Arms Control and Arms Race
cal science, and the seminal works here are the
Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics.
In most of the contemporary social sciences a factvalue dichotomy is observed. That is, the researcher must
carefully distinguish between facts based on empirical
observation and values based on personal preferences.
This distinction is denied in Aristotle’s works, however,
and one must read the Nichomachean Ethics and the
Politics as one extended work. Thus, Aristotle distinguishes six types of states, according to qualitative as well
as quantitative considerations. Monarchy is the rule of
one in the interest of all, while tyranny is a corrupted form
of monarchy. Similarly, aristocracy is the rule of the few in
the interest of all, while oligarchy is the selfish rule of the
few. Polity, finally, is the rule of the many in the interest
of all, while democracy is the decayed rule of the many in
their own interest. To Aristotle, human beings are political by nature, for they develop in association with others—beginning with the household, progressing through
a village organization, and coming to full maturity in the
polis, or city-state. This teleological approach to the
human or social sciences pervades all of Aristotle’s writings
on the practical sciences.
Aristotle’s influence in Western civilization is such
that he was considered “the philosopher” throughout the
Middle Ages. His influence has also been considerable in
Christian theology, especially through the works of
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274); in philosophy, especially
in his teachings regarding intellectual and moral virtues;
in the physical sciences, notably as the target of extensive
criticism by modern giants such as Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642); and in the modern social sciences, with
particular reference to political science.
SEE ALSO
Philosophy; Plato; Political Science
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jaeger, Werner. 1960. Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His
Development, 2nd ed. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Voegelin, Eric. 2000. Order and History: Plato and Aristotle. In
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Ed. Dante L. Germino.
Vol. 16. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Timothy Hoye
ARMED FORCES
SEE
Military.
ARMS CONTROL AND
ARMS RACE
Arms control is a form of international security cooperation, or “security regime,” aimed at limiting, through tacit
or explicit agreement, the qualities, quantity, or use of
weapons. The term arms control has been used loosely to
denote many things in international politics involving the
reduction or elimination of weapons or the tensions that
lead to their use, and even as a euphemism for militarily
enforced disarmament, like that imposed on Iraq by the
United Nations in the 1990s. But such phenomena often
do not reflect the conventional meaning of the term as it
is used by arms control scholars and practitioners: a meaning that implies a cooperative relationship involving reciprocity and mutually agreed restraints.
The three most important goals of arms control are
(1) to lower the likelihood of war; (2) to reduce its
destructive effects; and (3) to curtail the price of preparing for it. The first aim can be met by encouraging military postures that enhance deterrence and defense and
thus make aggression less attractive; by reducing the instabilities of arms racing that may lead to war (see below);
and by taking steps that make military “accidents” or
unauthorized uses of force less liable to happen or to lead
to war if they do. As for the goal of limiting damage when
wars do break out, arms control measures may forbid the
production, deployment, or use of certain military technologies. Finally, cost-savings can be garnered through
quantitative or qualitative arms limitation agreements.
Such economies are an important policy consideration,
for resources not sunk into certain types of weapons can
be used to promote security in other ways, or put toward
other welfare-enhancing activities.
Regardless of how it mixes or prioritizes these objectives, arms control has a few essential interrelated characteristics. First, it is a political relationship between actors:
Unilateral arms control is an oxymoron. This does not
preclude unilateral steps toward disarmament or demobilization that one state may take in order to elicit reciprocity from others and thus launch an arms control process:
The determining factor is the conception of an end-state
involving mutual reductions, limitations, or other
restraints. Second, arms control involves strategic interdependence—the parties engaged in it are sensitive to each
other’s postures and actions, and their decisions to agree
and comply with arms control depend on their beliefs
about each other’s willingness to do likewise. Third, it
involves at least tacit if not explicit bargaining because the
incentives to cooperate that infuse the relationship are
always mixed with some degree of conflict and incentives
to compete.
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TYPES OF ARMS CONTROL
It is useful to distinguish between rivalry-specific and general arms control measures. In the rivalry-specific form,
adversaries seek to manage their security competition
through agreements that are tailored to the shape of their
strategic relationship, in order to make a more stable or at
least less costly military balance. By contrast, general arms
control measures aspire to universality: With a broad
ambit and generic guidelines, they are meant to exert
desired effects over the multitude of strategic relationships
in international politics.
