Psychologists

Leon Festinger

American social psychologist (1919-1989) who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance (1957) and social comparison theory (1954), turning mid-century social psychology decisively toward laboratory experimentation while keeping field research alive. His 1956 book When Prophecy Fails was the first experimental evidence of belief perseverance, drawn from his team's covert infiltration of a doomsday cult predicting an apocalyptic flood. Trained under Kurt Lewin at Iowa, he taught at MIT, Michigan, Minnesota, Stanford, and the New School, abruptly leaving social psychology in 1964 for visual perception and later for human prehistoric archaeology. Following Skinner, Piaget, Freud, and Bandura, Festinger was ranked the fifth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century, yet the ethics of his cult fieldwork and replication debates over dissonance experiments remain live controversies.

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