Michael J. Lovaglia University of Iowa
The first studies to investigate the fundamental attribution error looked at the conclusions people draw when they watch another person’s behavior. We use what people say and do as clues to discover what kind of person they are. However, we may attribute behavior to a person’s character when that person had little or no control over what she did. Factors in a person’s situation may have dictated her behavior. She may have had little choice but to act as she did, so her behavior would not really tell us much about the kind of person she is. Nonetheless, we will probably continue to assume that her beliefs and attitudes correspond to her behavior. Because we typically assume a correspondence between a person’s behavior and attitude whether one exists or not, another term used almost interchangeably with the fundamental attribution error is correspondence bias (Jones 1986). Correspondence bias represents a different theoretical approach to the same research area. It helps to be familiar with both terms.
Jones and Harris (1967) set up a situation where people would judge a person’s attitude based on an essay the person had written. People were asked to judge one of two essays about Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba. They were told that the essay they read had been written for a political science class. One essay supported Castro; the other essay attacked him. People read the essay then rated the author’s true attitude toward Castro. Researchers predicted, as would most of us, that people would assume that authors of a pro-Castro essay had a pro-Castro attitude, whereas authors of an anti-Castro essay had an anti-Castro attitude. That is exactly what happened, to no one’s great surprise.
When they repeated the study, Jones and Harris (1967) showed people the assignment that a teacher had given along with the essay that had been written to complete the assignment. People reading the pro-Castro essay saw that the assignment had been to “write a short cogent defense of Castro’s Cuba.” Similarly, people reading the anti-Castro essay saw that the assignment had been to “write a short cogent criticism of Castro’s Cuba.” People thus were aware that the author of the essay had little choice in the subject matter of the essay. The teacher’s assignment dictated whether the essay would be pro-Castro or anti-Castro. Would people continue to assume that authors of pro-Castro essays had attitudes more favorable to Castro than did authors of anti-Castro essays? They did. Despite knowing that the essay author had little choice in the content of the essay, people continued to assume that authors of the pro-Castro essay were more pro-Castro than were authors of the anti-Castro essay. That is, despite direct evidence that a situational factor (the assignment) dictated the content of the essay, people assumed that the essay content corresponded to the true attitude of the writer. We now know that by ignoring the evidence of a situational cause for the essay’s content, the students displayed correspondence bias. They committed the fundamental attribution error.
The scientific community did not immediately accept the existence of a widespread bias toward dispositional attributions, let alone a fundamental attribution error. Following Jones and Harris (1967), many studies were conducted that showed how correspondence bias persists in a variety of situations that restrict a person’s behavior. In one study, students judged the attitude of a person reading an essay aloud. Students assumed the essay reader’s attitude corresponded to the essay content even when they had been told that the speech had been written by someone else (Miller 1976).
In my social psychology classes, I demonstrate the pervasive effect of correspondence bias. Two students volunteer to present a short speech. I take them into the hallway and give each a handwritten speech on the abortion issue. One essay is prochoice, the other is prolife. The presenters then take five minutes to practice their speech. Meanwhile, in the classroom, I pass out index cards on which the students will rate their impressions of the true attitudes of the presenters toward abortion. Then the first presenter gives the prolife speech. Students rate the true attitude of the presenter on an index car and turn it in. The second presenter gives the prochoice speech. Again, students rate the true attitude of the presenter and hand in their ratings. In this situation, it is quite plausible that students rate the prochoice presenter as having a prochoice attitude and the prolife presenter as having a prolife attitude. Students, after all, may well assume that the presenters wrote the speech they were presenting, or that presenters had chosen to speak on the side of the issue that corresponded with their true attitude toward abortion.
The next part of the demonstration is more interesting. I ask for two more volunteers to give a speech. In front of the class, I ask the presenter of the prochoice speech to give the handwritten copy of the speech to the first new volunteer. I ask the presenter of the prolife speech to give the handwritten copy of that speech to the second new volunteer. It is clear to all students that I have assigned the new volunteers to speak on either the prochoice or prolife side of the issue. They had no choice in the matter. And, because students have just finished listening to the exact speeches, it is clear that the new volunteers will be reading material written by someone else. The new volunteers have a few minutes to practice their speeches. The first volunteer presents the prochoice speech and students hand in their ratings of the speaker’s true attitude toward abortion. Then the second volunteer presents. Again, students rate the speaker’s true attitude. In this situation, it is difficult to see how anyone would assume that speech content would necessarily correspond to the true attitudes of the speakers. After all, students had just heard another student reading the exact speech. Will students still assume that speech content corresponds to the true attitudes of the speakers? Will students rate the prochoice speaker as truly more prochoice than the prolife speaker?
