Elliot Aronson – a collection of info

 

From the NPR website:

We all have a hard time admitting that we’re wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it’s not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson says our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Elliot Aronson, co-author, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me); social psychologist; professor emeritus, psychology, University of California Santa Cruz

 

An excerpt from Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s book  Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me):

Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification

It’s fascinating, and sometimes funny, to read doomsday predictions, but it’s even more fascinating to watch what happens to the reasoning of true believers when the prediction flops and the world keeps muddling along. Notice that hardly anyone ever says, “I blew it! I can’t believe how stupid I was to believe that nonsense”? On the contrary, most of the time they become even more deeply convinced of their powers of prediction. The people who believe that the Bible’s book of Revelation or the writings of the sixteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet Nostradamus have predicted every disaster from the bubonic plague to 9/11 cling to their convictions, unfazed by the small problem that their vague and murky predictions were intelligible only after the event occurred.

Click here to read more.

Click here to hear Elliot Aronson give a wonderful 30-minute radio interview on Cognitive Dissonance

Click here to go to Elliot Aronson’s website: Jigsaw Classroom. This web site is an effort to share some of the results from Professor Aronson’s research on cooperative learning techniques.

Overview of the Jigsaw Technique

History of the Jigsaw Classroom

Jigsaw in 10 Easy StepsJigsaw Method for Busy Teachers (Part 1)

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Jigsaw Method for Busy Teachers (Part 2)

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Elliot Aronson in an interview explaining how the Jigsaw Classroom improves cooperation and harmony among children: