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

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822501140

IRB Media

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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.