Yes, students continue to display correspondence bias even when the situation dictates what the speaker will say and the students have just heard the exact words spoken by someone else. When we tally up the results in class, the pattern is the same for the second two speakers as it was for the first two speakers. The prochoice speakers are rated as having a prochoice attitude while the prolife speakers are rated as having a prolife attitude. The effect is not as dramatic for the second pair of speakers as for the first, but it is still apparent. Students assume that a person’s spoken words correspond to the attitudes that person holds. That assumption proves very difficult to counteract.
In society, correspondence bias serves to maintain power and authority relationships among people. We give people credit for being competent when in fact their social position is responsible for their performance. One striking characteristic of modern social life is that some people have power and authority over others. Parents have power over their young children. Police detectives have power over suspected criminals. Teachers have power over students. When we deal with a person who has authority over us, it can often seem that the person is smarter and more competent than we are. Instead of attributing this power to the person’s position in society, we make the fundamental attribution error. We assume the person is more competent than we are because the person has power over us. We ignore the fact that people have authority because of their social position, not necessarily because of any special expertise.
One way that society gives people power over others is by granting them authority to ask questions. When a person can ask you a question and require an answer, that person has power over you. For example, on TV police dramas, suspects often have higher social status than the detective does. The suspect might be a doctor, for example. When the detective tries to interview the doctor, the doctor usually asks a lot of questions: “What is this about, Detective?” or “Why are you interviewing me?” At some point, the detective gets serious and turns the tables, saying abruptly, “Here’s how this works. I ask the questions. You answer them.” Suddenly the social status of the two people has been reversed. The detective has asserted his authority, transforming the high-status doctor into a low-status suspect. Teachers demonstrate their authority by requiring students to answer questions on an exam. And children dread their parents’ questions: “Why are you three hours late? Where have you been? What could you possibly have been thinking?” Anyone who has been trapped answering a five-year-old’s questions for an hour knows just how much power the ability to question can give a person. Five-year-olds know it too. That is one reason they ask so many questions.
Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) showed how questions work to cement the social position of those in authority. We think that people who ask questions are more knowledgeable than are people who have to answer them. Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz set up a “quiz game” setting in which some students would try to answer questions as contestants. Some students would ask the questions as hosts, and other students would watch the game as the audience. It is easy to see how a questioner might have an advantage in such a situation. For example, the questioner can ask very difficult questions. Even people with little general knowledge know odd bits of information that others are not likely to know. Coming up with difficult questions is relatively easy. For example, in the study, questioners came up with questions such as “What do the initials W. H. in W. H. Auden’s name stand for?” and “What is the longest glacier in the world?”
Beginning teachers soon discover a peculiar human trait. Anything we learn, no matter how complicated or difficult, seems obvious to us, even trivial, a short time after we have learned it. Because what teachers know seems obvious to them, novice teachers often make test questions too difficult for their students to answer. The teacher knows the answers, so the questions seem easy to her. The students do not know the answers and when they flunk the test, teacher and students may conclude that the class is not bright. For example, suppose you are a quiz game contestant and are asked “In what city did Sigmund Freud live and practice psychoanalysis during much of his career?” If you know the answer, it seems obvious—Vienna. You might be thinking “Everybody knows that,” but you would be wrong. If you do not know the answer, the question seems impossibly difficult and even unfair. However, the person who asked the question knows the answer. Unfair or not, the questioner will seem more knowledgeable than you.
