The Person and the Situation

by Lee Ross

the best available evidence on the predictive validity of unstructured interviews for estimating future college or graduate school performance, or job performance by blue-collar or white-collar workers, or professional success by executives, lawyers, doctors, or research scientists, indicates that the relevant correlations rarely exceed the .10 to .15 range.

Then why interview?

We hinted earlier at one case where individual difference information can be invaluable. This is where one has base rate information for the particular individual for the particular situation. Thus your prediction that Jack will talk a lot at the lunch table today, as in the past, is bankable, as is your prediction that your spouse will complain about the next party where people are standing around talking and drinking. It is entirely likely, in fact, that lay convictions about the utility of traits are in part based on an overgeneralization from successful predictions based on narrow, within-situation stability.

The rare instance of individual difference stabiity.

The explanation we prefer is a fundamentally perceptual one, owing originally to Kurt Lewin but first stated clearly by Fritz Heider. . . . behavior . . . has such salient properties that it tends to engulf the field rather than be confined to its proper position as a local stimulus whose interpretation requires the additional data of a surrounding field – the situation in social perception. (Heider, 1958, p. 54)

Context is king.

Impression perseverance. Once one has observed an actor’s behavior or outcome and come up with a dispositional attribution, it can be difficult to alter one’s hypothesis about that actor, even if one were to become privy to new information that challenged or invalidated the old information (Lord, Lepper, & Ross, 1979; Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975). There is evidence for a broad range of cognitive processes that would conspire to sustain initial impressions (Ross & Lepper, 1980). Subsequent acts are likely to be construed in terms that render them consistent with initial attributions; and confirmations are accepted at face value, while exceptions are readily explained away.

Confirmation bias.

Evolutionary pressures are more likely to have been applied to judgments about intimates in the early hominid and human troop than to judgments about strangers. Thus a simple reading of base rates for the individual for the particular, familiar situation would have been about all that was needed for quite accurate prediction in daily life.

Why we overestimate our abilities to infer based on stranger's individual differences.

it will become apparent, highlights the ways in which person and situation factors may be confounded to produce the frequent regularities (and also the occasional surprises) that we all experience in our everyday attempts to understand, predict, and control each other’s behavior.

Several studies show that attractive youngsters, from the earliest years of school onward, are presumed to be more personable and socially accomplished than their less attractive peers, and also to be more intelligent and likely to succeed academically (Clifford & Walster, 1973; Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Attractive people are further presumed to be happier, more sociable and extraverted, less socially deviant, and more likely to be successful in their personal and professional pursuits (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986; also Albright, Kenny, & Malloy, 1988; Chaiken, 1979).

Oh dear... Attractiveness comes with benefits it seems

A less extreme example of this phenomenon is familiar. Parents are often surprised to hear accounts of their children’s behavior at school, at a party, or in the home of a particular friend. Part of the surprise comes from the parents’ failure to appreciate the impact of the various social contexts on children in general. But part of their surprise comes from the fact that whenever they personally observe their child, they themselves are an important element in the child’s situation, producing more uniformity than would otherwise be the case.

Brilliant!

“Fair” research designs for investigating personality not only eliminate sources of everyday consistency that are actually situational, they also reduce some sources that reflect genuine interactions between dispositional factors and situational ones. People in everyday circumstances do not just “happen” to face the particular situations that compel and constrain their behavior. They actively choose many of the situations to which they expose themselves, and they alter many situations they happen to encounter. (See Endler, 1983; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Pervin, 1977; Snyder, 1981, 1983; and Swann, 1984, for more detailed discussions of person-situation interactions.)

the famous experiments of Kelley and Stahelski (1970) using a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” paradigm. In their experiments, two subjects, unable to see or communicate with each other, had to choose whether to make cooperative or noncooperative responses on each of several consecutive trials. The relevant “payoff matrices” were presented to the participants: When both subjects chose the cooperative response, both received a modest payoff. When one chose the cooperative and the other the competitive response, the latter received a high payoff and the former suffered a large loss. When both chose the competitive response, both suffered a moderate loss. Different subjects, however, construed the situation in different ways. To some, it was obvious that the sensible strategy was to play the cooperative response as much as possible so as to settle into a pattern of modest gain along with one’s partner. Such subjects (as would be expected from people’s tendency to assume that others share their construal of situations, and from their resulting tendency to overestimate consensus for their own behavior) overwhelmingly estimated that other subjects would see the object of the game in the same way and play cooperatively. To other subjects, it was equally obvious that the situation would reward “defection” more than cooperation, and they played accordingly, assuming that their partner would see things the same way.

