Feature: Lee Ross
Dr. Lee Ross is a Professor at Stanford University and one of the world’s most influential social psychologists. His pioneering research has shaped the field and been applied to real-world peace processes from Northern Ireland to the Middle East.
Ross’ book with longtime collaborator Richard Nisbett – The Person and the Situation – is required reading. As Malcolm Gladwell says: “All of my books have been, in some sense, intellectual godchildren of The Person and the Situation.” And as Gladwell writes in a foreword to the latest edition of Ross & Nisbett’s book: ‘If you have ever felt the excitement of putting on a pair of glasses for the first time, and seeing the world suddenly jump into focus, then you have some sense of what is in store for you in the pages ahead. You are in for a treat.’
We are lucky to have Lee contribute his insights to our website – insights that can be of great use to thoughtful intrapreneurs looking to understand the behaviour of the people and systems around them.
What to you are the 5 most important insights that we can take away from the field of social psychology to date?
In terms of the history of the research, the oldest and most consistent big insight that social psychology has been able to offer involves the power of the situation.
A lot of the research traditionally has involved just showing that you can manipulate something about the situation and have a big effect on behaviour, much bigger than people would anticipate. In a few cases, we actually go further than that and we show explicitly that the effects are bigger than people imagined or estimated that they will be.
One consistent line of work is to involve showing that if you create a situation where some people are at an advantage and some people are at a disadvantage, the people who are at an advantage certainly don’t give the situation adequate weight in the kind of inferences they draw, but sometimes even the people who are at a disadvantage don’t. They feel bad about themselves and they feel deficient, they may even under some circumstances feel the need to rationalize or justify the system that they are in, that has put them at a disadvantage.
We might say that people, particularly in our culture, are dispositionists. In this culture, we are taught to believe that success or failure in life, behaving badly or behaving well, depends on your traits, or dispositions, or maybe your values. Obstacles are just things to be overcome – when the going gets tough, the tough gets going – we have a lot of clichés like that.
This may be particularly true in our Western culture or what UBC professor, Steven Heine, calls WEIRD societies – western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. In those societies in particular, we are not only lead to be dispositionist because of what we pay attention to or notice but we actually have an ethos, an ideology that emphasizes and reinforces that.
There is a little bit of evidence that people from other more collectivists cultures are more inclined to appreciate the importance of social situational context. The combination of the fact that the situation is really important and that we don’t fully appreciate that kind of dispositionist error is a really important and consistent stream and one of the most useful insights that we can derive from social psychology.
The second important contribution, particularly in the last 20 years, has been to study something that in a way almost feels like it’s the opposite to situationism but really it’s just a refinement of it. Although we respond to situations, we don’t respond necessarily to a kind of objective third person view of the situation, we respond to our own particular way of understanding or construing the situation, what meaning it has to us, how it connects to our experiences and values.
A really interesting line of research, in particularly the last 20 years, has been showing how we can manipulate construal. We can influence how people frame a decision: do they frame it in terms of gains or do they frame it in terms of losses? There’s also work on priming, whereby we make a particular set of connotations, construals, or associations and we can make them more salient or less salient. We also can make our own values and insights more or less salient because in our culture we believe a lot of different things at the same time so which belief is sovereign or most important in the moment can be determinative.
In one study, we took Stanford kids and we asked them how they came to be at Stanford and for some of them we said tell us about the role of hard work, good decision making, and denial. For others we asked them to tell us how they go here but tell the story emphasizing the role of good fortune and the help of other people.
As you can imagine they told very different stories; and it isn’t that one story is correct and the other is incorrect. In some way both stories are really true, but you can tell either story. The interesting result in that study was what happened when we then asked their political views and what kind of policies they favoured. If we had made salient what we might call the good fortune scenario they favoured much more collectivist, much more liberal, much more generous policies. If we made the much more individualistic, hard work, effort, merit scenario more salient they expressed more conservative views. Those two insights – the power of situation and the relevance of construal – fit together; they’re not opposite but really two complementary parts of the same story.
The third insight that completes the triangle with those is something I call naïve realism.
We have the conviction that our way of looking at the world – the way we think, the way we feel, the way we see things, the way we interpret things – is somehow the natural or correct or most objective way to see them and that other reasonable people will see them the same way. We initially overestimate how much people will have the same take on the world as we do and we call that false consensus.