In their quiz game study, Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) made the advantage given to questioners obvious to everyone. Students drew cards to determine who would be assigned to the various roles—questioner, answerer, or observer. Thus students realized that questioners had been chosen at random and not because they possessed any special qualification for the questioner role. Questioners were asked to come up with “challenging but not impossible” questions for the quiz game. They were asked to avoid easy questions and to create questions on topics in which they had the most knowledge. Answerers and observers also heard these instructions given to questioners. Would students still rate questioners as more knowledgeable than answerers even though the advantage given by the answerer role was made obvious? Yes. Answerers consistently rated themselves as less knowledgeable than questioners. Neutral observers also rated questioners’ general knowledge superior to that of answerers. Questioners, however, may have been more aware of the advantage their position gave them. Questioners themselves did not think they were much more knowledgeable than answerers. It may be true that those in positions of great power can sometimes more clearly see the effects of situational factors. Abraham Lincoln said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me” (Lincoln 1965, p. 10). Being in a position of great power, Abraham Lincoln realized how limited his power actually was.
Results of the quiz game study imply that people in a low power position, who are required to answer the questions of a person with authority over them, will come to see the authority figure as having superior general knowledge. Our correspondence bias leads us to assume that the authority figure’s apparent knowledge results from her personal abilities and general competence. We ignore evidence that the authority’s position makes her appear competent. When questioners appear more knowledgeable because their position gives them the power to question, their authority seems more legitimate. We tend not to notice how big an advantage social position can be. Instead, we assume that those in positions of power must be as knowledgeable and expert as they appear. More generally, we fail to notice the situational factors at work in our lives. Instead, we attribute outcomes to the personal abilities of individuals, whether to other people or ourselves. That is the fundamental attribution error.
Now that we know that we have less control over our lives than we had thought, how will social psychology help us? Research on the fundamental attribution error tells us that factors in our situation are more powerful than we think they are. If situational factors are so powerful, then changing them will change our lives. If you want your life to improve, then concentrate on changing your situation. Find ways to change your situation that will have the desired effect on you.
Recall that people are about as good as their situation allows them to be. If you want to be a good person, find a situation that supports your aspirations. For example, there is a saying among professional salespeople: “If you want to be an honest salesperson, then go to work for an honest boss.” The sales game is highly competitive. Intense pressure to make a sale constantly tempts salespeople to cut corners, to lie to make a sale. Professional salespeople know that individual character is no match for the constant temptation to lie unless the organization they work for encourages honesty. They have found that an honest boss ensures that their own honesty will be supported. By changing their situation (finding an honest boss) salespeople can change a basic piece of their character (personal honesty). That insight empowers us to become better people.
Here is an example of our tendency to think we have more control over events than we actually do, and how understanding social psychology can change society. Consider this statement: “Meaningful social change must rise first in the hearts and minds of people.” Most of us find it enormously appealing. We would not be surprised if a famous person had said it, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the civil rights movement. It conforms to personal experience. As you grow up, your ideas about who you are and what you want to do change, so you behave differently. It sounds right. Social psychology shows us that reality is much more complicated.
Successful leaders sometimes use the principles of social psychology although they may not be aware of it. Martin Luther Kind Jr. is a good example. During the civil rights movement in the 1950s—not so long ago—most Americans felt that African Americans should be treated differently than others. African Americans were required to use separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Facilities designated for African Americans were often unavailable. Few jobs were open to them. And while many Americans of all races believed in integration as an ideal, most of them felt that nothing could be done to change racial discrimination. Today, few people in the United States believe in or condone racial discrimination. How did such a profound change occur in the attitudes and beliefs of an entire nation?
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CATHY© Cathy Guisewite. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.  Action is sometimes more important than its immediate outcome. |
Martin Luther King’s strategy during the civil rights movement played a part in changing American’s attitudes toward discrimination. At the time, popular wisdom held that you cannot legislate morality. According to popular opinion, legislation outlawing discrimination would not work unless people first came to believe that discrimination was wrong. It was commonly thought that people’s hearts and minds had to change before their behavior would. Martin Luther King Jr. rejected the common wisdom in formulating a strategy for the civil rights movement (Branch 1988). While he spent much of his life tying to change people’s attitudes, he did not wait for people to endorse social equality for African Americans. He saw that by changing the laws that limit people’s behavior, not only would discrimination be reduced, but eventually hearts and minds would follow. He knew that long-held beliefs and attitudes, our feelings, are highly resistant to change. He also knew that most people will obey the law. His knowledge of people told him that over time attitudes and beliefs align with behavior. We now know there was a sound basis for his strategy in social psychological research. After civil rights legislation was passed and people grew accustomed to the new rules, attitudes toward racial discrimination changed rapidly. However, there is much work left to be done....
