A Legacy of Social Psychology w/ Dr. Elliot Aronson & Dr. Joshua Aronson

In this special episode, Scott is joined by two legendary figures in social psychology: Dr. Elliot Aronson and his son, Dr. Joshua Aronson. At 93, Elliot Aronson remains a towering influence in psychology, known for pioneering the Jigsaw Classroom—a groundbreaking cooperative learning technique that reduces interethnic hostility and enhances learning. He is the only person in American Psychological Association history to receive all three of its major awards for research, teaching, and writing, including the prestigious William James Award for Lifetime Achievement.

His son, Dr. Joshua Aronson, is a distinguished social psychologist and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. His pioneering research on stereotype threat has reshaped our understanding of learning and performance under stress. As the director of the Mindful Education Lab, he leads efforts to improve psychological resilience and learning environments.

Together, Elliot and Joshua co-authored The Social Animal, a seminal textbook in psychology. In this conversation, Scott, Elliot and Joshua explore this groundbreaking work, their personal journeys, and the lasting impact of their research on education, social behavior, and human psychology.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And 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 then your independent variable becomes your dependent variable.

(00:22):
You are instructing them to behave the way you're predicting
they're going to behave. It's not good research.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Today.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
It's an absolute pleasure and honor to have the legendary
social psychologists Joshua and Elliott Aronson on the podcast. Elliot Aronson,
who is Joshua's father, is ninety three years old and
originator of the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative learning technique that
facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. Doctor Elliott

(00:55):
Aronson is the only person in American Psychological Association history
who have won all all three of its major awards
for writing, for teaching, and for research. In two thousand
and seven, he received the William James Award for a
Lifetime Achievement from the APA, in which he was cited
as the scientist who quote fundamentally changed the way we
look at everyday life. Elliott's son, Joshua is also a

(01:16):
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 Elliott and Joshua are co authors of

(01:39):
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 that
further ado I bring you doctors Elliott and Joshua Aaronson. So,
Elliott and josh so great to have you on this
podcast on A long time admirer of both of your research.

(01:59):
And you all are related, is that right?

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, we are related. I'm the sun. I know
he looks much younger than me, but I am.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yeah. How does that work? Yeah, Ellie, you agree. It's
so great to have you on. And you guys have
spent your whole lives, you'd build your whole lives to
the field of social psychology. Can you just explain a
little bit to our listeners, like what is social psycho
what are the parameters around that?

Speaker 1 (02:33):
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? Uh and ways of influence.
Even historical figures influence us. Parents influence us, teachers influence us.

(02:57):
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

(03:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I might add to that that at 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 did it feel like to walk into
a room and be of a different race. What does

(04:06):
it feel like to be to have everybody think you
have a learning disability? What is it that kind of experience,
whether whether the people are actually in the room with
you or not. It's social psychology deals with the experience
of that.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
It really also tells us a lot about how the
human mind works. By studying social psychology, we understand how
people 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

(04:50):
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

(05:13):
sound attractive. But it's the same process.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yes, and you wrote you put a lot of this
research into the seminal book called The Social Animal. When
was the first edition of The Social Animal, Eliot, you were.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
The nineteen seventy two it came out. I wrote it
in seventy and seventy one, and it's now we're working
on the thirteenth edition. Wow, it was a great experience
to write it, and just a terrific experience to see
how how long it's been a major text in the field.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah, it really has been. And you're both co author.
When you said we, it's the both of you are
now co authors on it. Is that right?

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, Well, Josh has been helping with me with it
over the past, I don't know, fifteen twenty years or so.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
I think I started when it was yellow. The cover
changes color. That's the only thing that changes about the
outside of the appearance of the book. There's no same picture,
just changes color. So what when did the yellow one
come out? That was the first one I help editing.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I think it came out when you were an undergraduate.
That was the first.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
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. Bestinger was a common for high frequency word dissonance,
things like that. But then I when I got into college,

(06:44):
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 nineteen eighty.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
Wow, well you mentioned Leon Festerer. There are a bunch
of influences and mentors for both of you. From I
have a little list here from Abraham Maslow, who's you know,
influence on me too, fil Loombardo and mayhe rest in peace?
Ram Das? How's Ramdas influenced you? Guys?