The other part of naïve realism is when someone doesn’t see the world the way we do – and again not just seeing but the priorities people attach to things, the particular policies they favour, and even their emotional reactions – we tend to think since our way is the natural way, the way someone else things about it is somehow an unnatural way, is a reflection of some kind of bias or strange personality trait or properties of some culture.
In some ways this point is similar to a very old idea, which says you should put yourself in the other person’s shoes or put on their eyeglasses. But if you get beyond the kind of eyewear and footwear metaphors, the difference is really in my naïve realism formulation the emphasis is on recognizing or failing to recognize something about the way you see the world. It isn’t just recognizing that other people see it differently and taking that into account. It’s recognizing that the way you see things is a product of who you are and of the particular biases and experiences you bring to the situation.
That recognition can be helpful in having you appreciate that on average other people are just about as sincere as you are. When someone responds in a way that seems very strange or unreasonable, you should not assume that they are just pretending or that they know the same things as you know but they are being perverse or particularly self interested. You should appreciate that on average, the role of experience or self-interest or bias from education that’s influencing you is just about as strong as the one that’s influencing someone else. That is the third insight and those three all fit together in terms of getting other people’s behaviour right and not drawing incorrect inferences about them.
A fourth insight that I would mention, which was the focus of a lot of very interesting research, particularly in the period of the late 60s and early 70s, involves the relationship between actions and beliefs. We normally assume that if we want to change people’s behaviour we have to change their beliefs, or at least their priorities; and that certainly is one path to behavior change. However researchers in the dissonance tradition, led by Leon Festinger, showed that the reverse direction of influence is also possible–that if we can influence people’s behaviour then that in turn will influence their beliefs and priorities.
The Festingerians talked about this in terms of reducing dissonance by making your beliefs congruent with your behavior. Other psychologists said sometimes we are not even so sure what we believe or think or feel, so we look at what our behaviour is and that informs us. For example, if I spend a lot of time watching television and very little time in the library, it must mean that I like television a great deal and I do not like the library. Of course, if that person were really clever they would do the kind of analysis we talked about before; they would look at the situational factors that are playing a role.
In some ways this work on attitudes and behavior again shows that even when it comes to our own behaviour we sometimes underestimate the impact of situational factors and constraints—especially when the influences on our behavior are subtle Within the dissonance tradition, the insight, and the non-obvious finding in the research, was that the less pressure you use in influencing someone to behave in a particular way, the more likely they are to internalize that belief.
If I pay you a lot of money to do something, you can explain your own behaviour and you don’t feel much dissonance about that behaviour. But if you’ve done it not because I’ve paid you a lot of money but because I very subtlety used all the tricks of the psychologist trade to get you to behave in a particular way and the forces that I used were invisible to you, or at least largely hidden, then I can produce a lot of attitude change as well as changes in values and beliefs.
If we look at the history of people who become involved in causes, we often see that causal direction, that for some reason or other they engaged in a small amount of behaviour. For example, they helped a particular friend who had a particular problem and they did it because the person was their friend but they then come to feel that they really prioritized that problem and begin to work on it more generally.
The final insight is one I personally have found particularly relevant in my own work on conflict resolution, and one, interestingly, that has its origin in the theorizing of Festinger’s famous mentor, Kurt Lewin. This insight involves the strategy of achieving changes in behavior by removing rather than adding forces to an existing tension system – that is, instead of relying on positive and negative incentives (which can add “tension” to a system), focus on the impediments or barriers that stand in the way of achieving change, and then eliminate or at least reduce those barriers.
For Lewin, the barriers to change he focused on were unhelpful group norms, which he tried to deal with by putting people in new groups and trying to establish new norms. However, the insight is a very general one. The first step in designing a program to produce change is to analyze the sources of individual and/or collective resistance to such change. This analysis should include not just “social” and “psychological” barriers but also situational and structural factors. Thus, while the failure of unemployed youth to utilize a job training program may reflect negative group norms and past experiences, it may also reflect unrecognized financial costs or other disincentives, or even the lack of convenient public transportation to the training site.
In my own work on conflict resolution my colleagues and I have focused on psychological barriers that stand in the way of agreements that would benefit both sides—barriers that include cognitive dissonance (it is hard to give up on demands that one has pursued at great cost and sacrifices) but also things like devaluation of proposed terms (eg if the other side offered them, they must be good for them, and therefore bad for us). One of most important implications of the Lewinian approach is that by trying to change the status quo, you get important clues about that status quo—about the factors that are making individuals or organizations or even members of a larger culture behavior the way they are behaving
That would be my list of top 5 insights that psychology has focused our attention on in the last 75 years.