Organized to illustrate the major themes of Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal, this collection of classic and contemporary readings explores the most important ideas, issues, and debates in social psychology today.
Elliot Aronson is a social psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He has previously taught at Harvard, the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota. As a researcher, he is best known for his groundbreaking research on social influence and persuasion as well as for the invention of the jigsaw classroom (a strategy for reducing prejudice in public schools).
He has written 22 books including The Social Animal, Age of Propaganda (with Anthony Pratkanis), Nobody Left to Hate, The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with his 7-year-oldgranddaughter, Ruth Aronson, and Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me (with Carol Tavris).
Aronson is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have received all three of its highest awards: For Distinguished Research, Distinguished Teaching, and Distinguished Writing. In 1981, he was named Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.
Among his other awards are the Gordon Allport prize for his contributions to inter-racial harmony and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2007). Recently, his peers named him as one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th Century.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
has served as President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology as well as President of the Western Psychological Association