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Ramdas was a very close friend of mine. We were
in graduate school together at Stanford. He was studying developmental
psychology and I was studying social psychology. He was a
couple of years ahead of me, and we became very
close friends at Stanford, and then he got a job.

(07:46):
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 nineteen fifty nine and I was there until

(08:08):
sixty two or sixty three, right around the time that Ramdas,
whose name was Dick Alfred 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

(08:31):
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 was hell bent on departing from

(08:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
They really got in the way.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
It's going to be a lot of science now though,
you know, John.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
Really starting right now, but there was a lot of
negativity around that.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, I was going to answer the Romdos question because
I actually met him once in person, but I knew
him through his books and stuff. But 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, not as a prisoner, but

(09:46):
as Phil Dimbardo's research assistant at the time, and my
office was in the Stanford Prison, and instead of commuting
home sometimes I would I just there. It gave me
a real insight into how awful those guys must have
had it when they were locked up in that prison,

(10:07):
because it was dreadful, and 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,

(10:34):
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 no Way, who turned into Ramdas, who had really
introduced me into meditation, and he kind of took me
into that whole world which I now study in my lab.

(10:56):
But to see that he had made this dramatic transfer
in terms of his the way he looked at the
world was just It was something I'll never forget.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Incredible. What about Kinky Friedman? Uh? You know, how do
you know him?

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well? Kinky Friedman was my camp counselor when I was
sent away to Jewish Boys camp in Curville, Texas. To
be a jeer 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

(11:37):
guitar playing really charismatic fun to be a round guy.
And everybody was calling him Kinky and his real name
was Ritchie 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. It was like the

(11:59):
first kars Madic 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,
exposed kids to excellent. That's one of the big problems
with the achievement gap that I see is that kids

(12:22):
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 and

(12:42):
built in creating schools.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
People are excellent, completely agree and yeah and inspired. Yeah,
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. Second, you know, there are
a lot of topics that there are perennial favorites within
any social psychology course. What would you say are some
things that really haven't replicated over the years that you

(13:08):
think we really should not include a staples anymore in
a social psychology class.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's 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.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
Some of the experiments can't be replicated for ethical reasons, like,
for example, Stanley Milgrim'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.

(13:53):
But it is a great experiment. I mean, it was
really a terrific It's not a great demonstration, but then
evolved into an experimental procedure, and I think the results
really do hold up because Milgrim 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

(14:19):
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

(14:39):
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,

(15:00):
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

(15:23):
the prison experiment it lasted for six days and six nights.
You really can't do that to people, so ethically, it's uh,
it should it has been forbidden, and it should be forbidden,
and we don't do that in our textbook anymore because

(15:46):
the results are very very shaky. Yeah, yeah, we.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
In fact, I think that we had a tug of
war about it, because I mean, I think that you know,
some of the what you 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 s Embarno's book

(16:14):
was it was that this is the power of the situation.
But then when you find out that it wasn't it,
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 by the experiment. It was just that it was
sort of a it was such a mess methodologically that

(16:37):
it's not clear it's telling us anything human nature.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Scott, that's a really good example of Josh influencing me,
and he really did because I loved the idea of
the experiment. I loved it what the hypothesis was, and
I think it's the hype ofthesis is true, but the

(17:02):
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

(17:26):
experiment should be taken out of our textbooks. 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 Phil has done

(17:49):
great research, but the prison experiment for which he became
very famous was not one of his good research.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah, fair enough. Javan Bevel and Dominic Packer and their
substact recently had a whole thing to stand for prison
Experiment de bunking a pop war 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 key

(18:25):
aspect that a lot of it was good acting, you know,
which the which even full the experimenters, you know, uh,
you know, like not only full the experiments, the experimenters
also asked them to act in certain ways, so they
influenced the produce. 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.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Now, it's it's it just shifted into becoming the Milgrim experiment.
It's like, well, well these prisoners people do what Phil
Dimbardo tells them to do, even if that it's not
the right thing. I mean, it just shifted over into
becoming an algur experiment.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
That's right. And yeah, 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 you're independent variable becomes your dependent variable.

