lab. But to see that he had made this dramatic transformation in terms of his. The way he looked at the world was just. It was something I'll never forget.
- [13:43]
Elliot Aronson
Incredible.
- [13:45]
Scott Barry Kaufman
What about Kinky Friedman? How do you know him?
- [13:53]
Joshua Aronson
Well, Kinky Friedman was my camp counselor when I was sent away to Jewish boys camp in Kerrville, Texas. To be a Jew in Texas meant to be in a real minority. And so we all went away to camp in the summer. And this. My camp counselor was this guitar playing, really charismatic, fun to be around guy. And everybody was calling him Kinky. And his real name was Rich Richie, and he used to tell us stories at night. He was the first person outside of my family where there was somebody like. My dad was like, the first charismatic Jew in Texas that I ever encountered. And I saw. I just think he's influenced me because I think a big part of educating people is to be excellent around them. And he was just excellent. You know, expose kids to excellent. That's one of the big problems with the achievement gap that I see is that kids don't meet people they want to be like. And I wanted to be like Kinky. And I ask students, how many of your teachers in school would you like to be like? And the answer is diminishingly small. It's going down. And so that, to me, is a real focus in creating schools to make sure people are excellent.
- [15:23]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Completely agree and yeah, and inspired. I think that's the big key. I know we're jumping around topics a bit, but I want to return to the field of social psychology a second. There are a lot of topics that are perennial favorites within any social psychology course. What would you say are some things that really haven't replicated over the years you think we really should not include as staples anymore in a social psychology class?
- [15:50]
Joshua Aronson
You know, that's a good question for us because we revise every five years and we have to decide what is true, you know, what is currently considered true. And it's been wrenching to pull some of those great studies out.
- [16:05]
Elliot Aronson
Some of the experiments can't be replicated for ethical reasons, like, for example, Stanley Milgram's experiment on obedience. Nobody could replicate it the way Stanley did it, but somebody did do a version of that. But it's very hard to do ethically and. But it is a great experiment. I mean, it was really a terrific. Started as a great demonstration, but then evolved into an experimental procedure. And I think the results really do hold up because Milgram himself did it a number of times while he could still get away with doing that. But another one is Phil Zimbardo's the Stanford Prison Experiment that Josh already mentioned. And that's. I think that was an interesting idea. Very, very difficult to pull off experimentally, and it wasn't pulled off well, so that there are some serious methodological flaws in that experiment. And of course, the ethics of it were extremely difficult because most experiments in social psychology, even every once in a while, students are made uncomfortable in a social psychological experiment, but they only last for an hour. And then after the experiment is over, we explain to them exactly what was going on. And we spend a lot of time with the participants, helping them feel good about it. And in the prison experiment, it lasted for six days and six nights. You really can't do that to people. So ethically, it has been forbidden, and it should be forbidden. And we don't need to include that in our. In our textbook anymore because the results are very, very shaky.
- [18:24]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah, yeah, we don't. We. In fact, I think that we had a tug of war about it because I think that, you know, some of the. These are my dad's close friends in many cases, and to pull their study out of the narrative of the social animal was really, really hard, especially something that began the book. Phil Zimbardo's book was a. This is the power of the situation. But then when you find out that it wasn't, you have to. You have to take it out. And then the question is, do you mention it with regard to ethics? And I just didn't think there was enough learned in by the experiment. It was just that it was sort of a. It was such a mess methodologically that it's not clear it's telling us anything. And, you know, human nature.
- [19:17]
Elliot Aronson
Scott, that's a really good example of Josh influencing me and he really did, because I love the idea of the experiment. I loved what it what the hypothesis was, and I think the hypothesis is true. But the experiment didn't demonstrate that because it was deeply flawed, because it's a very hard experiment to do. Phil Zimbardo was a very, very close friend of mine. As you know. He died recently, just a few months ago, and it was difficult for me to see to see that the experiment should be taken out of our textbook. But Josh convinced me of it and I'm glad we did. It's not a good representative study, not because Phil is a bad researcher. He's done some excellent research, but this was a very difficult one to do and I don't think anyone could have done it well. So yeah, Phil has done great research, but the prison experiment for which he became very famous was not one of his good research.
- [20:38]
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- [23:09]
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- [23:41]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, fair enough. Jay Van Bevel and Dominic Packer and their substack recently had a whole thing the Stanford Prison Experiment. Debunking a popular psychology myth. And what was really interesting to me is that they shared some of the audio recordings which we can now listen to and we can sort of try to make up our own mind about things. And I think one key aspect of that, a lot of it was good acting, which even fooled the experimenters. You know, like not only fool the experiment, but experimenters also asked them to act in certain ways so they influence the, you know, here's a quote, act as you picture the pigs reacting, you know, so there is. That's social influence on the part of the experimenter. Right?
- [24:25]
Elliot Aronson
Exactly.
- [24:25]
Joshua Aronson
Right now it just shifted into becoming the Milgram Experiment. It's like, will these prisoners people do what Phil Zimbardo tells them to do? Even if that it's not the right thing? I mean it just shifted over into becoming the Milgram Experiment.
- [24:42]
Elliot Aronson
That's right. If your hypothesis is that the situation causes the guards to behave brutally, which that's what it was. That was the hypothesis. You don't tell them to behave brutally because, yeah, that's bad. Research independent variable becomes your dependent variable. You are instructing them to behave the way you're predicting they're going to behave. It's not good research.