Social psychology teaches us that what we do, our behavior, has more impact over our attitudes and beliefs than we would have imagined. Common sense, after all, has told us that our attitudes and beliefs determine how we behave. However, the power of behavior to control deeply held beliefs was one of the earlier insights of the new discipline of social psychology. William James founded the first psychological laboratory in the United States at Harvard in the 1870s. In 1890, in the first American psychology textbook, he stated the principle that we can use our behavior to control our attitudes and beliefs. He said that while we cannot easily change our deeply held moral beliefs and emotionally charged attitudes,
we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. (James 1890/1981, p. 949)
Behavior is easier to control than beliefs and attitudes. By consciously acting in certain ways, we will eventually come to justify and believe in the attitudes implied by our behavior. For example, when I was a freshman in college, foul language was the norm. It was cool. Speaking crudely was a badge of honor. Speaking politely was considered dishonest. That way of speaking became part of my identity. Swearing was who I was. Later, swearing caused problems for me. Children who heard me would use the same words I did. And I was working as a salesperson, so swearing was inappropriate on the job. I resolved to change the way I spoke. It was not particularly difficult. I reminded myself regularly not to swear and tried to think before speaking. My attitude toward swearing did not change so quickly. For a long time I felt like a phony. Blunt, coarse speech still seemed to me to be more honest and honorable. Those feelings faded the longer I went without swearing. Years later, swearing is awkward and I can make myself do it only with difficulty. My attitude toward swearing has also changed completely. It now seems unnecessary and often destructive. My behavior changed first. My attitude toward that behavior followed.
“Bring the body, the mind will follow” is a slogan used by members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Problem drinkers often feel like phonies when they try to quit drinking. They feel they are being dishonest with other people and untrue to themselves. Deeply held attitudes may be difficult to change in normal people, but where the will has been damaged by alcohol or drug use, the conscious control of beliefs is virtually absent. Instead of trying to convince newcomers that drinking is a bad idea, AA members tell them to show up at AA meetings where no one drinks. “Bring the body” means show up, act like a sober person. Stop drinking one day at a time. Eventually, if a person does not drink for a long period, drinking comes to seem foreign, unnatural. The behavior change eventually produces an attitude change. The mind follows. Problem drinkers usually associate drinking with pleasant anticipation and exhilaration, but after quitting, they slowly come to realize and understand the problems that drinking caused them. The founders of AA had studied the psychology of William James. They knew that an effective program first must change the problem behavior. Healthier attitudes toward that behavior would follow.
The same principle that made the civil rights movement successful works to keep alcoholics sober. William James’s idea that changing behavior can lead to improving personal character spurred the growth of a large self-help industry in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. showed us that we need not be imprisoned by our history of prejudice. By changing our situation, changing the legal structure of society, racial prejudice is no longer predominant. It still exists and threatens to return full-force if we are not careful. But as long as we maintain our legal structure, our laws will allow us to be better people than our traditional fears and prejudices would suggest. The insights of social psychology can work on a more personal level as well.
Affirmations are positive statements about the person you want to be. By affirming the kind of person we want to become, we set ourselves up to change in that direction. The technique is not new. It has been used in crude form by teachers in the United States for about as long as there have been blackboards. Picture a whitewashed rural schoolhouse. A barefoot boy in pants too short for his legs stands at the blackboard writing laboriously “I will not stick Molly’s braids in the inkwell,” 100 times. We now think that positive statements make more effective affirmations than negative ones; so the boy wearing flashy athletic shoes and baggy jeans might write “I will respect Molly as a person.” The idea is the same. All of that writing on the blackboard is supposed to change the boy’s attitude toward tormenting the girl sitting in front of him, making him a better person.
The affirmation technique gained legitimacy with William James’s insight that attitudes come to correspond to behavior. Affirmations are behavior. If you repeatedly behave as if you are a certain kind of person, you grow into that kind of person. Affirmations, then, are more effective the more active you make them. Affirmations should at least be spoken clearly aloud. Better yet, write them out laboriously in the best handwriting you can muster. Write so that someone else could easily read what you have written. It is not necessary to write an affirmation 100 times. A few times a day seems sufficient to produce noticeable results.
