ABSTRACT
Social psychology is the study of the person as a social being, and so it has roots going back to the Greek political thinkers, to Machiavelli's detached approach to practical politics, and to Hobbes's first political science. This chapter briefly considers one theory widely influential in the 1950s and early 1960s–Leon Festinger's (1919–1989) theory of cognitive dissonance. It considers that what psychologists and philosophers of mind needed were a few concepts developing outside their fields, in industry, mathematics, logic and war research: Feedback, information, and computation. They would revolutionize the world–the world you live in is not possible without them–and make mind again respectable in psychological science. Cognitive science has come to be applied to social issues via the field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics is a cross disciplinary hybrid of cognitive science and economics, largely a fruitful collaboration between cognitive scientist Kahneman and economist Richard Thaler.