- [25:14]
Joshua Aronson
I was Phil Zimbardo's TA and research assistant at Stanford for a year. And it's a little bit of a shame to me that he's known for the prison experiment because there was a brilliance in his approach to doing experiments that I took to my graduate work and it helped me like the things that were never written down about how to do a cognitive dissonance research experiment. Phil Zimbardo was a master of that stuff and I think he got caught the. I think he got ambitious. He wanted to be, he wanted to do something like Milgram and so. And they had this space in the basement and he said, well, why not?
- [26:04]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [26:07]
Joshua Aronson
But I think that if you look at, if you want to appreciate how great he was, read the research that experiments he was doing in the 1960s prior to the, the, prior to the prison experiment. It's absolutely brilliant experiment experimentation. It really is absolutely brilliant.
- [26:32]
Scott Barry Kaufman
And after, I mean his work on evil, just his thoughts and his writings, his book he wrote more recently and on Heroes, I just, I find that work incredibly fascinating and rich.
- [26:45]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [26:46]
Scott Barry Kaufman
What about research replications that hit more closer to home in terms of. It's your actual research, Josh. So what about research and stereotypes?
- [26:55]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. Yeah. So if I were still teaching, I always brought into my class the latest critique of my of stereotype threat because well, I, I would say that's my, that's one thing I'd really attribute to my dad, which is you don't treat your projects or your theories like children. You make a clear distinction that these are not your children to be protected at all costs from all directions. And I met psychologists who treated their theories that way and they're like in the latest rally between them and it's like been 10 years and they're defending this thing. No, you've got it all wrong in this meta analysis is right. And you left out this variable. And I saw that and I was just like, I'm not going to be this way. I'm going to be more like dad. Which is to say, oh, I'm curious about what your, what your criticism is. And, and not to fight. And so I bring that to my students because they need to have. That's, that's the mindset I want to have. That's the growth mindset. In fact in its best form is to say give me the negative stuff about my work. So I don't. If we're getting closer to the truth, I'm happy. If we're Getting farther from the truth. I'm not happy. And I don't know if we're getting closer to the truth. I think it. A lot of this is scholarly brinksmanship and it's hard to see exactly where the truth lies. So this, for me, the replication crisis, for me, it underscored the importance of doing applied work because that's where it really matters. Does my understanding stereotype threat help me help that kid over there? It's either useful or not. And it. What I. So there are some senses in which the gender gap study is just totally not replicated. And I don't know what that means. And that's really a better question for the people that people tell people what.
- [29:21]
Scott Barry Kaufman
The gender gap study is.
- [29:24]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. So there it made a. It was sensational. It was. It showed that if you just described a test as not showing gender differences, magically the gender gap would disappear. Even when we were at Stanford and looking at that data before it was published, we had Claude, had bunch of students trying to replicate it all over and I would get lots of calls. This just doesn't work. And I didn't know what to say because it wasn't my research that. But I noticed that from the very beginning I think the race one is supposedly stronger, you know, that it's more robust, it's held up. But I don't, I don't know. I just don't know. And I'm curious about if we're getting closer to the truth or not. And what I do know for sure is that people going into schools like Jeffrey Cohen, I don't know if you've had him on your podcast.
- [30:28]
Elliot Aronson
I know him.
- [30:28]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, I know, but yeah, so he.
- [30:32]
Joshua Aronson
He does, he does what's called an affirmation in thing where. So basically the idea is you write about really central values to you and that bolsters you against the little threats that you might suffer in that context. What he's found in study after study is that kids that do that score better in grades, they feel better in the classroom, they feel their self esteem is more well grounded in that situation. But it mainly works when you measure stereotype threat and you find out that it's a threatening environment. So I don't know what we mean by does the stereotype threat effect work? Maybe it doesn't work in all the experiments, but it's provided wisdom that now unlocks this other situation. So it brings me back to the. The value of a theory is like the theory is useful if it helps you understand and remediate different situations. Even though one of the studies or two of the studies that involved in. In creating that theory may be flawed and not replicate. That's how I would say it. It's the wisdom.
- [31:58]
Elliot Aronson
That's well put, by the way. I just want to disagree a little bit about one of the things you said. I agree with almost everything you said. You said the really important part of it is if it's applied research, I agree that that's really important, but I don't think it's any more important than research, basic research, about replication and about getting it right. Because if you get it wrong and it looks good, then you're leading other people down a wrong path. And absolutely, you really can't do that. Now, I love what you tell your students about the importance of getting at the truth and how important it is not to get too wedded to your own theory or your own hypothesis in a particular experiment. But what I used to do with my students, in addition to that is put the fear of God in them by saying, okay, let's really look at this procedure and let's look at how we carried it out, and let's find whatever flaws we can find before we write it up. Yeah, because. And the. And the bottom line was, would you rather discover things wrong with it, or would you rather somebody who doesn't like you would discover something that's wrong with it after it's published? And. And that's a good point. That is a. I think that keeps people. It keeps honest people even more honest because that's the negative aspect of it. You don't want to lead people astray. And I'm very pleased that I've been doing research, I don't know, for 50 years, and I've done maybe 150 experiments, and one or two were difficult to replicate, and a couple of times I didn't replicate. But for the most part, almost everything I've done where people have tried to replicate it have been replicated. And for me, that's a tribute to the students I've had the training I had on experimentation with Leon Festinger, who was a master, and by the way, as somebody I disagreed with in terms of the theory and actually revised it a little. And Leon, to his credit early on, was annoyed at me because he felt I was narrowing his theory a little too much. But sooner or later, he came around. It took him four or five years, but he came around and said it was a good change, it was a valuable change, and that was high praise coming.
