Leon Festinger
Leon Festinger, 1919 to 1989, was an American social psychologist and one of the founders of the experimental tradition in the field. Two theories carry his name. Social comparison, from 1954, holds that people evaluate their own opinions and abilities against other people whenever no objective standard is available. Cognitive dissonance, from 1957, holds that two incompatible beliefs produce a discomfort people act to reduce, usually by changing the cheaper belief. The second made him famous. The first is the one this publication needed, and the citation is Human Relations, not "the Journal of Human Relations".
Who they are
Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Festinger took his degree at City College of New York in 1939 and his PhD at the University of Iowa in 1942 under Kurt Lewin. He followed Lewin to the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1945, moved with it to the University of Michigan in 1948, then to the University of Minnesota in 1951, to Stanford in 1955, and in 1968 became the Else and Hans Staudinger Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York.
He is one of the two or three most consequential social psychologists of the century, and his method is as much of the legacy as the theories: the insistence that claims about how people think could be put to an experiment rather than argued about.
Key papers
Festinger, L. (1954). "A theory of social comparison processes", Human Relations, 7(2), 117 to 140. DOI 10.1177/001872675400700202. The venue is Human Relations. The form "Journal of Human Relations" circulates widely in secondary sources online and is wrong. It appeared in the draft of the article this page was built for and was caught in verification.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press. The book he is best known for, and the source of the vault's cognitive dissonance material.
Key ideas
People carry a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities. Where an objective standard exists they use it; where none exists they use other people.
Comparison targets are chosen for being informative. A person similar enough to yourself tells you something; a person wildly different tells you nothing.
Dissonance between beliefs is aversive, and the cheapest belief is the one that gives way.
The 1954 paper is a theory of self-evaluation and nothing more. It does not say comparison harms anyone and it says nothing about behaviour. Every modern claim of that kind belongs to a later and much weaker literature, and his citation should not be used to borrow authority for it. See upward social comparison, where this site keeps both sides of that argument.
Concepts on this site
Social Comparison, the 1954 theory
Upward Social Comparison, the sub-case where the modern and contested evidence sits
Cognitive Dissonance, the 1957 theory
Conformity, the group-influence tradition he helped build
Effort Justification, a dissonance finding, has no page on this site yet
Sources
- Festinger, L. (1954). Human Relations, 7(2), 117 to 140.
- Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press.
- Vault record, 2026-09-11. Festinger was absent from this vault entirely before that date, with four passing mentions and no note, which for a figure of his standing was a real hole.