Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: MIT (Research Center for Group Dynamics), later Columbia University; social psychology
- Orientation: Social-influence/social-comparison theory of emotion; two-factor (cognitive-arousal) theory
Key contributions
- With Jerome Singer, proposed the two-factor theory of emotion: emotion = physiological arousal + cognitive appraisal/labeling of its cause (Schachter & Singer 1962).
- Extended Festinger’s social-comparison theory from opinions/abilities to emotions (The Psychology of Affiliation, 1959).
- Adrenalin-injection × informed/uninformed/misinformed × euphoric/angry-confederate design; launched decades of attribution/misattribution research.
Key papers
- Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69, 379–399.
- Schachter, S. (1959). The Psychology of Affiliation.
- Schachter, S., & Wheeler, L. (1962). Epinephrine, chlorpromazine, and amusement.
Connections
Social psychologist whose two-factor theory became the cognitive-appraisal pole of 20th-century emotion theory. See Cognitive appraisal (of emotion) and the paradigm at Adrenalin (epinephrine) injection paradigm.
The two-factor theory
Emotion arises when a state of physiological arousal is given a cognitive label drawn from context. In the 1962 experiment, epinephrine-aroused subjects who could not attribute their arousal to the drug (“uninformed”) took on the emotion of a euphoric or angry confederate; those who could (“informed”) did not. Read as: undifferentiated arousal + appraisal = specific emotion — a direct challenge to Autonomic specificity of emotion.
Dror’s revisionist reading
Dror (2017) argues Schachter’s route to the theory ran through social influence, not James–Lange:
- The cognitive element was needed to extend Festinger’s social-comparison theory to emotions.
- The euphoria condition was pure social influence (a stooge), inherited from his affiliation studies.
- James–Lange framing and adrenalin-study citations were added at a reviewer’s request.
- His deeper, lasting move was universalizing sympathetic arousal as constitutive of every emotion.
- Schachter himself was “furious” at the published paper’s Tables 6–9, where meaningless “ns” notations (“Nothing was tested”) appeared via a copy-editing blunder.
Reception
Methodologically savaged by psychophysiologists (Plutchik & Ax 1967; “exquisitely bad,” Levenson) and beset by replication failures, yet enormously influential — enshrined in textbooks and, later, foundational to social-constructionist emotion theory. See Friedman (2010).