In a child’s life there is almost always something more exciting to do than to concentrate on the cognitive task at hand. Those children with a little greater capacity to sit still may be those who, in our book-ridden culture at least, gain the cognitive skills, and at the same time earn reputations and develop conceptions of themselves, that contribute to further scholastic achievement.

Aristotelian dynamics are completely determined in advance by the nature of the object concerned. In modern physics, on the contrary, the existence of a physical vector always depends upon the mutual relations of several physical facts, especially upon the relation of the object to its environment.

Cialdini was interested in determining the best strategy for restaurant waiters to use in maximizing tips. He observed the highest-earning waiter in a particular restaurant for a period of time to find out what it was that he did. What was most notable about the waiter’s behavior, it turned out, was that he didn’t do anything consistently – except seek to maximize his tips. With families, he was warm and homey, winking at the children and anticipating their desires. With adolescents on dates, he was haughty and intimidating. And with older women eating alone he was solicitous and confidential. The “consistency” in these diverse behaviors lay only in the energetically and thoughtfully pursued professional goal of the waiter.

Individual differences in goals and preferences have long been seen as an important source of individual differences in behavior (Mischel, 1968). The personologist’s approach, moreover, often has been idiographic, revealing that people differ from each other not only in their particular needs and values but also in the importance or centrality of those needs and values. Thus, esthetic concerns appear central and organizing for some individuals and of relatively little importance for other individuals. Recognition of social and political values similarly can provide the key for understanding some people’s consistencies in behavior, but can be of little significance in understanding other people’s behavior.

The personality theory of the future will surely continue to stress the importance of understanding people’s goals, competencies, strategies, construals, and self-conceptions.

The answer offered by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great nineteenth-century observer of American society, was a decidedly situationist one. He argued that the physically demanding and socially primitive world of the colonists, coupled with the absence of any preexisting government institutions, required the citizenry to act cooperatively in ad hoc associations of their own construction. The habit of forming and using voluntary associations to pursue shared goals thus taught the skills and techniques of self-governance that are essential to democracy. Tocqueville believed it was no accident that . . . the most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires and have applied this new technique to the greatest number of purposes. (Tocqueville, 1835/1969, p. 514)

The elected Christian is in the world only to increase this glory of God by fulfilling His commandments to the best of his ability. But God requires social achievement of the Christian because He wills that social life shall be organized according to His commandments. . . . This makes labour in the service of impersonal social usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to be willed by Him. (Weber, 1905/1984, p. 108-109) Mere labor for the Lord was not enough, however. The pursuit of the common good had to be energetic and wholehearted so as to quell one’s doubts about one’s own election. On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace. . . . On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace. (Weber, 1905/1984, p. 111-112)

This is questionable.

The piety is explained by a distinctive theology; the commercial superiority, by the energy and moral stature conferred by the piety; and the free political institutions, by the government reforms required for economic rationality.

One of the most striking demonstrations was that, historically, periods of economic development for a given culture (of all kinds, including non-Christian ones) can be predicted by increases in achievement themes in the children’s literature of the generation before. They also were able to show significant correlations (albeit, generally rather weak ones) between the achievement imagery expressed by individuals, in their writings and in their responses to projective tests, and both the socialization practices to which they were exposed and their own actual achievement in various domains. There was, however, one weak link in the research evidence. Investigators were unable to establish that American Protestants show more achievement imagery than American Catholics (Veroff, Feld, & Gurin, 1962). Roger Brown, in his classic 1965 social psychology text, thought this a serious enough weakness to cast significant doubt on the entire enterprise.

Joan Miller (1984) has shown that Hindus are more likely than Americans to explain events in terms of situational or contextual factors. As noted in Chapter 5 (where we discussed only the results for American subjects), Miller asked her subjects to describe, and then to account for, “good” or “wrong” things that someone they knew well had recently done. Their explanations were coded into broad categories of which the most relevant, in terms of our concerns, were those corresponding to general dispositions (for example, “generosity” or “clumsiness”) versus context (for example, “there was no one else there to help” or “it was dark”). Individualistic, person-oriented U.S. subjects invoked general dispositions 45 percent of the time to explain negative or deviant behaviors, while Hindu subjects invoked them only 15 percent of the time.