(19:28):
You are you are instructing them to behave the way
you're predicting they're going to behave. It's not good research.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Phil, you know. I was Phil Lombardo's TA and and
and research assistant at at Stanford for a year and
it's 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

(19:59):
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 Limbardo was a
master of that stuff and I think he got hot
the I think he got ambitious. He wanted to be

(20:19):
he wanted to do something like Milgram and so, and
they had their space in the basement, and he said,
well why not. Yeah, yes, 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 nineteen sixties, prior to the prior to the

(20:44):
prison experiment. It's absolutely brilliant experiment experimentation. It really is
absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
And after I mean his work on evil, just his
thoughts and his writings, his book wrote more recently and
on heroes. I just I find that work incredibly fascinating
and rich. Yeah, what about research replications that hit more
closer to home in terms of it's your actual research, Josh,

(21:16):
So what about research?

Speaker 2 (21:17):
And 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 would say, that's my
That's one thing I'd really attribute to my dad, which is,

(21:43):
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 psychology who treated their theories that way, and
they're like in the latest rally between them and it's

(22:07):
like spen ten years and they're defending this thing. No,
you've got it all wrong and 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 criticism

(22:27):
is and not to fight. And so I bring that
to my students because they need to have. 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

(22:48):
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 than the truth. I think
that a lot of this is scholarly brinksmanship and it's
hard to see exactly where the truth lies. So this,

(23:09):
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 what I So,

(23:29):
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 want the gender gaps.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
Tell people what the gender gap study is.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, so it made it. 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 is published, we had Claude, had a bunch

(24:12):
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.

(24:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
I know him. Yeah I know, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
So he he does, he doesn't what it's called an
affirmation in thing. So basically the idea is you write
about really central values to you and that bolsters you
against the little threats that you may suffer in that context.

(25:16):
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

(25:37):
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 value of a theory is like, the theory

(26:05):
is useful if it helps you understand and remediate different situations,
even though one of the studies or two of the
studies that it involved in creating that theory may be
flawed and not replicate. That's how I would say it.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
It's a wisdom 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 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

(26:44):
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 you you
really can't do that. Now. I love what you tell
your students about the importance of getting at the truth

(27:09):
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,

(27:30):
and let's find whatever flaws we can find before we
write it out. Yeah, Because and the bottom line was,
would you rather discover things wrong with it? Or would
you rather somebody who doesn't like you will discover something
that's wrong with it after it's published? And then that

(27:56):
is 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
fifty years and I've done maybe one hundred and fifty experiments,

(28:20):
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

(28:42):
experimentation with Leon Festinger, who was a master and by
the way, is somebody I disagreed with in terms of
the theory and actually revised it a little. And Leon,
to his credit, early on, was a nose at me
because he felt I was narrowing his theory a little

(29:04):
too much. But sooner or later he came around, but
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 phrase coming.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
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
psychology you get a lot of chances at it, it's
called reliability analysis. Social psychology you get like one hour

(29:50):
chance to find an effect, you know, in some in
a lot of cases. And so you really need to
be humble and not. I mean, and and there are
some psychologist I mean, I have deep respect for John Barges,
but bar you know, at Yale, and but you know,
and you know some of that research, you know, touching

(30:10):
the hot coffee, you know, and 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 it's hard
to find long lasting generalizable effects when individual differences matter
as well, you know, And.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
I want to I want to. I think that 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 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,

(30:53):
your your view of human nature changes, and and and
he was like what it was just it set off
his bullshit to get there. And and I really feel
like that he was vindicated by the fact that most
of that stuff fell away, like it just shattered like

(31:15):
cheap glass when when put to the test. And I'm
not saying John Barge's stuff in particular, there was just
a wave of that story. 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

(31:36):
you'll you know it does this. It was very seductive
for a while to find the minimal and.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Mind you were not saying that John Barges or anyone
else intentionally. Uh no, I mean these things can happen
by accident. Happened doing the experiment in a way that

(32:05):
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 liked that group better
than the people who the control condition, that where people

(32:29):
were randomly assigned to a condition where they only went
through a mild initiation, because people are reducing distance by
convincing themselves that the fact that they went through hell
and high water makes them want to like the group
better in order to demonstrate that they weren't foolish or
stupid by having done that. Now that experiment, In that