The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, for example, was
rivalry specific. In it, the United States, Britain, and Japan
agreed to reductions in battleship fleets according to specific ratios of strength between them, and to a ten-year
hiatus on new construction, as well as limitations on battleship tonnage and armaments. The goal was to stabilize
the existing balance of naval forces at lower levels, and to
forestall an arms race among the three parties. Similarly, in
1972, at the peak of cold war détente, the United States
and the Soviet Union pledged in the first Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks agreement (SALT I) to limit the number
of ballistic nuclear missile launchers to then-current levels,
and to abide by major limitations on the deployment of
strategic missile defense systems. Behind these arrangements were mutually held cooperative and competitive
goals: to slow down the arms race and reduce worrisome
instabilities and to maximize restraints on the other side
while minimizing those on one’s own side.
As for general arms control measures, the most extensive early efforts were the conventions produced at the
Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Those widely
endorsed conventions promulgated, among other things,
prohibitions on the use of certain types of arms, such as
“dum-dum” bullets, poisonous chemical weapons, or
bombs dropped from balloons. In 1925, during the heyday of the League of Nations, the Geneva Protocol was
added to the conventions, reinforcing the prohibition on
the use of deadly gases. Later in the interwar period, participants in the World Disarmament Conference in
Geneva (1932–1936) tried to enact a blanket prohibition
on the use and development of “offensive” weapons,
which were (and still are) thought to be conducive to war.
The effort was ill fated for many reasons, but chief among
them was the bane of many such qualitative exercises—
the thorny and politicized issue of distinguishing between
offensive and defensive weaponry. At the Geneva conference, for example, Britain, France, and the United States
argued that aircraft carriers were essentially defensive; conversely, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan
asserted that they were inherently offensive because they
were useful for launching surprise attacks. In the era of the
United Nations, similar attempts to foster far-reaching
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agreements have been carried forward by groups of states
in the General Assembly; the current locus of these efforts
is the sixty-six-member Geneva Conference on
Disarmament (CD). Begun in 1979, the CD has been the
forum for adoption of the 1992 Chemical Weapons
Convention and the 1996 Comprehensive Test-Ban
Treaty, and for negotiating various additions to the 1975
Biological Weapons Convention.
The most recent general effort was the tightly focused
1997 Ottawa “Landmines” Convention, which prohibits
the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of antipersonnel mines and mandates the destruction of existing
stocks. As a general measure with aspirations to universality, the treaty has had mixed success. As of 2007, 155
member states had joined, while 37 had not, including 3
permanent members of the United Nations Security
Council: the United States, Russia, and China. However,
although the United States has not signed the treaty, it has
funded and supported demining efforts worldwide. Thus,
even though many important countries have not signed
the convention, it has had a tangible humanitarian
impact. Demining efforts catalyzed by the convention
have resulted in the removal of hundreds of thousands of
mines, saving a large number of lives worldwide.
General and rivalry-specific characteristics of arms
control can overlap—for example, when a rivalry-specific
formula is nested within a more general arms control
agreement. The most important and contentious arms
control agreement of the early twenty-first century—the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)—is a good illustration of this. The NPT, which first came into force in
1970, has a nearly universal membership (by 2007, 188 of
the 192 members of the United Nations were signatories).
Its general aims are to reduce and eventually eliminate the
role of nuclear weapons in international politics. Behind
these sweeping generalities are a variety of undertakings
that apply specifically to two different “classes” of signatories—the Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) and the NonNuclear Weapons States (NNWS). The NWS parties
“legitimately” possess nuclear weapons, but must work to
reduce them (eventually to zero), and must not share
them with states that do not possess nuclear weapons. The
NNWS cannot “legitimately” possess nuclear weapons,
but in return for foreswearing them, they are entitled to
develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and to
international support for those efforts channeled through
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Thus,
although the NPT is a nearly universal and general agreement, it is politically oriented toward managing a dangerous and difficult imbalance between the nuclear haves and
have-nots. Similarly, the parties to the 1990 Conventional
Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty were all members of either
the NATO or Warsaw Pact alliances. Although a general
aim of the treaty was to reduce conventional forces in
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Europe, its organizing principle was military balance
between the two blocs. There was thus a strong rivalryspecific core within the broader general agreement.
