Zimbardo’s work on dissonance began during graduate school and he wrote his dissertation on this topic after being introduced to Leon Festinger’s work by his Yale mentors in 1957.
Zimbardo’s dissertation pitted predictions from dissonance theory against the more rational expectations from Hovland and Sherif’s judgment model of attitudes of acceptance and rejection-and dissonance won. He conceptualized dissonance phenomena as the cognitive control of motivation, and demonstrated the power of this approach in a series of experimentally rigorous studies. This dissertation work was published in 1960 in the Journal of abnormal and social psychology.
Selected Publications:
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1960). Involvement and communication discrepancy as determinants of opinion conformity. The Journal of abnormal and social psychology, 60(1), 86.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Weisenberg, M., Firestone, I., & Levy, B. (1965). Communicator effectiveness in producing public conformity and private attitude change 1. Journal of Personality, 33(2), 233-255.
- Zimbardo, P., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970). Influencing attitudes and changing behavior: A basic introduction to relevant methodology, theory, and applications.
- Zimbardo, P. G., & Leippe, M. R. (1991). The psychology of attitude change and social influence. Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.
- Zimbardo, P. (1999). Recollections of a Social Psychologist’s Career: An Interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 14(1).
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1968). Cognitive dissonance and the control of human motivation. In R. Abelson, E. Aronson, W. McGuire, T. Newcomb, M. Rosenberg, & P. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook (pp. 439-447). Chicago: Rand, McNally.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (Ed.). (1969) The cognitive control of motivation. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman