ELLIOT ARONSON: My name is Elliot Aronson. I'm a social psychologist. And right now I'm professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I've been a social psychologist almost all my life, even before I knew there was such a thing.

I grew up in a very anti-Semitic neighborhood. I was frequently taunted and pushed around. One of my earliest, most powerful memories— I was about nine years old nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, and asking myself, why do these kids hate me so much when they don't even know me? I didn't realize it at the time, but these turned out to be profound social psychological questions.

The great humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow taught me a way of looking at the world. He believed that we could use psychology to help people grow and become more loving and accepting of one another. These were extremely powerful lessons for me. Leon Festinger, who was my mentor in graduate school, didn't give a damn about doing good in the world. What he trained me to do was to do good research.

In 1971, I was teaching at the University of Texas in Austin when the schools of Austin were desegregated. There were fistfights in the school yards. And the superintendent of schools asked if I had any ideas as to what to do in that situation. Prior to desegregation the schools in the black and Mexican-American neighborhoods were sub-par.

Then you had desegregation. These kids were all put in the same schools. They were in a highly competitive situation, where the black and Mexican-American kids were guaranteed to lose. It drove a stronger wedge between those different racial and ethnic groups. So we thought, well, let's see what would happen if we changed the nature of the classroom from a competitive one into a cooperative one.

We called it the jigsaw classroom. We broke the kids into five person groups that were different in terms of the racial makeup and the gender makeup. Each kid had a piece of the action. For example, if the kids were learning the biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, every kid would have a paragraph. But the only access each kid had was to his own paragraph. And then it was each kid's job to teach it to the other kids in their group.

The results was striking. Kids in the jigsaw classrooms, especially the minority kids— their performance went way up. They liked each other better. And they liked school better. After six weeks of jigsaw, the school yard was totally integrated. It only happened when kids were put in a situation where they had to work together in order to learn the material.

I first got interested in attraction around 1961 or '62. Why we find some people interesting and attractive and not others. John F. Kennedy had just been elected President of the United States. He was smart, Harvard trained, a war hero, he had a beautiful wife, two little kids, one boy, one girl. He was enormously attractive. Kennedy inspired the experiment, which showed that perfection isn't as attractive as imperfection.

Kennedy engaged in one of the worst blunders that our country had ever engaged in— the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when we actually sponsored an invasion of Cuba. That was an absolute disaster. But he took full responsibility for the blunder. That's attractive.

When a really bright, attractive person commits a blunder he actually gains in attractiveness because he seems more approachable. And I find this absolutely fascinating.

Vera and I were both psychology majors at Brandeis. And we gradually fell in love. She's talented as a musician, as an artist, does an awful lot of things, and raised four terrific kids.

I have macular degeneration. It came upon me about 15 years ago. And I gradually saw over the next two or three years my vision slip away. It's forced me to be a lot more spontaneous in teaching. It hasn't really stopped me. Desilu is my guide dog. She's is a great companion. I go everywhere with her.

I'm 83 years old and still changing, growing, learning things. What I tried to do, throughout my entire career, was combine the influence of my two great mentors, Abraham Maslow and Leon Festinger. Those are the two things that are most important to me, doing good science, and doing good.