Yet another form of arms control is the supplier-cartel regime, in which participants who share a leading position on a given weapons technology agree to restrict its
transfer to other parties outside the cartel. A formula of
this sort is wired into the NPT in that the NWS agree not
to transfer nuclear weapons to NNWS. But the purest
example is the Missile Technology Control Regime
(MCTR), which enjoins parties possessing advanced ballistic missile capabilities not to export the technology to
other states. Begun in 1987 by the United States and six
of its closest allies (Britain, Canada, France, West
Germany, Italy, and Japan), the MCTR cartel grew to
thirty-three members, including Russia, and also attracted
the “unilateral” adherence of a number of other key players, most notably China and India.
PROBLEMS AND CRITIQUES OF
ARMS CONTROL
The most important general critique of arms control is
that if states become or threaten to become aggressive,
arms control is rendered irrelevant and even pernicious: It
encourages false hopes, wastes political energies on
panaceas, and, worst of all, lowers defenses that need
rather to be raised. By the same token, critics contend,
arms control is most readily achieved and likely to work
when it is least needed—that is, when international politics are placid or when foes concur that the weapons in
question lack utility. In the 1991 Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty (START I), struck after the cold war
evaporated with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the withdrawal of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe, Washington
and Moscow achieved stunning success in agreeing to 30
to 40 percent cuts in the number of deployed strategic
nuclear weapons: Such cuts had been impossible in the
hostile and distrustful atmosphere of earlier decades.
Once the political bases for enmity are removed, arms
control can seem easy.
In circumstances of rivalry, in which trust and confidence-building is most needed, solutions to the verification problem (of measuring compliance with arms control
agreements) can prove elusive. Insistence on highly intrusive forms of verification, moreover, can mask a basic
unwillingness to reach agreement and negotiations can
become a charade: Here the goal is not to find common
ground but merely to avoid taking the blame for the failure to do so. Assuming a workable verification mechanism
can be agreed on, there remains, as Fred Iklé famously
observed, the enforcement problem—how to punish the
cheaters that are caught. There is nothing about an arms
control treaty that can make sanctions automatic:
Although effective verification may make it harder for
cheaters to covertly “break out” of agreements, the basic
political problem of when, where, and how to counter
their threatening military power remains, and will be
decided by the parties that are both willing and able to do
something about it. Thus, although it is a form of international cooperation, arms control does not transcend
power politics.
There is one more note of caution: Effective arms
control agreements that do produce mutual verifiable cuts
will expose new gaps and asymmetries in the balance of
forces among potential rivals, and, as a result, may encourage them to channel new investments into other—and
potentially more destabilizing—weapons systems. This is
most likely to occur when, despite major agreements, the
embers of political competition continue to smolder. One
of the important effects of the Washington Naval agreements was to facilitate the parties’ shift of focus and
resources to competitive aircraft carrier development—
with portentous consequences for the outbreak and conduct of World War II in the Pacific.
Proponents of arms control do not deny that these
problems exist, but they point out that arms control is not
always hostage to the vagaries of the political environment—it can shape that environment too. Arms control is
more than just a means by which states press fixed
national interests; it involves a political process that may
permit them to learn more about each other, to deflate
exaggerated images of “the enemy,” and to conceive of
interests in more compatible ways. If it is folly to pursue
arms control with irredeemably aggressive states, it is just
as foolish not to pursue it when the situation is less clearcut, for arms control itself may help not only to bring clarity but also to prevent potentially aggressive states from
becoming aggressors.
ARMS RACE: CONCEPT AND
CONTROVERSIES
An arms race occurs only when parties for whom war is a
possibility engage in strategically interdependent increases
in the quantity and/or quality of weapons: Their respective acquisitions and buildups are meant to match or overcome the strengths of the other side. The element of
strategic interdependence is central to the identification of
the arms race as a phenomenon of international politics,
which requires states to rely ultimately on their own military forces for security, because the military forces of other
states may threaten them and there is no world government to protect them. In such a milieu, where falling
behind one’s competitors can potentially lead to the
gravest consequences, arms racing can be seen as a normal,
survival-enhancing behavior.
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Nevertheless, arms races are often considered harmful
because they lead states that are trying to outpace each
other to devote more resources to military preparations
than would otherwise be necessary for their security.
