Albert Hastorf

Who they are

Hastorf spent the early part of his career at Dartmouth and later moved to Stanford, where he held a professorship in psychology and senior administrative posts, including dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences and provost. His best-known publication is the football study he wrote with Cantril, which compared how students at two universities described the same game.

The study took place after a Princeton and Dartmouth football game in 1951. The authors gathered responses from students at both universities and then showed a film of the game to each group, asking them to count rule infractions.

Key papers

Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: A case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 129-134. doi:10.1037/h0057880

The paper reports that students at each university counted more infractions by the opposing team, and the authors concluded that the two groups had in effect seen different games. It is a case study of perception shaped by loyalty.

Key ideas

The paper proposed that what people see in an event is shaped by their stake in it, so that two groups looking at the same material can hold different, equally convincing records of what happened. Later writers often cite it as an early picture of confirmation bias, the tendency to read evidence in ways that favour what one already believes.

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