Early Life and Educational Background
Abraham Tesser was born on May 24, 1941, to Ruth and Louis Tesser in Brooklyn New York.
Tesser completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Long Island University in 1962. After a nonacademic year of work, travel, and existential flailing, he returned to school, Purdue University, for graduate work. Still searching, he began his graduate work in Clinical Psychology and flirted with Industrial Psychology. After being exposed to Leon Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in a social psychology class, he was hooked. The theory’s ability to make predictions that seemed to contradict common sense was intriguing and he was awed by the ingenuity, staging, and results of experiments designed to test those novel predictions. Tesser did not become a dissonance researcher but he did become the second PhD out of Purdue’s then nascent program in Social Psychology. (He minored in statistics and psychometrics.) His master’s research (1965), on...
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Selected Bibliography
Beach, S. R. H., & Tesser, A. (1995). Self-esteem and the extended self-evaluation maintenance model: The self in social context. In M. Kernis (Ed.), Efficacy, agency, and self-esteem (pp. 145–170). New York: Plenum.
Millar, M. G., & Tesser, A. (1992). The role of beliefs and feelings in guiding behavior: The Mis-match Model. In L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), The Constructions of Social Judgement. Hillsdale, Nj: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Tesser, A. (1978). Self-generated attitude change. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 11, pp. 289–338). New York: Academic.
Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 181–227). New York: Academic.
Tesser, A. (1993). On the importance of heritability in psychological research: The case of attitudes. Psychological Review, 100, 129–142.
Tesser, A. (2000). Theories and hypotheses. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Guide to publishing in psychology journals (pp. 58–80). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Tesser, A. (2002). Constructing a niche for the self: A bio-social, PDP approach to understanding lives. Self and Identity, 1, 185–191.
Tesser, A., & Bau, J. J. (2002). Social psychology: Who we are and what we do. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 72–85.
Tesser, A., & Leone, C. (1977). Cognitive schemas and thought as determinants of attitude change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 340–356.
Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1975). The reluctance to transmit bad news. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 194–232). New York: Academic.
Tesser, A., Martin, L., & Cornell, D. (1996). On the substitutability of self-protective mechanisms. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action: Linking motivation and cognition to behavior (pp. 48–68). New York: Guilford.
Tesser, A., Crepaz, N., Collins, J. C., Cornell, D., & Beach, S. R. H. (2000). Confluence of self defense mechanisms: On integrating the self zoo. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1476–1489.
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Tesser, A. (2019). Tesser, Abraham. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_442-1
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