Increased military buildup, in turn, means that fewer
resources can be devoted to other, welfare-enhancing
activities. When the competitive dynamic of arms racing
comes to dominate other principles for controlling acquisitions, the buildup (and concomitant waste) can mount
precipitously. For example, during the most dramatic
upswing of the cold war nuclear arms race, as the Soviet
arsenal grew and American planners became ever more
ambitious in their target selection, the U.S. nuclear warhead stockpile climbed from approximately 1,000 in
1955, to 18,000 in 1960, to 32,000 by 1967. It was very
hard to understand why a much smaller (and cheaper)
arsenal of warheads would not have been sufficient to
achieve the main strategic purposes: deterring a Soviet
nuclear strike on the United States, or a conventional
assault on Western Europe.
The worst fears about arms races, however, are not
that they are wasteful but that they can cause wars by feeding conflict-spirals that do not just reflect enmities, but create and reinforce them. In this view, arming itself may
become the stuff over which states fight. The conflict-spiral premise is what makes many figurative uses of the term
arms race inapt. It has, for example, been used to describe
the spike in steroid use among the “slugger-elite” of professional baseball, and also the steady pace of miniaturization and computing-capacity innovation among
microchip developers. But few would argue that the greatest danger of steroid use in baseball is that the supersized
sluggers will eventually fall on each other in sudden batwielding melees, or that the technology race among
microchip producers will lead to a cataclysmic collapse of
the high-tech economy.
Two objections to the conflict-spiral conception of
arms racing are often raised. The first and most intuitive
is that arms races do not cause hostility but are its consequence. They reflect the maneuvering of rivals consciously
seeking a margin of advantage that will permit aggression
or deter it, not some unfortunate misunderstanding—and
that being the case, buildups may prevent war, because
they reinforce mutual caution. Second, even if an arms
race between status-quo-oriented states does sometimes
culminate in war, their decisions to fight are based on concrete stakes and complex political judgments that simply
cannot be reduced to reciprocal fears caused by the arms
race itself.
Nevertheless, there is an impressive amount of
research on the connection between arms races and war,
most of which has tended to focus on a few key questions:
Given that some arms races culminate in wars, whereas
178
others do not, are certain types more conducive to war
than others? Do the dynamics of qualitative races (in
which competitors seek innovative capabilities that will
render their rival’s obsolete) differ from quantitative races
(in which competitors seek a numerical advantage in relatively comparable weapons)? Samuel Huntington’s answer
to these questions blended the two concerns by arguing
that quantitative arms races are more dangerous than
qualitative ones because, among other reasons, quantitative races require increasingly costly sacrifices that put
pressure on states to seek a quick and violent escape from
the competition. Others have suggested that arms races
that generate large swings back and forth in relative
strength (thus creating tempting opportunities for aggression by the temporary leader) are the most dangerous. Still
others have made the intuitive point that arms races which
give big advantages to states that favor the status quo are
more likely to result in peace than those which give big
advantages to states with aggressive intentions (although
this ignores the possibility that a status-quo state may
want to use its temporary margin of strength to defeat an
aggressive adversary before it, in turn, becomes stronger).
During the cold war, these concerns were amplified
by the fact that the arms race in question was nuclear: If
it had led to war, it would truly have been a “race to oblivion.” The survival of human life—let alone civilization—
following a major nuclear exchange between the cold war
rivals would be questionable. Furthermore, it was clear
that unless effective arms control measures were taken to
interrupt the competitive dynamic, the superpowers’
nuclear race would metastasize, creeping into other rivalries throughout the international system. Even if arms racing increased the likelihood of war only by small margins,
as the number of nuclear “racers” multiplied so too would
the prospects for nuclear holocaust. Concerns such as
these provided the impetus behind the rivalry-specific and
general nuclear arms-control efforts discussed above, and
while the politics of the NPT remain contentious, and a
number of crucial nuclear-weapons states are not members (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), the NPT
does appear to have helped stem the contagion of nuclear
arms and arms races among states.
As the cold war recedes, and with it the chilling
imagery of a nuclear-arms-race-spiral, the concept of an
arms race remains useful. It has striking relevance to an
important issue of international security today: the militarization of outer space. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the
Soviet Union and the United States experimented with
weapons designed to destroy earth-orbiting satellites,
which have tremendous civilian and military utility. The
feared arms race in such weapons did not then materialize, and the end of the cold war put the issue on ice. In
2007, however, China surprised the world by testing an
antisatellite weapon, challenging the presumption of the
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United States’ military preeminence in space. Thus, the
prospect of a space arms race was resurrected, and the
question of whether such a race could become so intense
as to raise the probability of war was reopened—along
with the question of whether arms control could serve to
prevent war.