- [35:01]
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- [38:03]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I think you need a lot of humility, especially in social psychology because you have the stack, it's stacked against you, the odds are stacked against you compared to personality psychology. And let me explain what I mean by that. With personality psychology you get a lot of chances at it. It's called reliability analysis. Social psychology you get like one hour chance to find an effect in a lot of cases. And so you really need to be humble and not, I mean, and there are some psychologists, I mean I have deep respect for John Barg, you know, at Yale and you know, and you know, some of that research, you know, touching the hot coffee, you know, and how he claimed it affects you, it hasn't really replicated that well. And it's not really his fault. I mean it's not like it's not personal. It's just, it's hard to find long lasting generalizable effects when individual differences matter as well. You know.
- [39:11]
Joshua Aronson
I think that John Barges and that style of research is a really good example of why it was great to be able to work with my dad on the social animal because I bring him a study like that and I go dad, if you just hold a cup of coffee and it's warm, your, your view of human nature changes. And, and, and he was like what. It was just, it set off his detector and, and I, I really feel like that he was vindicated by the fact that most of that stuff fell away. Like it just shattered like cheap glass when, when put to the test. And I'm not saying John Barges stuff in particular. There was just a wave of that stuff. It was, it was who can out cute each other with a, with a cute finding. If there's an American flag in the room, you'll, you'll, you know, it does this. It was very seductive for a while to find the minimal.
- [40:21]
Elliot Aronson
And, and, and mind you, we're not saying that John Barge or anyone else intentionally. No data. No, no. It, I mean these things can happen by accident, happen by a lot. Doing the experiment in a way that is not airtight and allows bias to come in. I remember when Chud Mills and I Did the experiment showing that if people go through a severe initiation in order to get into a group, they like that group better than the people who. The control condition that. Where people were randomly assigned to a condition where they only went through a mild initiation because people are reducing dissonance by convincing themselves that the fact that they went through hell in high water makes them want to like the group better in order to demonstrate that they weren't foolish or stupid for having done that. Now, that experiment. In that experiment, I. I did the. I ran the subject, put them through the initiation, and then Judd Mills interviewed them and gave them a questionnaire to fill out without knowing what condition the subjects were in. And after each subject, I asked him to guess which condition the subjects were in. And he was worse than chance. Not significantly worse than chance, but slightly worse than chance. He couldn't figure out whether they were in the mild condition or the severe condition. And then we knew that we had a firewall between the independent variable, which is the manipulation, the important manipulation, and the dependent variable, which is how much they like the group. So he couldn't. By his tone of voice or the way he asked the question, he couldn't possibly influence subjects in the direction of the hypothesis because he didn't know which condition they were in. That is fundamental experimentation 101. But a lot of people neglect to do that. And, and that isn't out of. Out of trying to make the data come out the way you want it to. It comes just because people tend not to dot every I and cross every T unless they're well trained to do that.
- [43:07]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes, yes, this is all true. But there's also human, Human element to this. I mean, as researchers, we are still human. And we do get excited when we get a significant finding. You know, we. We take it personally. We say, oh, look, I found this. Look how cool that is. And I'm the experimenter here. We can't. We can't ignore that. And, you know, I think this is a nice segue into dun, dun, dun growth mindset theory.
- [43:36]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah.
- [43:38]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I had a really wonderful chat with Carol Dweck on my podcast. Our listeners can listen to the whole chat. And I went, you know, study by study, and I talked about some of the newer meta analyses. The effects suggest that it's not as ground, you know, groundbreaking, or as, you know, completely transformative of our entire lives as she has worded it in some of her books. And I asked Carol, I said, you know, Dr. Dweck, given these findings, I just told you, do you still stand by this quote, and I quoted her saying, you know, growth mindset affects and pervades every aspect of your life and is the most important thing out of everything. And she says, yes, I still stand by that. And I think it's interesting, you know, like, I don't know what to do with that. I have deep, deep respect for her and her research. But at what point do we start to kind of revise some of the narratives we have around the pervasiveness of our. Of our constructs?