(32:55):
experiment I did, I ran the subject, put them through
the initiation, and then jud Mills interviewed them and gave
them a question in to fill out without knowing what
condition the subjects were in. And after each subject, I

(33:16):
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

(33:40):
the independent variable, which is the manipulation, the important manipulation,
and the dependent variable, which is how much they liked
the group. So he couldn't buy his tone of voice
or the way he asked the questions. 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

(34:05):
experimentation one oh one but a lot of people neglect
to do that, and that isn't out of uh, out
of trying to make the day to come out the
way you wanted to, just because people tend not to
dot every I in crusts every T unless they're well

(34:27):
trained to do that.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Yes, yes, this is all true. But there's also a
human human element to this. I mean, as researchers, we
are still human, and we do get excited when we've
got a significant finding. You know, we we take it personally,
we say, well, God, look how cool that is. And
I'm the experimenter here. We can't we can't ignore that.

(34:50):
And you know, I think this is a nice segue
into growth mindset theory I had. I had a really
wonderful chat with Carol dwek 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 analysis the effects suggest that it's not as

(35:14):
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, doctor dwek Uh, given these findings. I just
told you, do you still stand by this quote? And
I quoted her saying, you know, growth mindset effects and
pervades every aspect of your life and is the most

(35:34):
important thing out of everything. 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
what at what point do we start to kind of
revise some of the narratives we have around the pervasiveness
of our of our constructs.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
I think, when I think, what point I think when
you know, I don't, I don't. I can't account for
Carol's maintaining that position or 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

(36:23):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:05):
a field that's really hot, and both stereotype threat and
growth mindset got really hot. 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

(37:25):
of it. 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

(37:48):
for the concept, and so it'd be like if so
what what? I often found myself getting attacked for well,
how dare you do this? And and I'm like, I'm
not doing this in schools. I'm not the idea should
be in school. So, for example, I don't believe that

(38:08):
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

(38:28):
student matters greatly. And growth mindset and an affirming relationship
and a relationship with the 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

(38:52):
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

(39:14):
each other up because you're mixing races together. You have
the underachievement of the black and Latino kids who are
being now busted into nice white neighborhoods. They're really frustrated,
and so the superintendent cries for help to his social
psych professor, who was Elliot Arens and says, well, you

(39:36):
bragged a lot about the power of social psychology and
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,

(39:58):
self esteem is important, Let's give them 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.

(40:19):
They find out, oh, 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

(40:42):
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?

Speaker 3 (40:52):
It makes a lot of sense. I love a systems approach,
and I think that's what you're hinting at.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, Yeah. I think when you have ten different psychologists
promoting what they found in the lab rushing in the schools,
teachers are just confused. They're just confused.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
It's like, well, I'm trying to address their learning style
and induce a growth mindset, but not have too much comped.
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.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yes, can 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 some of the core elements
and tell me a little bit about how you're incorporating
them to this new school.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Josh, thank you for asking that, because I think I
mentioned Jigsaw just in passing and what 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

(42:01):
kind of in the control group, so it was louthy
in my in my control group, kids in the 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

(42:22):
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 a it's
actually the oldest boarding school in America, and we bought
it because it was struggling and the vision was to

(42:44):
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,

(43:06):
and Jigsaw gave me the confidence that it would work.
So in social psyche, 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,

(43:29):
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 the work you're doing makes a difference.
Most schools frustrate most of those motives, and that's why

(43:51):
we're seeing a lot of the problems. You go into
a school where everybody feels like they belong, they understand
what 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.

(44:13):
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 they got a
new principal who had been trained in psychology. Wow, and
it just and I mean, these were dirt poor kids.
So that's I gave a talk about this, and the

(44:34):
billionaire heard the talk and he brought me in to
help build this school. That that model, I think is
really important. So what it's 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

(44:58):
a three dimensional something that serves another human being. So
in the 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

(45:19):
out how much the feed costs, how much hues 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 kids that

(45:40):
get the highest test scores and go on to be
go to college. And the chicken now they keep the
chickens as pets, and the chickens lay the eggs. I
have lots of pictures of kids. Anytime in this school
that you're upset, you can go out into the place

(46:00):
around and pick up a chicken and hold it. And
there's other animals too, and and so that that's 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

