Blackwell Reference Online

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Leon Festinger was one of the most important figures in modern psychology and contributed several theories that are still important today for our understanding of the communication process, particularly the individual's exposure to communication and processes of opinion formation and judgment (→  Cognitive Dissonance Theory ; Exposure to Communication Content ; Social Comparison Theory ). Born in 1919 in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of Russian immigrants, Festinger received his first training in psychology at the University of Iowa under the famous German-born social psychologist Kurt Lewin. After World War II he followed Lewin as an assistant professor to the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, in a group of other avant-garde psychologists, Lewin and Festinger developed the standards for modern experiment-based research on perception and group dynamics. It was during his time at MIT that Festinger authored his theory of informal social communication (1950), in which he described the influence of group pressure on the individual's attitudes and behaviors. One year after Lewin's death in 1947 Festinger moved to the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and another three years later to the University of Minnesota. There he developed his theory of social comparison processes ( 1954 ) in which he suggested not ... log in or subscribe to read full text