- [44:37]
Joshua Aronson
I think when. I think. At what point, I think when, you know, I can't account for Carol's maintaining that position, you know, despite all of that, except for the fact that I think all of us have difficulty letting go of ideas that we cherished. And that's why I say you got to be really careful about distinguishing your ideas from your children, because you really should not mistake the two of them. And what I have found is that growth mindset is an interesting thing to talk about. Interesting language. I think I did a couple of really good studies on it, and I mostly left it behind because I tend to get bored and I don't. I think I got tired of reviewing papers of people doing things that I had been planning to do. And so when you're in a big. When you're in a field that's really hot, and both stereotype threat and growth mindset got really hot. Yeah. And I have dyslexia and I can't read quickly and stuff like that. It just sort of. I realized that I couldn't follow every study that came out and be the person that knew all of it. What. What was more interesting to me was to go into schools and to see if I could use this. And how. What I. What I feel like happened with that work is that. And this also happened with the affirmation work, too, is that the demonstration got confused for the concept. And so it'd be like, if so, so what? What I often found myself getting attacked for, well, how dare you do this in schools? And I'm like, I'm not doing this in schools. I'm not. I. The idea should be in school. So, for example, I don't believe that all because Jeff Cohen showed that writing down your strong values shows that affirmations can reduce stereotype threat. I don't believe that it's the answer to all of our educational problems. That's such a far leap. What I do think it means is that the relationship between the teacher and the student matters greatly. And growth mindset and an Affirming relationship and a relationship with a teacher who believes in your growth capability. Very important. But those are two very different things. What you want is an elegant solution that combines all the things that kids need. And this is the way I think of my dad's jigsaw work, which is, you know how I came up with the idea of the elegant solution? Because of Jigsaw, which is the elegant solution takes three or four problems and it solves them with one really neat trick, as they say on the Internet. And in the case of Jigsaw, you had kids beating each other up because you're mixing races together. You have the underachievement of the black and Latino kids who are being now bused into nice white neighborhoods. They're really frustrated. And the superintendent cries for help to his social psych professor, who is Elliot Aarons, and says, well, you bragged a lot about the power of social psychology in class. Can you help us out now that the kids are beating each other up? And they were mainly trying to get the kids to stop beating each other up. He developed this cooperative education thing and it solved like three problems at once. And it didn't do it by saying, oh, self esteem is important. Let's give them a self esteem boost. He said, let's build a system that increases self esteem, empathy and achievement all in one thing. And I love that. Because education suffers from the same problem that nutrition does. They find out, oh, a growth mindset is good. So let's focus all on this one little thing. It'd be like saying, vitamin C is good, let's make a pill instead. There's an elegant solution. It's called an apple. You eat it and you get fiber and vitamin C and all of those things. That's the jigsaw classroom. It gives a lot of nutrients to what kids need. And it's not that one little manipulation. It's a sort of an elegant solution. Does that make sense?
- [49:30]
Scott Barry Kaufman
It makes a lot of sense. I love a systems approach. And I think that's what you're hinting at.
- [49:35]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah.
- [49:36]
Scott Barry Kaufman
And yeah.
- [49:39]
Joshua Aronson
I think when you have 10 different psychologists promoting what they found in the lab rushing into schools, teachers are just confused. They're just confused. You know, it's like, well, I'm trying to address their learning style and induce a growth mindset, but not have too much. It's just very. There's too many. It's like taking a bunch of different vitamin pills when what you should do is eat a good meal.
- [50:07]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes. Tell me some more of the elements of this meal that you're doing with the school that you're starting. So what do you see as some of the core elements? And tell me a little bit about how you're incorporating that into this new school.
- [50:17]
Joshua Aronson
Josh, thank you for asking that, because I think I mentioned Jigsaw just in passing. And I grew up in that system of being in a school that was just frustrating all my needs. And Jigsaw came in and made it good for some of the kids. I was kind of in the control group, so it was lousy. In my control group, kids in Jigsaw were learning to like each other, learning to respect each other, see across racial lines and get along and interact even outside the classroom. And so that was like an entry into my ledger of, oh, my God, if you just organize things differently, you can bring out much nicer qualities in children. So my school, it's actually the oldest boarding school in America, and we bought it because it was struggling, and the vision was to take the world's poorest children and mix them together with the world's wealthiest children. And this is my. I have a billionaire friend who is making this all happen. And so he's asked me to help him design this school. And it's really a school based on social psychological principles. And Jigsaw gave me the confidence that it would work. So in social psych, I think of there being a bunch of social motives, and we all see them in front of us. It's like, you want to belong. You want to understand what's going on and have an understanding with people. You want to be in control of your environment, so you don't want to be pushed around, and you want to be able to trust the people around you. And you want to have a sense that you matter, that if you weren't there, people would miss you, all of those things, and that the work you're doing makes a difference. Most schools frustrate most of those motives, and that's why we're seeing a lot of the problems. You go into a school where everybody feels like they belong. They understand the work they're doing, and they understand why they're doing it. In other words, they understand the importance of what they're doing. If they feel like they trust their teachers, they get some autonomy, but also connectedness to other people. In this one school I worked with, the school went from the absolute bottom of the test score distribution to the top in about four years because we got a new principal who had been trained in psychology.
- [53:04]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, wow.
- [53:04]
Joshua Aronson
And it just. And. And I Mean this, these were dirt poor kids. So that's. I gave a talk about this and the billionaire heard the talk and he brought me in to help build the school. That, that model, I think is really important. So the elegant solution to that problem is like jigsaw, is that you get kids working together on not just learning some material, but by producing a three dimensional something that serves another human being. So in the case of the school that I was studying, kids learn math by raising chickens. And there is so much math involved in raising a chicken that you wouldn't get from a worksheet. You have to figure out how much the feed costs, how much you can sell the eggs for repairs, and then at the end of it, you deliver eggs to poor people. So kids are learning math, but they're also learning that they matter in the world and they understand why they're doing it, why math is important. And this is the, the kids that get the highest test scores and go on to be. Go, go to college and do they.
- [54:25]
Elliot Aronson
End up, do they end up eating the chickens?
