Summary of Lee Ross & Richard E. Nisbett's The Person and the Situation

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The experience of serious graduate students who, over the course of four or five years, are immersed in the problems and orientation of the field, is different from that of undergraduates who take their first course in social psychology.
#2 The contributions of social psychology are often difficult to reconcile with common sense, but they are important to understand and appreciate. They challenge, reform, and expand common sense.
#3 The predictability ceiling is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of. 30 between measured individual differences in a given trait and behavior in a novel situation that tests that trait. This ceiling is by no means trivial, but it is still lower than what most people expect when they make predictions about each other’s behavior.
#4 The challenge of accounting for the discrepancy between beliefs about everyday experience and empirical evidence is one of the most important faced by psychologists.

Sujets

• Social Psychology
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822501140
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Lee Ross & Richard E. Nisbett's The Person and the Situation
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The experience of serious graduate students who, over the course of four or five years, are immersed in the problems and orientation of the field, is different from that of undergraduates who take their first course in social psychology.

#2

The contributions of social psychology are often difficult to reconcile with common sense, but they are important to understand and appreciate. They challenge, reform, and expand common sense.

#3

The predictability ceiling is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of. 30 between measured individual differences in a given trait and behavior in a novel situation that tests that trait. This ceiling is by no means trivial, but it is still lower than what most people expect when they make predictions about each other’s behavior.

#4

The challenge of accounting for the discrepancy between beliefs about everyday experience and empirical evidence is one of the most important faced by psychologists.

#5

The fundamental attribution error is the belief that individuals’ personalities and dispositions are the most important factors when it comes to their behavior. However, people are often mistaken about the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior.

#6

Some situational factors are very weak in their impact on behavior. For example, the long-term impact of physical and sexual abuse suffered in childhood is relatively small, and the long-term impact of teenage pregnancy on a young woman’s life outcomes is also relatively small.

#7

The fact that some factors that we expect to be very important are trivial in their impact, and some factors that we expect to be weak exert a large influence, demonstrates that we must constantly re-evaluate the importance of situational factors.

#8

The fact that social psychology can never predict how any given individual will behave in a given novel situation is not a reflection on the field’s maturity. The roots of this unpredictability are deep, and may be similar to a source of unpredictability in the physical and biological sciences.

#9

The world seems to be a predictable place, and it is. However, people often make incorrect predictions based on erroneous beliefs and defective prediction strategies.

#10

The field of social psychology is based on the principles of lay social psychology, which are generally adequate for most purposes of life, but they are seriously deficient when we must understand, predict, or control behavior in contexts that lie outside our most customary experience.

#11

Lewin’s work with group decision making demonstrated the most powerful restraining force that must be overcome to change people’s habits is the peer group, but the most powerful inducing force that can be used to achieve success is the social context.

#12

Lewin’s situationism was based on the fact that behavior is produced by the opening up of some channel, and sometimes is blocked by the closing of some channel. It was important for him to recognize and respect channel factors, which are small but critical facilitators or barriers.

#13

The channel factor principle is one way to understand why some situational factors have bigger effects than expected. Seemingly big interventions and campaigns that provide no effective input channel in the form of situational pressures will produce small effects.

#14

The second enduring contribution of social psychology is its understanding of the importance of construal processes, which is the process of understanding the meaning that a person attaches to a situation. To predict the behavior of a given person successfully, you must understand their construal of the situation.

#15

People often fail to take into account the extent to which their own understanding of stimuli is the result of an active, constructive process rather than a passive reception and registering of some external reality. They also fail to recognize the inherent variability of situational construal.

#16

People often fail to recognize the extent to which observed actions and outcomes, especially unexpected or atypical ones, may be diagnostic not of the actor’s unique personal dispositions but rather of the objective situational factors facing the actor and the actor’s subjective construals of those factors.

#17

The third major contribution of psychology is the principle that individual psyches, as well as collectivities ranging from the informal social group to the nation, must be understood as systems in a state of tension. The analysis of any given stimulus situation must include the recognition that behavior is derived from a totality of coexisting facts, and that these coexisting facts have the character of a dynamic field.

#18

The tension system principle helps us understand why seemingly big situational manipulations sometimes have small effects and why seemingly small situational manipulations sometimes have big effects. Big manipulations may fly in the face of, or even increase the strength and resistance of, even bigger restraining factors.

#19

The tension system is when two cognitive elements are in conflict with each other, and people attempt to change others’ opinions so they align with their own. When this doesn’t happen, people will move their beliefs in line with their behavior.

#20

The dissonance theory of attitude change is that people are motivated to change their attitudes when they believe those attitudes are not in line with their actions, which they believe was freely chosen.

#21

The limits to prediction in the social sciences do not mean that we cannot effectively intervene to better the lives of individuals, groups, or society as a whole. They simply indicate that there are limits to what is possible, and it may take some tinkering to achieve those possibilities.

#22

The three principles of social psychology explain how people make predictions, and how those predictions are usually wrong and too confidently made. People often have exaggerated notions about the strength of individual differences and the role those differences play in producing behavior.

#23

The world as it is experienced by the average person is fairly predictable. Lay psychology, like lay physics, generally gets the job done well using dramatically mistaken principles. When it fails, it will generally be because of reasons that we can understand and anticipate.

#24

There are three definitions of relative effect size: the statistical, the pragmatic, and the expectational. Effects are big, or small, relative to something. For our purposes, it will be sufficient to refer to the statistical and the expectational.

#25

Effect size has little to do with statistical significance. By Cohen’s definition, a difference between two means that corresponds to a quarter of a standard deviation in the distribution of the relevant measure is considered small, a difference corresponding to half a standard deviation is considered moderate, and a difference corresponding to a whole standard deviation is considered large.

#26

The most common objection to a simple statistical definition of big is that we don’t care about some effects that would qualify as big by this definition. Effects are big or small relative to the obstacles that stand in the way of getting a particular job done, and relative to the importance of the job.

#27

The judgments passed on social interventions and on the scientific theories on which they are based depend on how well they do relative to our expectations. When we speak of big situational effects, we mean that the effects are big by at least two of these standards: statistical and expectational.

#28

When we compare effects, we will present results wherever possible in proportional form. The proportional measure of effect size is a common metric that is easily understood by everyone.

#29

The predictability and coherence of behavior is seen from the perspective of modern experimental and cognitive social psychology. People often differ in their responses to particular situations and events, and in the patterns of their everyday behavior.

#30

The final four chapters of the book deal with predictability of individual behavior. We begin by reviewing some major studies documenting the modest size of the cross-situational consistencies in the behavior of people exposed to a fixed set of situations. We will then discuss what we believe to be the sources of real behavioral consistency and predictability.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The mob situation, which is when hundreds of people willingly and even eagerly behave in ways that would cause shame and embarrassment if they were alone, illustrates the situational control of behavior. We often make the mistake of explaining individual behavior in dispositional terms, when it should be understood in situational terms.

#2

The famous experiments of Solomon Asch demonstrated the influence of group norms. When subjects performed the task in pairs or groups of three, the estimates began to converge and a group norm quickly developed.

#3

The Asch paradigm is a social influence experiment that was designed to test the idea that people’s most basic perceptions and judgments about the world are socially conditioned and dictated. It proved that people’s judgments are influenced by the judgments of their peers.

#4

The experiment was set up so that the subjects would not be able to communicate with each other. They were told that the judgments they were required to make were independent, but they were extremely e