What the Cambridge-Somerville studies remind us of (aside from the fact that some of our preconceptions about the causes and correlates of adult success may be in need of revision) is something very important about tension systems. Most normal human psyches are more robust and less subject to either early- or late-occurring trauma than our intuitions tell us (Kagan, 1984). Similarly, most normal communities like Cambridge-Somerville are more potent and stable in their influences on potentially deviant individuals than we recognize. By the same token, positive interventions, no matter how early they occur or how potent they seem, are not likely to have large or enduring effects, at least not on average, if the community ecology is allowed to work its influence on individuals.

The importance of community ecology

The significance of the finding that teacher expectations affect children’s intellectual growth has not been lost on those concerned with minority education. Indeed, there is evidence that educators generally expect lower performance of minority children (Brophy & Good, 1974), and strong circumstantial evidence that these expectations can be a factor in the children’s poor educational performance (Dreeben & Barr, 1983).

Pertinent

1975 by Richard Miller, Phillip Brickman, and Diana Bolen. It showed that children may be less responsive to communications urging them to change their behavior than to positive social labels and to the suggestion that they already possess the virtue in question.

Not truant but virtuous

By contrast, the use of embellishments to enhance intrinsic interest led children to more complex and efficient problem-solving strategies and to superior performances. It also led the children to more positive assessments of the task and of their own abilities, and to more ambitious preferences for future tasks.

Intrinsic interest has always been the way.

When girls received negative feedback, 88 percent of it pertained to intellectual quality and only 12 percent pertained to sloppiness or incorrect form. When boys received negative feedback, only 54 percent of it pertained to intellectual content and 46 percent pertained to matters of neatness or form. In short, the overall pattern of feedback encouraged boys more than girls to feel that their successes reflected their academic abilities, while their failures did not.

reverse placebo effects can also occur. That is, the erroneous belief that one is receiving an effective drug or treatment can exacerbate rather than relieve the patient’s symptoms. The explanation for this paradoxical result can be found in attribution theory, particularly as it is applied to emotional experience and self-labeling (Ross, Rodin, & Zimbardo, 1969; Valins & Nisbett, 1972). To the extent that negative symptoms persist in the face of a treatment that “ought” to bring relief, one may be inclined to attribute such persistence to the seriousness and intractability of whatever it is that is producing one’s symptoms.

Compelling.

Economist and political theorist Thomas Sowell (1987) has argued that two opposing visions of human nature and society have struggled against one another across the centuries. He calls these visions “constrained” and “unconstrained.” The constrained vision holds that human nature and the broad outlines of social life are relatively fixed and are very difficult to change, and that the effects of deliberate interventions to produce change are unpredictable and usually include unforeseen negative consequences that cancel or outweigh any positive ones. The unconstrained vision holds that human nature is highly plastic and malleable, and that we know the laws of individual psychology and social systems well enough to be able to plan interventions that will reliably improve the human condition. We believe that social psychology speaks in a clear voice to these questions – siding in part with the holders of the constrained view and in part with the holders of the unconstrained view.

Indeed, well before publication of The Person and the Situation, Barbara McNeil and colleagues showed that even experienced physicians were susceptible to variations in the way treatment risks and benefits were “framed.” In particular, the marked preference the doctors attending a conference showed for the less risky but potentially less effective option of radiation over that of surgery that had been evident when the risk was described in terms of immediate mortality rates (i.e., 10% vs. 0%) vanished when the risks were described in terms of survival rates (i.e., 90% vs. 100%).

For the biases paper.

If we were writing our book today we would emphasize a source of bias affecting inferences and judgments that we believe may be more truly “fundamental” – that is, the conviction that one’s own perceptions, inferences, judgments, etc are a reflection of objective reality. This epistemic stance, which Ross & Ward termed naive realism, leads us to expect other reasonable and objective people to share our views. It also leads us to attribute disagreements in judgment to something about them – i.e., dispositions, idiosyncratic circumstances and experiences, and other distorting cognitive, motivational, or even cultural biases.

Refer to naive realism in paper.

More collectivist cultures, including especially those of East Asia, not only show less focus on the self and more on family and other in-group members, they also are less dispositionist in their world view and in fact less prone to the fundamental attribution error. They focus less on the actor and more on the social situation surrounding the actor.