- [54:28]
Joshua Aronson
No, they keep the chickens as pets and, and the chickens lay the eggs. I have lots of pictures of kids anytime at this school that you're upset. You can go out into the playground and pick up a chicken and hold it, and there's other animals too. And, and so that, that it. What's truly exciting is that the, when I said before that theories are really great, and when our theories are challenged by replications, that's when I want to go into the schools and say, hey, does growth, if I really believe in this kid, will it really help them? Because that's where, that's where I think that's the final arbiter of whether something's useful or not.
- [55:10]
Elliot Aronson
Very good, Josh.
- [55:11]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, that's very good. And I think that a big message of a lot of the growth mindset research, which I Talked about with Dr. Dweck on my podcast, is that the greatest effects happen in the kids who need it the most. And I think that is a big message of yours as well, Josh. You know, if you average out in the general population and you find a small effect, it's, it's covering up some of the most important nuance. You know, like underprivileged kids, kids in poor neighborhoods. I mean, growth, you know, developing, cultivating growth mindset in face, in the face of challenges. And that, that's particularly important.
- [55:49]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah, absolutely, Scott. And you're talking, you're not, you're kind of talking about children too, of the sort that I'M used to working with. Yeah. And a lot of these kids learn from their parents will tell them that they're stupid. You know, one of the reasons that this school in Appalachia was so successful is that they, their teachers had so much influence on them because their parents were so dysfunctional. I've never seen poverty be such an advantage in my life, but it was because the teachers were just such a stable characters that believed in the kids. And often the parents were in jail and telling the kids that they're stupid. And so growth mindset for these kids is a revelation. You know, like, I can really be something that. That. That I think is the beautiful side of that.
- [56:44]
Elliot Aronson
That is beautiful. And Josh, you know, one of the things that I got out of your description as you told it, so it's really quite beautiful, is the importance of having a billionaire sit in on one of your lectures.
- [57:01]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah.
- [57:02]
Elliot Aronson
And I was so envious. I kept thinking, how come I never had a billionaire? And the reason it's so important for education is that as you know as well as I do, schools are very slow to change, very slow to innovate. Maybe it's partly because there's so many people out there with innovations to sell or to give away that they get overwhelmed by that. But they're very conservative places, and it's so slow. But to have a billionaire building a school for you where you can do things like that, it's marvelous.
- [57:44]
Joshua Aronson
It's even slow then, though, because you're turning around, trying to turn around a culture and trying to change people who've been. All of us have been indoctrinated into a model of schooling that we'd be very afraid to depart from. So in my searches to build the perfect school, I've visited hundreds of them. And some. Some of the most. The best working schools, you. You, most of parent. Most parents would never put their kids in because they're so radical. But those are the schools that have changed my mind about education because they're so radical.
- [58:31]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [58:32]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. So I could. I could go on forever about it, but this is really.
- [58:37]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I know. This is really what.
- [58:41]
Joshua Aronson
I know you wanted to talk about the science of this stuff. And so.
- [58:45]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, no, this is great too. This is great too, because. Well, you have a whole lab on the mindful. Mindfulness is a particular focus of yours as well, in the schools. Is that right, Josh?
- [58:55]
Joshua Aronson
It is. Because you travel through schools and you wait for a certain feeling. So you know that. I don't know if this is published, but somebody did a study that most people can tell whether they'd want their kid in a school within like 10 seconds of entering the school. You know, like we are very attuned to what's good for our kids and what safety and things like that. So I looked around to find a certain feeling and the feeling is, God, I wish my kids could go to school here. This is just so nice. And I'd often find that feeling in the most unlikely places. You know, like in Appalachia for example, where the kids are really poor or but the coolest was a school where the kids don't have any classes. My favorite student that I've ever met in my all my years of teaching had one math class in her whole life and one English class in her whole life. She was self taught in everything and meeting her changed everything about my ideas about education and so I'm glad I I had that. I couldn't recreate her experience because nobody wants to go to send their kid to a school where there's no classes. But we have to open our minds to the things fact that we may have gotten human nature wrong.
- [60:27]
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- [63:29]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I love that. Well, your lab is called the Mindful Education Lab.
- [63:33]
Joshua Aronson
Yes.
- [63:34]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Why, why do you think mindfulness is so important for kids?
- [63:38]
Joshua Aronson
For kids? Well, so it's not called them, it's called the Mindful Education Lab. So it, mindfulness is part of what we do, but it's really in the broadest sense, we approach educational problems mindfully. So good what we do free of charge. For any school who calls me up with a problem, I put my students to work on it. We figure out can this problem be solved by looking at the literature and saying, yep, you've got an X problem, we're going to give you X solution. We or is it a problem that we need to do research on? And so that it's a sort of need driven, service driven laboratory. And it's been wonderful because my students and the needs of the community determine what we work on. We have a research agenda that sort of trots along in the background. But the really exciting things are when I get a call from a school and they say Dr. Aronson 30% of our boys are suicidal. What can we do? And then we go in and talk to the boys and figure out what's going on with them and my students. And I learn an incredible amount that way. It's so much better than when I had a research agenda like confirm growth mindset.
- [65:04]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Right.
