(in no particular order)
1.) Leon Festinger is sexy because he is big on consistency. The social comparison theory (1954) sand cognitive dissonance (1957) both hinge on consistency, whether with similar others or between our attitudes and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance is sexy because it demonstrates a counterintuitive idea that rather than changing one’s behavior to fit one’s attitudes, sometimes it’s the other way around. People actually change their attitudes, which I argue is more salient to one’s identity, to fit and justify their behavior. Consistency is sexy.
2.) Solomon Asch is sexy because he got participants to behave in a way that was inconsistent with their attitudes. Again, consistency (and inconsistency) is cool. In his famous line judgment study (1951), 37% of responses conformed to the group standard and thus were incorrect answers. The normative influence of conformity is sexy because these participants that gave incorrect answers knew that their answers weren’t actually correct! They just didn’t want to appear deviant. Who knew that following norms could outweigh being correct? Social influence in sexy.
3.) Robert Zajonc is sexy because he got cockroaches to navigate a maze (1969). Who knew that cockroaches are also subject to social facilitation?! Zajonc (1965, 1980) is also cool because he recognized that presence of other for easy tasks improves performance whereas hard tasks hinder performance. Social facilitation is sexy because it demonstrates that we do not live in a vacuum. Our performance, behavior, attitudes, etc are products of our environment and social interactions. And social interactions are sexy.
4.) Gordon Allport is sexy because he not only gave us a great definition of social psychology that includes the implied or imagined presence of others (1985), he also created the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He is also the father of the contact hypothesis (1954) which is so intuitive. How do you fix prejudice, stereotypes, etc? Just be around diverse people! Duh! Okay, it’s not that simple, but the contact hypothesis is sexy because it encourages and promotes diversity, equality, and cooperation. Equality is sexy.
5.) Robert Cialdini is sexy because he teaches us how to get what we want. His compliance techniques (2007) demonstrate that people can be easily swayed to comply with requests, even from total strangers. The sexiest compliance strategy is door-in-the-face (2007) because even though you’re tricking someone, there are rarely hard feelings about it. The fact that a huge, unreasonable request can later lead to compliance with a smaller, intended request blows my mind. I use this technique all the time. The key is to not be too unreasonable with the first request, like when I asked Lauren if we could have a baby in order to get her to agree to a puppy. Compliance is sexy.
Allport, G. W. (1985) The historical background of social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (3rd ed., Vol. I, pp 1-46). New York: Random House.
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, leadership, and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Compresence. In P.B. Paulus (Ed.), Psychology of group influence (pp. 35-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zanjonc, R.B. (Heingartner, A., & Herman, E. M. (1969). Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 82-92.
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