Perhaps one of the greatest impacts of Festinger's studies lies in their "depict of social behavior as the responses of a thinking organism continually acting to bring order into his world, rather than as the blind impulses of a creature of emotion and habit," as cited in his Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. Behaviorism, which had dominated psychology until that time, characterized man as a creature of habit conditioned by stimulus-response reinforcement processes. Behaviorists focused only on the observable, i.e., behavior and external rewards, with no reference to cognitive or emotional processes. Theories like cognitive dissonance could not be explained in behaviorist terms. For example, liking was simply a function of reward according to behaviorism, so greater reward would produce greater liking; Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment clearly demonstrated greater liking with lower reward, a result that required the acknowledgement of cognitive processes. With Festinger's theories and the research that they generated, "the monolithic grip that reinforcement theory had held on social psychology was effectively and permanently broken."