- [65:07]
Joshua Aronson
You know that it doesn't, it didn't, that didn't produce the happiness or the understanding that I was looking for. Sure. So what? So, but we do teach children mindfulness because it's the, the best classroom I ever saw in my life was. It must have been. There were kids from every different background. It was a magnet school in New Haven. There were black kids from the ghetto. There were kids and girls in hijabs. There were Chinese kids, Japanese kids. And they were lovely to each other. And just, I was like, what is going on here? And they were doing mindfulness. And I remember just to drop my jaw and I was just like, this is Martin Luther King's dream. These kids are being so supportive. And I remember them talking about the awful things that happen to them in their daily life, like at home in New Haven. And they'd bring it in. Here were 11 year olds, like, acting like they were in some kind of support group. And it was all because they did this mindfulness stuff together. And so, you know, I've been, I, I help schools put in mindfulness programs by getting to know what works. And so that's what we do is we, we mindfully approach their educational problems. And sometimes I tell them, don't do mindfulness. That's the mindful solution is to say, don't do mindfulness. It's not going to work. It's not the answer in all situations.
- [66:43]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I'm really glad you said no.
- [66:45]
Joshua Aronson
I'm really glad.
- [66:46]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah. Yeah.
- [66:47]
Joshua Aronson
I think it was Maslow who said, Wasn't it Maslow who said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Yeah, that's so. That so describes academia. Academics who want to go into the field, have theory, will travel, have intervention, will travel. I just don't, I don't think our kids deserve that.
- [67:11]
Scott Barry Kaufman
They don't. I want to now just transition a little into what makes a good teacher because both of you have won teaching awards and are considered very esteemed, wonderful teachers. So I think you're in a good position to kind of inspire other teachers out there.
- [67:27]
Joshua Aronson
So.
- [67:27]
Scott Barry Kaufman
So what do you think makes a good teacher?
- [67:29]
Elliot Aronson
Well, teaching at a university, there are, I think, three kinds of teaching that we do and they all require. They each require a different set of skills. There's stand up teaching when you're lecturing to a group primarily. And I used to do a lot of that. Like at the University of Texas, I taught an introductory social psychology class that had 600 students in it. And I taught that year after year. Then there's what I call sit down teaching, which is a seminar where the skill involved is mostly shutting up, not talking, and asking good questions and helping a student hone their answer to the question to bring them closer and closer to a full understanding of all of the ramifications of the question that was asked. So the first one is you have to be an interesting person if you want to hold the attention of, of 600 people. And there's a lot of aspects to that. And it's not a matter of standing up and telling jokes like a stand up comedian. It's a matter of talking about something that you think would be interesting to the students.
- [69:04]
Scott Barry Kaufman
I like being funny though.
- [69:06]
Elliot Aronson
I do, I do like a story. It could be funny, but not a joke. Just to warm up the audience. I know, hey, that's fair enough.
- [69:15]
Scott Barry Kaufman
That's fair enough.
- [69:16]
Elliot Aronson
I think what you would talk about is a story about real life that you think might grab their attention, but is about something that you're going to lecture on, some social psychological principles and research that will stand as the underpinning to that story. So that when they leave the lecture hall, and in many cases 20 or 30 or 40 years later, when I get letters from former students of mine, they'll remember the story and will remember the principles of social psychology that undergirded the story. The linkage of the complex abstract idea with research to the story is what is, what helps it become embedded in their consciousness. And I, I love that, that notion because my aim for students who are taking a large introductory class with me is not just to teach them some social, social psychology, not just to hope they all get A's in the course because they really know that stuff, but to teach them something about themselves and about life that may stay with them for their entire lives. And that, that is a very ambitious goal. But it's one that I have and I, and I still have and I get, I get information from my students that, that I, in many cases I've achieved that. Now the sit down kind of teaching or when it's a seminar is to bring out ideas from students and to help them hone their ideas so that they make. It may be kind of a somewhat sloppy idea to begin with, but if you Continue to ask the right questions, you can get them to create the answers. And the third kind of teaching, of course, is being a mentor to taking a graduate student under your wing and really training him to do the things and to be excited about stuff that you yourself think is important and that you reach a common interest with the student so that it's something that he or she finds important and it's something that you yourself are excited about. And those three skills are very different and yet very important and require sensitivity to the student.
- [72:08]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, I see why you've won so many awards, Elliot. That was really well put. In fact, I do want to say you are the only per. I don't know if you know this, you're the only person in the 120 year history of the APA to have won all three of its major awards for writing, for teaching and for research. So if this was the mba, you would be Michael Jordan.
- [72:27]
Elliot Aronson
I just do what I do and it's so exciting for me. My mentor, Leon Festinger, when he wanted me to do a research project with him the summer before I was leaving Stanford to take my first teaching job, and I said, no, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I could use the money, but I really need to start preparing for my course I'm teaching in the fall. He says, what? You're going to prepare for teaching? With your skills as a researcher, why do you want to spend time preparing? And that was one of the few things I disagreed with him on. And that was, I took the teaching very seriously. That's a major part of my job. And I devoted a lot of time and energy to it. Leon didn't agree with that, but he wasn't perfect. Yeah.
- [73:26]
Joshua Aronson
He finally comes out. Leon Festinger, imperfect human.
- [73:30]
Elliot Aronson
But you are.
- [73:31]
Scott Barry Kaufman
You are.
- [73:32]
Joshua Aronson
Yes, you're. You're the perfect. You're the perfect child of Maslow and Festinger. If they could have gotten together and had a baby, you'd be it.