Still, in the early twenty-first century concerns over
the arms-race-spiral as a potential cause of nuclear war
seemed to decline relative to fears of another nuclear
nightmare scenario—that of “loose nukes” getting into
the hands of terrorists. This perceived and perhaps real
shift in nuclear risk raises important questions about the
future agenda of arms control concerning nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction: Can the
existing nonproliferation regimes—with some clever
rewiring—furnish satisfactory solutions? Or must a new
matrix of rivalry-specific, general, and supplier-cartel
agreements be contrived to manage risky relationships
between states and nonstate actors? And if the latter is
necessary, will the supportive international political context on which arms control depends take shape and be
maintained? For common danger does not make security
cooperation inevitable. Without a countervailing common will, a construct entirely contingent on politics, the
states that oppose this danger will make a rabble, not a
regime.
Cold War; Deterrence, Mutual; Gorbachev,
Mikhail; Huntington, Samuel P.; League of Nations;
Militarism; National Security; Politics; Reagan,
Ronald; Terrorism; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics;
United Nations; Weaponry, Nuclear; Weapons
Industry; Weapons of Mass Destruction
SEE ALSO
Downs, George W. 1991. Arms Races and War. In Behavior,
Society, and Nuclear War, vol. 2, ed. Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L.
Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly,
73–109. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fairbanks, Charles H., Jr., and Abram N. Shulsky. 1987. From
‘Arms Control’ to ‘Arms Reductions’: The Historical
Experience. Washington Quarterly 10 (3): 59–72.
Falkenrath, Richard A. 1995. Shaping Europe’s Military Order:
The Origins and Consequences of the CFE Treaty. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Garthoff, Raymond L. 1994. Detente and Confrontation:
American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Rev. ed.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Garthoff, Raymond L. 1994. The Great Transition: AmericanSoviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Glaser, Charles L. 2000. The Causes and Consequences of Arms
Races. Annual Review of Political Science 3: 251–276.
Glaser, Charles L. 2004. When Are Arms Races Dangerous?
Rational versus Suboptimal Arming. International Security 28
(4): 44–84.
Goldman, Emily O. 1994. Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control
between the Wars. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Gray, Colin S. 1971. The Arms Race Phenomenon. World
Politics 24 (1): 39–79.
Gray, Colin S. 1992. House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must
Fail. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hafner, Donald L. 1980–1981. Averting a Brobdingnagian Skeet
Shoot: Arms Control Measures for Anti-Satellite Weapons.
International Security 5 (3): 41–60.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1958. Arms Races: Prerequisites and
Results. Public Policy 8 (1): 41–86.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Iklé, Fred Charles. 1961. After Detection—What? Foreign Affairs
39 (2): 208–220.
Adler, Emanuel. 1992. The Emergence of Cooperation: National
Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of
the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control. International Organization
46 (1): 101–145.
Intriligator, Michael D., and Dagobert L. Brito. 1989.
Richardsonian Arms Race Models. In Handbook of War
Studies, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky, 219–236. Boston: Unwin
Hyman.
Betts, Richard K. 1992. Systems for Peace or Causes of War?
Collective Security, Arms Control, and the New Europe.
International Security 17 (1): 5–43.
Jervis, Robert. 1982. Security Regimes. International
Organization 36 (2): 357–378.
Brennan, Donald G., ed. 1961. Arms Control, Disarmament, and
National Security. New York: Braziller.
Jervis, Robert. 1993. Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of
War. Political Science Quarterly 108 (2): 239–253.
Brodie, Bernard. 1976. On the Objectives of Arms Control.
International Security 1 (1): 17–36.
Kennedy, Paul M. 1983. Arms Races and the Causes of War,
1850–1945. In Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight
Studies, 165–177. London: Allen and Unwin.
Bull, Hedley. 1961. The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament
and Arms Control in the Missile Age. New York: Praeger.
