The Person and the Situation Quotes

“Social psychology stands at the intersection between our eyes and the world in front of us, and helps us understand the difference between what we think we see and what is actually out there.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“people often make correct predictions on the basis of erroneous beliefs and defective prediction strategies.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“People’s inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions, together with their failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior, has been termed the “fundamental attribution error”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“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.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“When trying to get people to change familiar ways of doing things, social pressures and constraints exerted by the informal peer group represent the most potent restraining force that must be overcome and, at the same time, the most powerful inducing force that can be exploited to achieve success.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“group discussion techniques could be employed to change a variety of similarly entrenched behaviors involving health practices and child care. For example, when rural mothers in a maternity hospital were individually advised by a nutritionist to administer cod-liver oil to their newborn infants, only about 20 percent complied within the initial test period. When the same information was introduced in the context of a six person discussion group, the rate of immediate compliance more than doubled, reaching 45 percent.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“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. Such an “internal attribution” might be harmful if it produces worry and rumination that exacerbate one’s symptoms.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“The presence of a salient social model appears to be a particularly potent channel factor in inducing people to engage in behavior that is socially desirable, that is, in facilitating the link between positive attitudes and positive actions. Effect sizes vary, but they are generally quite large both in absolute terms and relative to most people’s intuitions”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“Before designing their interventions, the investigators, in the best Lewinian tradition, carefully analyzed the motivational factors and group processes that restrained productivity in general and resulted in particular resistance to procedural changes. The specific techniques employed to increase productivity similarly incorporated a number of subtle features (for example, the manner in which the workers were encouraged to adopt the proposed changes and implementation details as their own group’s norm, and not as something imposed upon them without their advice or consent).”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“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.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“Our intuitive ideas about people and the principles governing their responses to their environment are generally adequate for most purposes of the office and the home; but they are seriously deficient when we must understand, predict, or control behavior in contexts that lie outside our most customary experience – that is, when we take on new and different roles or responsibilities, encounter new cultures, analyze newly arisen social problems, or contemplate novel social interventions to address such problems.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology

“The channel factor principle, thus, is one key to understanding why some situational factors have bigger effects than might be anticipated and why some have smaller effects. Seemingly big interventions and campaigns that provide no effective input channel in the form of situational pressures, or no effective behavioral outlet channel in the form of clear intentions or plans, will generally produce disappointingly small effects. And seemingly small situational factors that operate on important input or output channels will often exert gratifyingly large effects.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation

“The first principle concerns the power and subtlety of situational influences. The second involves the importance of people’s subjective interpretations of the situation. The third speaks to the necessity of understanding both individual psyches and social groups as tension systems or energy “fields” characterized by an equilibrium between impelling and restraining forces.”
― Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation