The Person and the Situation

Perspectives of Social Psychology

Lee Ross, Richard E. Nisbett

• Publisher: Pinter & Martin
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781905177455
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does the situation we're in influence the way we behave and think? Professors Ross and Nisbett eloquently argue that the context we find ourselves in substantially affects our behavior in this timely reissue of one of social psychology's classic textbooks. With a new foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Undergraduates taking their first course in social psychology generally are in search of an interesting and enjoyable experience, and they rarely are disappointed. They find out many fascinating things about human behavior, some of which validate common sense and some of which contradict it. The inherent interest value of the material, amounting to high-level gossip about people and social situations, usually ensures that the students are satisfied consumers.

The experience of serious graduate students, who, over the course of four or five years, are immersed in the problems and the orientation of the field, is rather different. For them, the experience is an intellectually wrenching one. Their most basic assumptions about the nature and the causes of human behavior, and about the very predictability of the social world, are challenged. At the end of the process, their views of human behavior and society will differ profoundly from the views held by most other people in their culture. Some of their new insights and beliefs will be held rather tentatively and applied inconsistently to the social events that unfold around them. Others will be held with great conviction, and will be applied confidently. But ironically, even the new insights that they are most confident about will tend to have the effect of making them less certain than their peers about predicting social behavior and making inferences about particular individuals or groups. Social psychology rivals philosophy in its ability to teach people that they do not truly understand the nature of the world. This book is about that hard-won ignorance and what it tells us about the human condition.

THE LESSONS AND CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

As graduate students at Columbia University in the 1960s, working primarily with Stanley Schachter, we underwent the experience typical of students exposed to the experimental tradition in social psychology. That is, many of our most fundamental beliefs about human behavior, beliefs that we shared with most other people in our culture and that had remained intact or even been strengthened by our undergraduate courses in the humanities, were abruptly challenged in ways that have shaped our subsequent careers. An introduction to these challenges, which we offer below, provides a departure point for our discussion of the contributions of our discipline. Indeed, the remainder of our book represents an attempt to reconcile common sense and common experience with the empirical lessons and challenges that lie at the core of social psychology. In so doing, the book seeks to provide an overview of social psychology’s primary scientific and intellectual contributions, one that serves to challenge, reform, and expand common sense.

The Weakness of Individual Differences

Consider the following scenario: While walking briskly to a meeting some distance across a college campus, John comes across a man slumped in a doorway, asking him for help. Will John offer it, or will he continue on his way? Before answering such a question, most people would want to know more about John. Is he someone known to be callous and unfeeling, or is he renowned for his kindness and concern? Is he a stalwart member of the Campus Outreach Organization, or a mainstay of the Conservative Coalition Against Welfare Abuse? In short, what kind of person is John and how has he behaved when his altruism has been tested in the past? Only with such information in hand, most people would agree, could one make a sensible and confident prediction.

In fact, however, nothing one is likely to know or learn about John would be of much use in helping predict John’s behavior in the situation we’ve described. In particular, the type of information about personality that most laypeople would want to have before making a prediction would prove to be of relatively little value. A half century of research has taught us that in this situation, and in most other novel situations, one cannot predict with any accuracy how particular people will respond. At least one cannot do so using information about an individual’s personal dispositions or even about that individual’s past behavior.

Even scientists who are most concerned with assessing individual differences in personality would concede that our ability to predict how particular people will respond in particular situations is very limited. This “predictability ceiling” is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of .30 between measured individual differences on a given trait dimension and behavior in a novel situation that plausibly tests that dimension. This ceiling, for example, would characterize our ability to predict on the basis of a personality test of honesty how likely different people will be to cheat in a game or on an exam, or to predict on the basis of a test of friendliness or extroversion how much sociability different individuals will show at a particular social gathering. Now a correlation of .30, as we will emphasize later, is by no means trivial. Correlations of this magnitude can be quite important for many prediction purposes. But a correlation of .30 still leaves the great bulk of variance in people’s behavior unaccounted for. More importantly, a correlation of this magnitude is a good deal lower than it would have to be to provide the type of predictability that most laypeople anticipate when they make predictions about each other’s behavior or make inferences about others’ personal attributes. Moreover, the .30 value is an upper limit. For most novel behaviors in most domains, psychologists cannot come close to that. Certainly, as we will see, neither the professional nor the layperson can do that well when obliged to predict behavior in one particular new situation on the basis of actions in one particular prior situation.

Despite such evidence, however, most people staunchly believe that individual differences or traits can be used to predict how people will behave in new situations. Such “dispositionism” is widespread in our culture. What is more, most of us, scientists and laypeople alike, seem to find our dispositionism affirmed by our everyday social experience. The challenge of accounting for this discrepancy between beliefs about everyday experience on the one hand and empirical evidence on the other hand is one of the most important faced by psychologists. We will deal with it at many points in this book.

The Power of Situations

While knowledge about John is of surprisingly little value in predicting whether he will help the person slumped in the doorway, details concerning the specifics of the situation would be invaluable. For example, what was the appearance of the person in the doorway? Was he clearly ill, or might he have been a drunk or, even worse, a nodding dope addict? Did his clothing make him look respectably middle class or decently working class, or did he look like a homeless derelict?

Such considerations are fairly obvious once they are mentioned, and the layperson, upon reflection, will generally concede their importance. But few laypeople would concede, much less anticipate, the relevance of some other, subtler, contextual details that empirical research has shown to be important factors influencing bystander intervention. Darley and Batson (1973) actually confronted people with a version of the situation we’ve described and found what some of these factors are. Their subjects were students in a religious seminary who were on their way to deliver a practice sermon. If the subjects were in a hurry (because they thought they were late to give a practice sermon), only about 10 percent helped. By contrast, if they were not in a hurry (because they had plenty of time before giving their sermon), about 63 percent of them helped.

Social psychology has by now amassed a vast store of such empirical parables. The tradition here is simple. Pick a generic situation; then identify and manipulate a situational or contextual variable that intuition or past research leads you to believe will make a difference (ideally, a variable whose impact you think most laypeople, or even most of your peers, somehow fail to appreciate), and see what happens. Sometimes, of course, you will be wrong and your manipulation won’t “work.” But often the situational variable makes quite a bit of difference. Occasionally, in fact, it makes nearly all the difference, and information about traits and individual differences that other people thought all-important proves all but trivial. If so, you have contributed a situationist classic destined to become part of our field’s intellectual legacy. Such empirical parables are important because they illustrate the degree to which ordinary men and women are apt to be mistaken about the power of the situation – the power of particular situational features, and the power of situations in general.

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” (Ross, 1977; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; see also Jones, 1979; Gilbert & Jones, 1986). Together with many other social psychologists, we have directed our attention to documenting this conjoint error and attempting to track down its origins. Every chapter of this book will discuss research relevant to this error. In Chapter 5 we will marshall the evidence showing how widespread the error is and try to explain why it occurs.

The Subtlety of Situations

There is another face to situationism. Not all situational factors prove to be powerful determinants of behavior, not even those that seem intuitively strong to both laypeople and social scientists. Some, in fact, prove to be astonishingly weak.

Nowhere is the weakness of apparently big situational factors more perplexing than in studies of the impact of various real-life events on important social outcomes. For some of these weak effects we can be grateful. For example, it turns out that in most cases the long-term impact of physical and sexual abuse suffered in childhood is relatively slight (Widom, 1989), as is the long-term effect of teenage pregnancy on a young woman’s life outcomes (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, & Morgan, 1987), and even the long-term effect of P.O.W. camp indoctrination (Schein, 1956). Unfortunately, apparently positive events sometimes also prove to be surprisingly weak in their effect. For example, the lives of major lottery winners seem to be influenced far less by their windfalls than most of us would predict, especially when we imagine how much our own lives would be changed by a similar windfall (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978).

A more sobering example of the weakness of apparently large, apparently positive events is to be found in what is perhaps the progenitor of modern social intervention experiments, the Cambridge-Somerville study of delinquency described by Powers and Whitmer (1951) with follow-ups by the McCords (J. McCord, 1978; J. McCord & W. McCord, 1959; W. McCord & J. McCord, 1959). The subjects in this noble experiment (which we discuss at greater length in Chapter 8 on applications of social psychology) were both “delinquency prone” and “average” boys living in a lower socioeconomic status in a mostly Irish and Italian suburb of Boston in the 1940s. Some of the boys were assigned to an extremely ambitious and intensive experimental intervention condition in which, over roughly a five-year period, they were exposed to a wide variety of social, psychological, and academic supports. Thus counselors provided two home visits per month to work on personal and family problems. Tutoring in academic subjects was made available. Many of the boys received psychiatric or medical help. Contact with Boy Scouts, YMCA, or other community programs was facilitated, and a substantial number of the boys were given the opportunity to attend summer camps. Despite this intensive and apparently favorable intervention, however, the boys in this experimental, or “treatment,” condition proved to be no less likely to become delinquent than those in an “untreated” control group. Indeed, follow-ups conducted 30 years after the end of the program suggested that treated subjects may actually have fared slightly worse as adults, for example, in terms of rates for serious adult offenses, than those subjects whose outcomes were merely monitored.

Follow-up research on the nondelinquent boys in the Cambridge-Somerville sample who received no treatment (Long & Vaillant, 1984) showed even more surprising noneffects – in this case, noneffects of apparently important social factors in the boys’ family backgrounds. The boys were classified into four different categories depending on the degree of social health or pathology of their home life. At the lowest extreme were families with many serious problems – for example, an alcoholic or abusive father, a schizophrenic mother, a dependence on many social agencies for financial support, and so forth. At the opposite extreme were families that seemed for the most part to be models of the working poor – fathers were employed, mothers were serving as homemakers, there was no obvious pathology and no dependence on social agencies. The life outcomes of boys in these different categories were then examined in a follow-up study 40 years later. On indicator after indicator – for example, income, mental health, prison incarcerations, suicides, and the like – the status of the subjects’ home situation as children made little if any difference.

What do we learn from these spectacular noneffects? Certainly not that situational factors are unimportant in the world outside the social psychology laboratory. As we will see beginning in Chapter 2, many realworld effects turn out to be huge – from the dramatic personal changes wrought by immersing conservative young women in highly liberal surroundings (Newcomb, 1943), to the pronounced effect of competition on group conflict (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961). Conversely, it is not only in the “real world” that situational factors and manipulations sometimes prove to be surprisingly small or nonexistent. It is the studies with detectable effects that get published, and the subset of the studies with large and unanticipated effects that become well known. The others languish in file drawers. We wish we had a dollar for every failed laboratory manipulation that social psychologists have designed with the confident expectation that the effects in question would be significant. What we have learned, in short, is that situational effects can sometimes be far different from what our intuitions, or theories, or even the existing psychological literature tell us they should be. Some factors that we expect to be very important prove to be trivial in their impact; and some factors that we expect to be weak prove, at least in some contexts, to exert a very large influence indeed. Accounting for our poor “calibration” as to the size of the effects produced by situational factors is a major focus of the education of the social psychologist and a chief concern of this book.

The Predictability of Human Behavior

When we, the authors, were undergraduates, we were assured that the sharply limited abilities of social scientists to make accurate predictions had to do with the relative youth of the social sciences. We no longer share such beliefs nor resort to such defenses of our field. We now believe that ours is not a particularly immature science and that we have, in fact, already discovered and documented some very important things about human social behavior. At the same time, we accept the fact that social psychology is never going to reach the point of predicting how any given individual (even one who is well known to us) is going to behave in a given novel situation. A corollary of this concession is that the application of social science knowledge is always going to be a risky business. When we try something new, even a new intervention that seems very reasonable on prior grounds, we are frequently going to discover that people respond quite differently than we had anticipated.

The roots of this fundamental unpredictability, we will argue, are very deep and perhaps akin to a source of similar unpredictability in phenomena in the physical and biological sciences (Gleick, 1987). We will consider this unpredictability issue further near the end of this chapter, and then return to it again at several other points throughout the book.

The Conflict Between the Lessons of Social Psychology and the Experience of Everyday Life

As we have seen, the evidence of empirical social psychology often conflicts sharply with what we “know” from everyday life. To be sure, we are sometimes surprised by the behavior of our fellow human beings, or by a genuinely unexpected act on the part of one of our children, or one of our friends, or some public figure. But for the most part the world seems an orderly, predictable place. It is extroverted Bill who dons the lamp shade at the party and not introverted Jill. Similarly, it is the pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd who preaches charity and the Republican congressman from the wealthiest district in the state who preaches self-reliance and free enterprise. Moreover, soft answers do seem to turn away wrath. Sending a boy to do a man’s job generally does result in disappointment. And, when it really counts, our best friends usually do come through for us, just as we had expected they would.

Earlier in their careers the authors seriously entertained the hypothesis that most of this seeming order was a kind of cognitive illusion. We believed that human beings are adept at seeing things as they believe them to be, at explaining away contradictions and, in particular, at perceiving people as more consistent than they really are. While we continue to believe that such biased processing of evidence plays an important role in perceptions of consistency, we now believe that the predictability of everyday life is, for the most part, real. At the same time, we believe that many of the principles and intuitions that people use to explain and predict behavior are unreliable. That is, people often make correct predictions on the basis of erroneous beliefs and defective prediction strategies.

We draw an analogy here between lay and professional physics. Lay physics (which is largely the same as Aristotelian and medieval physics) is undeniably mistaken in some of its main presumptions (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard, 1986; McCloskey, 1983). In particular, lay physics, like lay psychology, errs in focusing on the properties of the object to the neglect of the field of forces in which that object exists. Moreover, the main interactional notion of lay physics – namely, the intuitive notion of “momentum” – is the utterly mistaken notion that a force applied to an object gives it a store of energy that gradually dissipates. The correct notion (that of inertia) requires that objects at rest remain at rest and that objects in motion remain in motion, unless some other force is applied. Nevertheless, lay physics does a perfectly good job of getting us through our days. In a world where air, land, and water all offer resistance or friction, the notion that objects somehow lose their momentum is good enough. Only when we step outside the normal haunts of daily life, for example, when we venture into a physics laboratory or into outer space, does our lay physics get us into serious trouble.

And so it is for social psychology. 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. When we go from being students to being professionals, when we bargain with a street vendor 5,000 miles from home, or when our community begins a new program to deal...