- [73:40]
Elliot Aronson
Well, that is a great compliment. And by the way, it's the Maslow influence in me that made me want to go into psychology. Maslow was my mentor when I was an undergraduate and we really hit it off together. And he was an inspirational guy. And his idea, here's a lousy scientist. He didn't know how to do science, and I didn't know at the time that he didn't know how to do philosopher.
- [74:13]
Scott Barry Kaufman
He was a philosopher, more of a.
- [74:15]
Elliot Aronson
Philosopher than anything else, but he was inspirational. And his belief was that psychology can and should be used to improve the human condition. And that's why I went into graduate school. When I was in graduate school, I met this guy, Leon Festinger, who didn't give a fig about applying what we know to the real world. What he was interested in, and only what he was interested in was discovering how the human mind works and, and how you, how you can. How you can improve the. How you can improve experimentation. So I started off going into psychology because I wanted to do good. And then I met Festinger, and what I learned from him and got really excited about was how to do good research, how to do good experiments. And then, Josh, when you talk about the Jigsaw classroom, that to me is a combination of doing good and doing good research. And I think what we discussed earlier, very early in this discussion, Scott, is that why it's important to get it right when you're doing it. Not, not to, not to publish the damn thing and not to become famous, but to do the experiment in a very careful way and get it right so that people who want to follow up on the research you do can expand on it and to prove you wrong if you happen to be wrong with it. And that can happen, too. And then when you really know it's right, to bring it into the real world.
- [76:08]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah. Thank you for this wisdom. Josh, do you want to add anything quickly about teaching what makes a good teacher from your perspective?
- [76:15]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. It was interesting listening to my dad talk about the three kinds of teaching, and I agree with that. I try to combine all of those into every course I teach because students need it. I became a much better teacher. I was already pretty good, but when I started studying schools that worked and how they worked, I started applying some of these, the lessons of kindergarten and first grade to my college class. And it started working really well. And, and the, the thing that I learned about these great schools was that they try to learn everything they can about each student, and then knowing them makes a better teacher for them. And so I, I would, I would get my students to fill out surveys with their favorite music and stuff like that, and I would listen to the songs that they were listening to. So, like, I've felt like I was preparing for a role, you know, like I need to know, because especially as I'm getting older, these students are getting more and more different. And so I ask them questions like, what problems do you lie away at night thinking about? And what problems would you like to be able to solve with psychology? And, and so I, I, then I write my lectures around their concerns, getting Harder because, you know, half of my students think about why don't more people like K Pop, you know, And I don't know how to, you know, empathize with that so much because I really don't. Like.
- [77:55]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:56]
Joshua Aronson
How do you like. Okay, well, you're lucky to have such, you know, such problems to worry about. Yeah, I. I think it's really challenging now to teach. And what I try to do is provoke my students and model the way to be as a human being. And I would say the most important thing I do is I try to get them to define what the good life is and then show. And show them that social psychology has a tremendous amount to say about living a good life. Like you said, fame and fortune are not the answers to being happy. We know that because social psychologists have studied that. So what should be the good life? And what would you. What. I asked them what. What reminder would you tattoo onto your body to remind you who you are and what your purpose is? And I. By the end of the course, I want you to have a well thought out tattoo.
- [78:56]
Elliot Aronson
I love that.
- [78:57]
Scott Barry Kaufman
And you're talking about economic fortune. I personally feel like I have so much social fortune in my life that is just. It's like, it makes my life so meaningful. Like, I have. I just. I love my friends like you.
- [79:12]
Joshua Aronson
Like you guys. Yeah.
- [79:14]
Scott Barry Kaufman
To me, that's.
- [79:14]
Joshua Aronson
Yeah. No, that's what you. Some people learn that too late in life that it's not about the money.
- [79:20]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah. For the last part of today's interview, I'd like to talk about death a little bit. Josh, you had a year of living deathfully, and I was wondering if you.
- [79:29]
Joshua Aronson
Could just talk a little about.
- [79:30]
Scott Barry Kaufman
About what that. What that means.
- [79:32]
Joshua Aronson
So I was invited to give advice about how to. About the good life. And it was like a January thing. And so there were rabbis talking about, you know, reading, a year of reading. And I thought living deathfully, because I studied with a Buddhist teacher who I caught just at the right time. Right after Trump was elected. NYU was like, you could have. It was like a bomb had been dropped on the place. And my students didn't show up to class. I found myself in a Buddhism class that, like, the day after. And the Buddhist teacher goes, I understand how you are all feeling. I have felt this way in my life, but I don't feel that way now, even though I wanted a different outcome. And he goes, you want to know why? He goes, because every day I spend 10 minutes thinking about how all this is going away. It's just Temporary. Everything you think is. Is permanent, it's going away.
- [80:41]
Elliot Aronson
So.
- [80:42]
Joshua Aronson
So get used to that feeling. And I felt myself getting lighter when I. And so every day after my meditation, I spent five minutes going, this may be the last day of my life.
- [80:53]
Elliot Aronson
Wow.