I first used the affirmation technique as a young man selling furniture. I had fallen into the habit of using little lies to make a sale. A customer might ask, “When can I get this sofa?” I would reply, “We have a shipment coming in next week. Let me reserve one for you. We only need a 20 percent deposit with your order.” I would start to fill out the paperwork. The customer would start to write a check. It was another easy sale. I knew all along that the customer’s sofa would not arrive the following week. It might take about a month, but the customer did not want to wait. If I told her it would be a month, then she might keep looking until she found a store that had what she wanted in stock.
I would rationalize that technically what I said was true. We would get a shipment the following week. The customer’s sofa, however, would not be on it. It was a lie. Then I would lie again when the customer called to check on the order. “Yes, we did get the shipment. Let me check the warehouse. No, your sofa did not arrive. I don’t know what could have happened. I will contact the factory and get back to you.” After a series of postponements and excuses, more lies, the sofa would eventually arrive. The customer would usually be happy. Rarely did a customer cancel the order even after the third or fourth delay. By then they had become committed to their purchase. The social psychology of my selling approach was sound. The ethics were not.
I never felt good about lying. I dreaded hearing the phone ring. Which customer would it be? What would I tell them this time? What had I told them last time? It was a tumultuous period in my life. I had been drinking heavily for years. I quit suddenly. I started reading books that might help me find a better way to live. One of them suggested the affirmation technique. Here is the first affirmation I tried: “I, Michael Lovaglia, am an honest and sober person.” I resolved to write the affirmation at least three times a day as clearly and legibly as possible. At first it was extremely difficult. The muscles in my forearm would knot up when I tried to write those few simple words. My stomach would feel queasy. Later I found out that meant the affirmation was on target. My unconscious mind was resisting the change suggested by the affirmation. Eventually it became easier to write. My lying steadily decreased. My sales volume did go down at first but then went back up. When the phone rang at work, my anxiety level would rise, tempting me to lie. I used another affirmation to remind myself what to do: “The truth is good enough.” And it was. Lying turned out to be more of a crutch than a sales tool.
Affirmations are a standard technique of the self-help industry. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale uses it extensively and apparently successfully. My copy of the book has a red sticker on the cover that says, OVER 5 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT. Aside from being a popular idea, it would be nice to know that affirmations also have a sound basis in social psychology. One aim of this book is to help you identify such techniques. You can concentrate on techniques that have been demonstrated to be effective and avoid the more speculative ideas in the self-improvement literature.
Attribution research explains why affirmations change our attitudes. When we observe people behaving in a certain way, we assume that their attitudes correspond to their behavior. That is correspondence bias. Our own attitudes come to correspond to our behavior in a similar way. Just as we observe others’ behavior, we also observe our own behavior, at least some of the time. In some situations we may be too busy or distracted to be very good observers of what we are doing. Bem (1965, 1967) pointed out that to the extent we observe our own behavior, we will assume our attitudes correspond to that behavior. When we observe a person giving a prolife speech on abortion, we assume that person’s attitude is prolife. Correspondence bias operates when we observe our own behavior as well. Bem’s proposition suggests that if we make a prolife speech for whatever reason, we will observe our own behavior and assume that our attitude must be prolife. We are, or at least become, what we do. Affirmation, whether spoken or written, constitute behavior. When we observe ourselves speaking or writing about the person we want to become, we assume that we are that person. Eventually, with repeated use of the affirmation technique, the assumption about who we are becomes belief. Affirmations allow you to grow toward the person you want to become.
Written affirmations are effective because written evidence is hard to deny. Writing has a permanence that thought and spoken words lack. It is relatively easy to take back what you have said. “Please forgive me, I spoke without thinking” usually works if you have said something inappropriate. It is more difficult to take back what you have written. We accept that people commonly speak without thinking. We are less likely to believe they have written without thinking. Thus, as observers of our own behavior, we find written affirmations more convincing. It is as if we say to ourselves “Look how carefully I wrote this. I must have meant it.” Written confessions are a good example of the power of the written word. Criminal convictions based on a written confession are almost impossible to overturn. Convictions usually stand even when it has been proved that the person convicted was coerced and confused at the time of the confession and did not know what he was signing. Juries have been known to convict on the basis of a written confession even when evidence has proven conclusively that the person who confessed could not have committed the crime. We hold people responsible for what they have written. You will hold yourself responsible for what you write about yourself. That is what makes the written affirmation a powerful tool.
