Lee Ross

Who they are

Ross was the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences. The vault's note on him confirms his dates, the Stanford professorship and the 1977 coinage against Stanford's obituary and the Association for Psychological Science tribute. With Richard Nisbett he wrote The Person and the Situation (1991),.

His research covered how people explain behaviour and how those explanations go wrong. Beyond the attribution error, the vault records work on naïve realism and the illusion of personal objectivity, and the use of the same ideas to explain obstacles to resolving conflict.

Key papers

• Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173-220. The chapter that names the fundamental attribution error.
• Ross, L. D., Amabile, T. M., & Steinmetz, J. L. (1977). Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(7), 485-494. The quiz-game study.

Key ideas

In Gilbert and Malone's account of the 1977 chapter, Ross used the name for the tendency to underestimate how much situations shape behaviour, and argued that the tendency applied to social psychologists and their research subjects alike. Subjects often treated strongly constrained actors as if they had been only lightly constrained, which explained why their behaviour surprised researchers.

The quiz game made the point with a design. Pairs drew cards for the roles of questioner and contestant. Questioners wrote ten hard questions from their own knowledge, and contestants usually failed on many of them. Contestants rated themselves well below their questioners, and 48 observers who watched replays rated the questioners far above the contestants, although a written quiz showed the roles scored about the same.

Ross did not claim that character does nothing. The vault's reading is that his point concerns how we explain behaviour, and that the slide from "situations are underrated" to "character is irrelevant" is the one to watch for. The effect has also turned out to be weaker in some cultural samples, as Miyamoto and Kitayama's comparison of American and Japanese participants shows.

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