- [80:54]
Joshua Aronson
This may be the last time I pet my dog, kiss my wife, call my father. It. It lends an incredible poignancy to life. And I. It's weird because social psych was wrong on this one. It didn't capture what the Buddhists and the Stoics were telling us about contemplating your death. It was going. Mortality salience. This makes assholes out of people. And I. That I don't. There may be some truth to that experimentally, but for me, in the mindset of appreciate every moment, there's nothing like death to remind you of that. That you're. That you're mortal. And. And so it takes away a lot of the fears that I had and a lot of the worries about trivial stuff. And I think that's the. That's something that I try to give to my students, even though the idea that they're contemplating death at their young age is. Is it. It really works better when you're older and you truly feel that the time is running out.
- [82:04]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Our mutual friend Abraham Maslow talked about this. You know, the postmortem life. He said, I wish everyone could live a postmortem life, which is what he experienced after his first heart attack, and he still lived. He said, wow, I wish everyone could experience this kind of transcendence.
- [82:21]
Elliot Aronson
Yeah.
- [82:22]
Scott Barry Kaufman
This transcendent state of everyday consciousness. Elliot, can you give me some reflections here on death?
- [82:29]
Elliot Aronson
I hope so. I don't know. I don't know where to start. I grew up. I had a brother who was two and a half years older than I am, and he died of cancer when he was 32 years old. And my father died when he was in his 40s. And so I came out of both of those experiences really with the belief that I might not have a long time to live. And so it made me very conscious of. Of dying. And I had a young family at the time that my brother died. I had. Josh was just born right around the time that my brother was dying. And I have four kids. And I was thinking, God, how much time do I have left? And it really focused me on exactly what Josh just was talking about on, you might not have much time left. Really enjoy what you're doing. And what do you enjoy doing? And it was being with my family, telling the kids bedtime stories. Being with my wife and really enjoying her and teaching and doing research. And so I did everything I had been doing, but with more awareness and more intensity. Now I'm 93 years old, I never expected to live this long. I've lived almost three times as long as my brother, who was my first mentor lives. So I'm really feeling, I'm really feeling that. And you live long enough and your friends keep dying. Leon Festinger died. Abe Maslow died. Ned Jones died. Zimbardo, Phil Zimbardo, Lee Ross, I mean, a lot of them. And I've been giving an awful people who aren't famous but who are old good friends of mine. And I've given a lot of eulogies in the past 10 years. And there's one nice thing about giving a eulogy, it makes you really think about another person's life and reflect back and think of your own. When I hit 90, when a couple of my kids asked me, well, what should we do for your 90th birthday? That's a milestone, I thought about that and I thought, you know what? Every time I give a eulogy, people would come back to me and say something like, gee, what a great eulogy. It's too bad Ned wasn't alive to give what you have to say about him. It's too bad that Leon wasn't alive to hear what you had to say about him. Yes, etc. And I thought, what I want is a living eulogy. What I want is for all of you to sit down and write a eulogy as if I had just died. Tell me what I meant to you. Tell me what was important about me to you. And then my daughter in law, one of my daughters in law, who she's a very active, very powerful person, wrote to all of my friends, to some of my students, and they all wrote things or made videos and stuff like that.
- [86:15]
Joshua Aronson
And I've seen a theology now every.
- [86:18]
Elliot Aronson
Once in a while and. And it's really an exciting process. Every time I'm feeling down, the eulogies perk me up and make me much more conscious and much more aware of what's important to me.
- [86:34]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, I love this. Well, I hope this episode as well is a tribute to you and really offers that purpose as well to our listeners. A big part of living, a big part of a good death is a good life. You've certainly lived and are still living a very good life. And a big part of a good life is having transcendence. And sometimes that takes the form of beautiful children. So tell Me a little bit about, are you proud of your son, Elliot?
- [87:10]
Elliot Aronson
I'm proud of Josh a lot. And Josh is the only one of my sons who became a social psychologist. And a lot of people said, oh, what a courageous thing to do. I never thought of it as courageous, but I thought of it as difficult. And Josh has done some beautiful work. I love his attitude toward research. I love his attitude toward teaching. I've seen him teach. I've heard him lecture at convention. He's terrific. And his research has been very, very good. And I like what. I love what he's doing now.
- [87:43]
Joshua Aronson
Thanks for the eulogy, man.
- [87:48]
Elliot Aronson
But I have four kids, and I love what each of them does. And the one thing they have in common that just makes me bubble over with happiness is that none of them think that money and fame is really important. None of them believe in that shit. Most of them, they're all doing things that are good for humanity. Yeah, I'm touched by all of them.
- [88:18]
Scott Barry Kaufman
That's a big part of transcendence. And Josh, in 30 seconds or less, just send us off. You're telling us what you're proud of about your father.
- [88:30]
Joshua Aronson
I'm proud that he could have become one of those celebrity academics, and he always resisted it. And so I. I teach that to my students. I go two questions that people automatically say yes to, that they should think, can I have more money? And do you want to. Do you want more money or do you want more fame? If you really look at it, you should think very carefully about those things. And so, yeah, I'm proud that he's the real deal, he's authentic and that he cares about people and that he's created a legacy of doing research that blends the best of Maslow with the best of Festinger and made something that I hope the field will return to over and over again. That's what the social animal is about, is a reminder that the field used to do some really cool stuff and it wasn't online.
- [89:39]
Scott Barry Kaufman
Thank you so much, guys.
- [89:42]
Joshua Aronson
Thank you. It was really fun.
- [89:44]
Elliot Aronson
You asked very good questions. This was great fun.
- [89:52]
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