Larsen, Jeffrey A., ed. 2004. Arms Control: Cooperative Security in
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Buzan, Barry, and Eric Herring. 1998. The Arms Dynamic in
World Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Lavoy, Peter R. 1991. Learning and the Evolution of
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George W. Breslauer and Phillip E. Tetlock, 735–783.
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Armstrong, Louis
Levi, Michael A., and Michael E. O’Hanlon. 2005. The Future
of Arms Control. Washington DC: Brookings Institution
Press.
ARMSTRONG, LOUIS
SEE
Jazz.
Lieber, Keir A. 2005. Grasping the Technological Peace: The
Offense-Defense Balance and International Security.
International Security 25 (1): 71–104.
Mistry, Dinshaw. 2003. Containing Missile Proliferation: Strategic
Technology, Security Regimes, and International Cooperation in
Arms Control. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Morrow, James D. 1989. A Twist of Truth: A Reexamination of
the Effects of Arms Races on the Occurrence of War. Journal
of Conflict Resolution 33 (3): 500–529.
Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 1989–1990. Arms Control after the Cold
War. Foreign Affairs 68 (5): 42–64.
O’Hanlon, Michael E. 2004. Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary:
Constraining the Military Uses of Space. Washington DC:
Brookings Institution Press.
Pringle, Peter, and William Arkin. 1983. S.I.O.P.: The Secret U.S.
Plan for Nuclear War. New York: Norton.
Rathjens, George W. 1969. The Dynamics of the Arms Race.
Scientific American 220 (4): 15–25.
Richardson, Lewis. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical
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Rosenberg, David Alan. 1983. The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear
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Schear, James A. 1989 Verification, Compliance, and Arms
Control: The Dynamics of the Domestic Debate. In Nuclear
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Schelling, Thomas C., and Morton H. Halperin. 1961. Strategy
and Arms Control. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.
Siverson, Randolph M., and Paul F. Diehl. 1989. Arms Races,
the Conflict Spiral, and the Onset of War. In Handbook of
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Unwin Hyman.
Talbott, Strobe. 1979. Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II.
New York: Harper and Row.
Talbott, Strobe. 1985. Deadly Gambits: The Reagan
Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control.
New York: Vintage.
Weber, Steven. 1991. Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet
Arms Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
York, Herbert. 1970. Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the
Arms Race. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Timothy W. Crawford
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ARONSON, ELLIOT
1932–
Elliot Aronson is a prominent American social psychologist. Born in Revere, Massachusetts, on January 9, 1932,
his career has spanned nearly fifty years. He is renowned
as a creative methodologist who conducts carefully
crafted, highly impactful experiments to explore the
causes and consequences of human social behavior. His
style of experimentation builds on the legacy of Kurt
Lewin (1890–1947) and Leon Festinger (1919–1989).
Aronson’s textbook, The Social Animal (9th ed., 2003), is
widely used and highly regarded for its pedagogical innovations. He is also known for his work as coeditor of two
editions (1969, 1985) of the important Handbook of
Social Psychology. He has been a highly successful mentor
of doctoral students, including many who have made significant contributions to the field of social psychology
during distinguished careers.
Aronson earned a bachelor’s degree in 1954 at
Brandeis University, where he was mentored by Abraham
Maslow (1908–1970). He then earned a master of arts
degree at Wesleyan University in 1956, and completed the
PhD program at Stanford University in 1959, where his
mentor was Festinger, known for developing the theory of
cognitive dissonance. Aronson subsequently held faculty
positions at Harvard University, the University of
Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, and the
University of California at Santa Cruz, where he has been
professor emeritus since 1994. Since 2001 he has also
been distinguished visiting professor at Stanford
University.
Beginning in 1959 and continuing through the mid1960s, Aronson published a number of widely cited
experiments that tested derivations from the theory of
cognitive dissonance, providing support for dissonancetheory explanations of such phenomena as effort justification (evaluating an outcome more positively after a high
degree of effort was required to attain it) and insufficient
deterrence (devaluing a forgone pleasure when the threatened aversive consequence was minimal). Aronson proposed a useful modification to the theory of cognitive
dissonance by asserting that the dissonant cognitions must
be self-relevant, and that dissonance reduction will be
directed at preserving one’s self image. In the 1990s he
returned to this topic in experiments that show that making salient a discrepancy between the behavior that one
advocates for others and one’s own behavior (hypocrisy)
I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N