(46:20):
schools and say, hey, does growth my 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.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
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 doctor deuec All my podcast, is
that the greatest effects happen in the kids who need
it the most. And I think that a big message
of yours as well, Josh. You know, if you if
you average out, you know, in the general population, and
you find a small effect, it's it's covering up some

(46:57):
of the most important nuance, you know, like underprivileged kids,
kids in poor neighborhoods. I mean growth, you know, developing,
cultivating growth and mindset in face in the face of challenges,
and that's particularly important.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
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. 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

(47:33):
so much influence on them because their parents were so dysfunctional.
It's I've never seen poverty be such an advantage in
my life, but it was because the teachers were just
such stable characters that believed in the kids, and often
the parents were in jail and telling the kids that

(47:55):
they're stupid, and so growth mindset for these kids is
a revelation, you know, like I can really be something
that that I think is the beautiful side of it.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
That is beautiful. And Josh, you know, one of the
things that I got out of your the description as
you told it, she's really quite beautiful, is the importance
of having a billionaire sit in one of your lange. Yeah,
and I was so envious, Like, I think, how come

(48:26):
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 prob because there's so many
people out there with innovations to sell or to give

(48:48):
away that they get overwhelmed by that. But they're very
conservative places.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
And change slow.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
But they have a billionaire building with school for you
where you can do things like that. It's marvelous.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
It's even if it's even slow then though, because you're
you're turning around, trying to turn around a culture and
trying to change people who've been you know, all of
us have been indoctrinated into a model of schooling that
we'd be very afraid to depart from. So what in

(49:28):
in my search is to build the perfect school. I've
visited hundreds of them, and some of the most the
best working schools you most parents, 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

(49:50):
because they're so radical. Yeah, so I can tell I
could go on forever about it, but this is really
I this is really what. So I know you wanted
to talk about the science of this stuff, and so.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
Oh no too, this is great too, because well you
have a whole lab on the mindful. Mindfulness is the
particular focus of yours as well in the schools, Is
that right, Josh?

Speaker 2 (50:17):
It is because you know, you just 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 ten

(50:37):
seconds of entering the school. You know, like, we're 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

(51:00):
most unlikely places, you know, like in Appalachia, for example,
where the kids are really poor, or but the coolest
was the school where the kids don't have any classes.
My favorite student that I've ever met in my life
all my years of teaching, had one math class in
her whole life and one English class in her whole life.

(51:22):
She was self taught in everything, and meeting her changed
everything about my ideas about education. And so I'm glad
I had that. I couldn't recreate her experience, because nobody
wants to go to send their kids to a school
where there's no classes. But we have to open our
minds to the fact that we may have gotten human

(51:44):
nature wrong.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
I love that. Well, your lab is called the mindful
Educational Lab. Yes, why do you think mindfulness is so
important for kids?

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Well, so it's not called the It's called the mindful
education Lab. So mindfulness is part of what we do,
but it's really in the broadest sense, we approach educational
problems mindfully. So what we do free of charge for
any school who calls me up with a problem. I

(52:24):
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, 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

(52:47):
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 the school and they say, doctor Aaronson, thirty
percent of our boys are suicidal. What can we do?

(53:09):
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 right, Yeah, you know that it's
it doesn't It didn't. That didn't produce the happiness or

(53:33):
the understanding that I was looking for. Sure, 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

(53:55):
magnet school in New Haven. There were black kids from
the ghetto. There were kids girls and he jobs. 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,

(54:17):
this is Martin Luther King's dream. These kids are being
so supportive. And I remember them talking about the awful
things that happened to them in their daily life, like
at home in New Haven, and they'd bring it in.
Here were eleven year olds like acting like they were
in some kind of support group. And it was all

(54:38):
because they did this mindfulness stuff together. And so you know,
I've been I helped schools put in mindfulness programs by
getting to know what works. And so that's what we do,
is we mindfully approach their educational problem. And sometimes I
tell them don't do mindfulness. That's the mindful solution is

(54:59):
to say don't do mindfulness. It's not going to work.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
It's not the answer in all situations. I'm really glad
you said no, I'm really good.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
I think it was Maslow who said, wasn't it. Maslow said,
when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like
a nail. Yeah, that's so. That's so describes academic academics
who want to go into the field, have theory, will travel,
have intervention, will travel. I just don't. I don't think

(55:28):
our kids deserve that.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
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. So what do you
think makes a good teacher?

