Contact:	Bob Nelson						For immediate release
		(212) 854-5573					June 9, 1997
		rjn2@columbia.edu



Stanley Schachter, Social Psychologist at Columbia, 75


	Stanley Schachter, the noted social psychologist at Columbia University
 whose wide-ranging curiosity brought him to studies of addiction and the 
emotions, among many other topics, died at home at The Springs, East Hampton,
 N.Y., on Saturday (June 7).  He was 75.
	He had suffered from cancer for more than six years, said his son, Elijah. 
	Professor Schachter was internationally known for his work in social 
l determinants of behavior.  His work has had a major impact on current views of
 emotion and of disorders such as obesity and nicotine addiction.
	"One of the most remarkable things about Stanley was the variety of 
different areas in which he made contributions," said Robert Krauss, professor of 
psychology at Columbia.  "His work ranged from the effects of deviating from a 
group consensus, to reasons people seek to affiliate with others, to the emotions, to 
the psychological factors underlying such appetitive behaviors as smoking and 
obesity, to decision making in the stock market, and most recently, to the sources 
of speech errors.
	"I don't think there was anybody who had as broad a palette or who allowed 
his imagination to range as freely," Professor Krauss said.
	Possibly his best known work was on the emotions.  In the late 1950s, he 
proposed that our emotional experience is a function both of a physiological state 
and a cognitive interpretation of that state.  That approach has had far-reaching 
impact not only in psychology but also the social sciences as well, Professor
 Krauss said.
	He proposed the phenomenon of misattribution, in which people explain
 their own feelings and behaviors as the result of some source other than the real
 one.  In one experiment, he gave participants a pill that stimulated them, but told
 them it would make them itch.  When the participants were placed in an
 emotional situation, they responded with strong emotions because they believed 
the situation, not a drug, was the cause of the emotion.
	He is also remembered for his studies of affiliation, in which he asked
 under what circumstances humans seek out one another.  He was inspired by 
social comparison theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, his mentor at the 
University of Michigan, which holds that people understand their own beliefs, 
feelings and experiences by comparing them to those of others.  He concluded that 
the need for social comparison is an important source of affiliation.
	One consequence of the work on affiliation was a powerful set of findings on 
the effects of birth order, said Julian Hochberg, Centennial Professor Emeritus of 
Psychology at Columbia.  The more anxious the subjects, the more they want to be 
with other people, a tendency particularly marked for first-born and only 
children, a finding that he applied to a great number of behaviors, such as fighter 
pilot effectiveness, alcoholism and receptiveness to psychotherapy.
	"He was a brilliant experimentalist," Professor Krauss said.  "In many 
ways, he was the virtuoso of the experiment.  His experiments were simple, 
involving and incisive."
	In a 1968 study of obesity, widely reported in the press, he found that obese 
people are prompted to eat by "external" cues unrelated to physical hunger, such 
as the immediate presence of food, surroundings, time of day and strong 
emotions, for example.  And in a 1978 study, he showed that cigarette smokers are 
physiologically addicted to nicotine, and that when they switch to lower-nicotine 
brands, they smoke more to prevent symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.
	He worked with Donald Hood, James F. Bender Professor of Psychology at 
Columbia, to "bring the individual back into the stock market," showing that 
market fluctuations could be traced to the psychology of individual participants.  
Greed and fear move the market, not efficiency, as many economists had 
proposed, Professors Hood and Schachter said.  With tongue in cheek, Professor 
Schachter unveiled "bubba psychology," after the Yiddish for "grandmother" at
his 1981 University Lecture at Columbia.  Any grandmother, he proposed, could 
outpredict an economist because she knows that people are not coldly rational 
about investing their money.  "Bubba psychology" was the topic of a front-page 
story in the Wall Street Journal.
	His books were titled: "Social Pressures in Informal Groups" (1950) with 
Festinger and others; "Theory and Experiment in Social Communication" (1950) 
with Festinger and others; "When Prophecy Fails" (1956) with Festinger and 
Henry Riecken; "The Psychology of Affiliation" (1959), "Emotion, Obesity and 
Crime" (1971) and "Obese Humans and Rats" (1974), co-authored with a former 
student, Judith Rodin, now president of the University of Pennsylvania.
	Professor Schachter was born in New York City in 1922 and received the 
B.S. and M.A. from Yale University in 1942 and 1944 respectively.  From 1944 to 
1946, he was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force working on visual problems in the
 Biophysics Division of the Aero-Medical Laboratory at Wright Field.  He returned 
to his graduate studies at MIT's Research Center for Group Dynamics, and, 
when that center moved to the University of Michigan, followed, receiving his
 Ph.D. in social psychology in 1949.
	He was named assistant professor of psychology at the University of 
Minnesota in 1949 and taught there until 1952.  After spending two years studying 
and conducting research in Amsterdam and Oslo, Professor Schachter returned 
to the University of Minnesota as associate professor in 1954.  From 1954 to 1958, 
while research director of the Organization for Comparative Social Research at 
the University of Minnesota, he was also visiting professor at the University of 
Amsterdam and at Stanford.  He was made full professor in 1959 and joined the 
Columbia faculty as professor of psychology in 1961.
	Professor Schachter was elected to the American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences in 1976 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and was the 
recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships.  He was named Robert 
Johnston Niven Professor of Social Psychology in 1966 and retired in 1992 with an 
emeritus designation.
	He was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including the James
 McKeen Cattell Award, the American Association for the Advancement of
 Science's Social-Psychological Prize, the General Electric Foundation Award
(three times), the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific
 Contribution Award, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology's 
Distinguished Scientist Award.
	He was a significant teacher and mentor, and the generation of social
 psychologists who were his students are now the dominant figures in the field,
 Professor Krauss said.
	He is survived by his wife, the former Sophia Duckworth, a consultant on
 historic preservation.  They were married in 1967.  Elijah, their only son, was
 born in 1969.  Professor Schachter's wife and son reside in New York City.  There
 are no other survivors.

This document is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/.  

6.9.97												19,150