Works
- The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, with Judson Mills, 1959
- The Effect of a Pratfall on Increasing Interpersonal Attractiveness, Psychonomic Science, 1966
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
The pratfall effect. Listeners rated a highly competent person as more attractive after he committed a clumsy blunder, spilling coffee, and rated a mediocre person as less attractive after the same blunder. The authors suggested that a small flaw makes a superior person seem more human and approachable. Caveat: The result is a single laboratory study and the effect is conditional: it depends on the person already being seen as highly competent, and the same blunder hurt the average performer.
What it explains
Aronson explains why a competent leader who admits a small mistake can gain standing from it, while someone not yet trusted loses by the same admission. Praise and humility land differently depending on the audience's prior view of competence.
Tactics that draw on Elliot Aronson (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
Known for experimental work on cognitive dissonance. With Judson Mills he found that people who went through a severe initiation to join a discussion group rated the group more favorably than those who went through a mild initiation or none, the effect now called effort justification.