Speaker 1 (55:48):
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. Their stand
up teaching when you're lecturing to a group primarily, and
I used to do a lot of that. Like at

(56:11):
the University of Texas, I taught an introductory social psychology
class that had six hundred students in him and I
taught that year after year. Then there's what I call
sit down teaching, which is a seminar where the skill

(56:33):
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

(56:58):
was asked. So the first one is you have to
be an interesting person if you want to hold the
attention of six hundred 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

(57:21):
be interesting to those students. This story. It could be funny,
but not a joke just to warm up the audience.
I love that. I think what you what you would
talk about is a story about real life that you

(57:43):
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

(58:08):
many cases twenty or thirty or forty 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

(58:28):
idea with research to the story is what is what
helps it become embedded in their consciousness. And I love
that notion because my aim for students who are taking
a large introductory class with me is not just to

(58:52):
teach them some social psychology, not just to hope they
all get a's in the cost because they really know
that stuff. 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 still have, and I

(59:16):
get information from my students that that 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 may it may be kind of a somewhat

(59:40):
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

(01:00:02):
is important, and that you reach a common interest with
the students 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

(01:00:22):
important and require sensitivity to the student.

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
I see why you Yeah, I see why you've won
so many awards, Elliott. That was really well put. In fact,
I do want to say you are the only I
don't know if you know this, you're the only person
in the one hundred and twenty 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 NBA, you would be Michael Jordan.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
I just do what I do, and it's so exciting
for me. My mentor, Leon Festigo, when he wanted me
to do a research project with him 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

(01:01:10):
my course I'm teaching in the fall. He said, what
you're going to prepare for teaching with your skills as
a researcher, why you know, why do you want to
spend time preparing? And you know, that was one of
the few things I disagreed with him on, and that
was I took the teaching very seriously as a major

(01:01:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Yeah, finally comes out Lee infesting imperfect human.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
But you are, but you are, You're perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
You're a perfect child of Maslow infesting her. If they
could have gotten together and had a baby, it'd.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Be a 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.

(01:02:24):
He was a lousy scientist. He didn't know how to
do science, and I didn't know at the time that
he didn't know. He was a philosopher, more of a
philosopher and 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 that's why I went

(01:02:47):
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 how you
how you can how you can improve the how you

(01:03:10):
can improve experimentation. So I started laugh 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,

(01:03:36):
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 why it's important
to get it right when you're doing it, not to

(01:03:56):
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 to and

(01:04:19):
then when you really know it's right, Yeah, to bring
it into the real world, to bring it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
Yeah, thank you for this wisdom, Josh. Do you want
to add anything quickly about teaching? What makes a good
teacher from your perspective?

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
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. That I became a
much better teacher. I was already pretty good, but when
I started studying schools that worked and how they worked,

(01:04:58):
I started applying some of these the lessons of kindergarten
and first grade to my colleagues class and it started
working really well. And 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

(01:05:19):
a better teacher for them. And so 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 I
felt like I was preparing for a role. You know,
like I need to know, because, especially as I'm getting older,

(01:05:39):
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 so
I I then I write my lectures around their concerns.

(01:06:00):
Me 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? How do you like? Okay, well, you're
lucky to have such, you know, such problems to worry about. Yeah,

(01:06:23):
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

(01:06:45):
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 of social psychologists
have studied that. So what should be the good life?
And what would you what. I asked them, what what

(01:07:05):
reminder would you tattoo onto your body to remind you
who you are and what your purpose is. And by
the end of the course, I want you to have
a well thought out tattoo.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
I love that. And you're talking about economic fortune. I
personally feel like I have so much social fortune in
my life that is is just It's like it makes
my life so meaningful, like I have. I just I
love my friends like you like you guys.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Yeah to me, that that's what you were. Some people
learn that too late in life, that it's not about
the money.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Yeah. For For the last part of today's interview, I'd
like talking about death a little bit. Josh. You had
a year of living deathly, and I just talk a
little bit about what that, what that means.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
So I was invited to give advice about how to
about the good life, and it was like a Janue thing,
and so there were rabbis talking about, you know, reading
a year of reading, and I thought living deathfully because
I've studied. I studied with a Buddhist teacher who I

(01:08:16):
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 were all feeling. I

(01:08:40):
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 ten minutes thinking about how
all this is going away. It's just temporary. Everything you
think is is permanent. It's going away. So get used

(01:09:02):
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. Wow, this may be the last time I
pet my dog, kiss my wife, call my father. It
lends an incredible poignancy to life and I it's weird

(01:09:26):
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 other people and I that I don't There
may be some truth to that experimentally. But for me,

(01:09:47):
in the mindset of appreciate every moment, there's nothing like
death to remind you of that that you're mortal, 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 that's something that I try to

(01:10:09):
give to my students, even though the idea that they're
contemplating death at their young age is it really works
better when you're older, Yeah, and you truly feel that
the time is running out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
Our mutual friend Abraham Maslow talked about this, you know,
the post mortem life. He said, I wish everyone could
live a post mortem 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. Yeah,
this transcend state of a very day consciousness. Elliott, can

(01:10:46):
you give me some reflections here on death?

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
I hope so. I don't know. I I don't know
where to start. I grew I had a brother who
was two and a half years older than I am,
and he died of cancer when he was thirty two

(01:11:10):
years old. And my father died when he was in
his forties, 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

(01:11:31):
me very conscious of dying. And I had a young
family at the time that my brother died. I had
Josh was just gone right around the time that my
brother was dying, and I have four kids, and I was,
thank God, how much time do I have left? And

(01:11:51):
it really focused me on exactly what Josh just was
talking about, and 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,

(01:12:14):
and teaching and doing research. And so I did everything
I had been doing, but with more awareness and more intensity.
Now I'm ninety three years old. I never expected to
live this long. I've lived almost three times as long

(01:12:36):
as my brother, who was my first mentor live. Wow,
So I'm really feeling I'm really feeling it. And you're
long enough, you'll live long enough. And your friends keep dying.
Leon Festinger died, Abe Maslow died, Ned Jones died Phil Zimbato,

(01:12:58):
Lee Ross. I'm 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 ten years. And there's one nice
thing about giving a eulogy. It makes you really think

(01:13:19):
about another person's life and reflect back and think of
your own. When I hit ninety, when a couple of
my kids asked me, well, what should we do for
your ninetieth birthday? That's a milestone. I thought about that
and I thought, you know what, every time I give

(01:13:39):
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, but you have to say about them.
It's too bad that Leon wasn't alive to hear what
you have to say about him, et cetera. And I thought,
what I want is a living eulogy. What I want

(01:14:02):
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 she's a very active,

(01:14:24):
very powerful person. Wrote to all of my friends, to
some of my students, and they all wrote things are
made videos and stuff like that. And I've seen a
blogy now every once in a while and it's really
an exciting process. Every time I'm feeling down, the eulogies

(01:14:47):
perked me up and make me much more conscious and
much more aware of what's important to me.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
Oh, I love this well. I hope this episode as
well is a tribute to you you you know and
uh and really offers that purpose as well to our listeners.
You know, A big part of living a good death.
A big part of good death is a good life.
You've you've certainly lived and are still living a very

(01:15:17):
good life. And a big part of good life is
having transcendence. And sometimes that takes the form of beautiful children.
So tell me a little bit about about Are you
proud of your son, Elliot.

Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
I'm proud of 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,
that but 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

(01:15:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Now, thanks for the urergy man.

Speaker 1 (01:16:05):
Yeah, but I have four kids, and I love what
each of them does. And the one thing they have
in common that it 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.

(01:16:29):
Both of them. They're all doing things that are good
for humanity. Yeah, I'm touched by all of them.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
That's a big part tresidents, Josh, in thirty seconds or less,
just send us off. You're telling us what you're proud
of about your father.

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
I'm proud that he could have become one of those
those celebrity academics, and he always resisted it, and so
I teach that to my students. I go two questions
that people automatically say yes to that they should think,

(01:17:12):
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
careful 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

(01:17:37):
research that is blends the best of Maslow with the
best of Bestinger and made something that I hope the
field will return to and 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. Thank you so much, guys, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
It's very fund You asked a very good question. This
was a great fun