Social psychological research shows why a positive affirmation is preferred over a negative one. Tell yourself to do something positive rather than to not do something negative. It is better to write about the person that you want to become than about the person you want to stop being. Studies have shown that using a negative word in a sentence makes the sentence harder to understand (see for example Evans 1972; Leenars, Bringmann, & Balance 1978). The danger in using negative statements as affirmation is that they require more mental processing than do positive statements. The negative statement is first seen as true, then falsified by the negative word. When my toddler is concentrating fiercely on pouring herself a glass of milk, she will usually spill it if I call out “Don’t spill the milk.” She understands “spill the milk” first. If she had time she would then process the “don’t.” But she is concentrating on her task. Before she can fully process the negative sentence, she has reacted to it as if it was positive and spills the milk. In contrast, warning her to “Be careful” will not usually produce a spill. Positive questions are easier than negative ones. Teachers know that the test question “Which of the following is not one of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?” will be much harder than “Which of the following is one of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?” Affirmations work the same way. A negative affirmation will probably work. It just takes more mental processing. Why put the negative statement in your mind in the first place? Concentrate on who you want to become. Sometimes, it can be difficult to frame an affirmation positively. Suppose you want to stop biting your nails. What positive affirmation would you use? It takes some thought but can usually be done. (“I, Jennie Smith, have long, elegant nails” might work.) Whenever possible use positive statements for your affirmations.
Just as a positive statement makes a deeper impression than does a negative statement, a study by Gilbert, Krull, and Malone (1990) suggests that true statements make a deeper impression than do false statements. Researchers set up a situation to investigate how we process true and false information. By default, we accept statements as true. Then, if we have evidence that the statement was false, we reclassify the statement as false. Researchers had people read a number of statements. They then received information about which were true and which were false. When given time to think about it, people could correctly identify false statements about as often as true statements. However, researchers then tried the same experiment but added a distraction. A loud noise sounded after a statement. If the statement was initially accepted as true, then the distraction should have no effect on the accurate recall of true statements. However, the distraction should serve to decrease accurate recall of false statements by preventing people from reclassifying statements from true to false. That is exactly what happened. People were able to correctly identify true statements just as often whether distracted or not. However, false statements were misclassified as true almost twice as often when people were distracted. True statements are easier to handle mentally than false ones.
One reason that bad habits are hard to break is that not doing something is difficult. It is hard to build an identity in a vacuum. The problem is not really quitting nail biting or smoking or drinking or using credit cards or chocolate or coffee. The problem is what to do instead. When I first quit smoking, a day would stretch out before me forever. How could a person possibly fill up all those hours without a cigarette? What was I to do? I needed an activity to fill my time while not indulging my habit. Successful addiction recovery programs—whether Alcoholics Anonymous or hospital-based treatment—recognize that a positive activity has to be substituted for the addictive behavior. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous members go to meetings instead of bars. Writing affirmations is an activity you can substitute for the habit you are trying to break. Every time you get the urge to bite your nails, you could write an affirmation instead.
Make yourself write an affirmation at least three times a day, or more often if the mood strikes you. Pick one that you think will do you some good, one that will move you closer to the kind of person you want to become. Then keep at it. It may be difficult to remember at first. If I skipped writing my affirmations one day, then I made myself write extra ones for following day. Like me, you may find it difficult to make yourself write an affirmation that challenges long-held or unconscious beliefs about yourself. I would tell myself that I did not have the time to write. Then I figured out how long it took to write an affirmation three times. Writing in longhand, as carefully and clearly as possible, it took me about two minutes. Two minutes a day to change your life.
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Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Excerpted from Knowing People: The Personal Use of Social Psychology, 2000, Chapter 1, pp. 4-14. © 2000 by McGraw-Hill. Reprinted by permission.