TANLEY SCHACHTER WAS ONE of the very few social psychologists ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences (in 1983). His contributions ranged across the study of communication and social influence, group processes, sources of the affiliation motive, intellectual and temperamental correlates of birth order, nature of emotional experience, people's ability to correctly attribute the causes of their behavior to external versus internal factors, causes of obesity and eating behavior disorders, the addictive nature of nicotine, psychological reactions to events that affect stock market prices, and the proper interpretation of "filled" ("uh," "er") pauses in speech. Few, if any, social psychologists ever made contributions over a wider range of topics. Remarkably, the diverse content of the contributions was tied together by a small number of powerful theoretical concepts.
psychology department, which he found far more to his liking than the undergraduate school. The main intellectual influence on Schachter at Yale was Clark Hull, one of the founding fathers of learning theory.
Stanley Schachter was born on April 15, 1922, to Nathan and Anna Schachter in Flushing, then a semi-rural part of Queens, New York. Knowing that he wanted to go away to school, but knowing nothing of the rarefied and preppy atmosphere he was about to enter, he chose Yale, where he initially majored in art history. He stayed on for a master's degree in Yale'sAfter a stint working on vision in the Aero-Medical Laboratory of the Armed Services during World War II, Schachter found he was eager to work on pressing social problems. This took him to MIT in 1946 to work with the great German social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who had just set up his Research Center for Group Dynamics for the theoretical and applied study of social issues at that school. The other younger faculty members were Dorwin Cartwright, Leon Festinger, Ronald Lippitt, and Marion Radke, all to become distinguished social psychologists. The first two-year cohort of students included many who were to become eminent social psychologists, including Kurt Back, Morton Deutsch, Murray Horwitz, Harold Kelley, Albert Pepitone, John Thibaut, and Ben Willerman. On Lewin's death in 1947, the Research Center for Group Dynamics moved to the University of Michigan, where it became a part of the Institute for Social Research. Schachter received his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1949.
Schachter's dissertation adviser and most influential mentor was Leon Festinger. With Festinger, Schachter studied communication and social influence and, together with Henry Riecken, they wrote a book entitledWhen Prophecy Fails(1956), describing what happened to a millenial group that had predicted the end of the world on a date certain. The appointed hour came and went, but the group's adherents did not give up their beliefs. On the contrary, they decided their faith had saved the world and began to proselytize for converts! Though this finding might seem a mere curio, it gave rise to much interesting social psychology, including Festinger's celebrated cognitive dissonance theory. It also played a key role in showing Schachter how powerful social influence could be.
Schachter's first job was at the University of Minnesota, and he remembered both the city of Minneapolis and the university with great fondness. In 1961 Schachter moved to Columbia, the university from which he ultimately retired. Schachter and his wife, Sophia Duckworth, loved the city of New York, as well as their summer residence on Long Island. The couple had a son, Elijah.
The effect that Schachter had on people was very much the same whether they were his fellow eminent scientists or the lowliest of beginning graduate students. He was charismatic, funny, a wonderful gossip (but never in a malicious way), thought provoking, and unpretentious. He encouraged his students to be equally unpretentious, by his example and by his habit, after a student had just produced a particularly sententious observation, of insisting that the student repeat the observation, but this time in language that would be used for the student's grandmother.
Schachter's non-professional interests were as protean as his professional ones. He loved art, literature, the theater, the beach, tennis, backgammon, and offbeat scientific facts from fields as diverse as geography and medicine. Partly for esthetic reasons, he was incapable of conducting boring research--including the sort of potboilers that even the best scientists are likely to conduct to make sure they are productive. His esthetic sense and his capacity to enjoy himself at play prevented Schachter from being the sort of workaholic that many great scientists are. He enjoyed himself enormously outside of work, and probably in part because of that, in his work as well.
Schachter had the great good fortune to work briefly with Kurt Lewin, and then with Lewin's student Leon Festinger. Both men understood that social psychology could be an experimental science like any other. Schachter's dissertation, published in 1951, became one of the most famous experimental demonstrations of a social process ever conducted up to that point. It showed the massive pressures to conform that are brought to bear on deviates from a group norm and the sorts of punishment that are administered to those who fail to toe the line. The study also showed the "carrot" side of group pressure. Deviants who join the opinion fold may be fully forgiven for the error of their previous ways.