Lee Ross

Lee Ross
Born	1942 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	American (born in Canada)
Alma mater	University of Toronto, BA (psychology), 1965 Columbia University, PhD, 1969
Known for	false consensus effect fundamental attribution error reactive devaluation psychological barriers to conflict resolution attitude polarization false polarization effect hostile media effect belief perseverance naïve realism (psychology)
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology
Institutions	Stanford University (1969-present)
Influences	Stanley Schachter, Mark Lepper Solomon Asch, Leon Festinger
Influenced	cognitive psychology, social psychology

Lee David Ross (born 1942) is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University^[1][2] and an influential social psychologist who has studied attributional biases, shortcoming in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross is known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media.^[3] His current interests include ongoing societal problems, in particular protracted inter-group conflicts, the individual and collective rationalization of evil, and the psychological processes that make it difficult to confront societal challenges. Ross has also gone beyond the laboratory to involve himself in conflict resolution and public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other areas of the world.^[4]

Life

Ross earned his B.A. in psychology at the University of Toronto in 1965 and his Ph.D. in social psychology at Columbia University in 1969^[5][6] under the supervision of Stanley Schachter. His primary interests include biases in human inference, judgment, and decision-making; intergroup relations and dispute resolution; political psychology; and points of contact between psychology, law, and ethics.

Ross first came into prominence when he coined the term "fundamental attribution error" to describe the finding that people are predisposed towards attributing another person's behavior to individual characteristics and attitudes, even when it is relatively clear that the person's behavior was a result of situational demands (Ross, 1977; This effect is closely linked to, but somewhat broader than, "correspondence bias" identified by Jones & Davis, 1965). With Robert Vallone and Mark Lepper he authored the first study to describe the hostile media effect. He has also collaborated with Richard Nisbett in books on human judgment (Nisbett & Ross, 1980) and the relation between social situations and personality (i.e. "the person and the situation"; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). His 1977 chapter, on "The Intuitive Psychologist and his Shortcomings" has been one of the most cited articles in social psychology over the past four decades.

Author of over 100 journal articles and book chapters,^[6] Ross, co-authored two influential books with Richard Nisbett: Human Inference (1980), which deals with the tasks, strategies, and shortcoming of the intuitive psychologist and The Person and the Situation^[7] (Ross & Nisbett, 1991; reissued in 2011 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, who commented that "all of my books have been, in some sense, intellectual godchildren of the Person and the Situation"). Most recently, Ross has co-authored, with Tom Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room, which explores what the authors consider to be the most important and the most personally and societally useful ideas to have emerged from social psychology and related disciplines.

Awards

1994: Elected to American Academy of Arts

2003: American Psychological Society William James Fellow

2004: Elected to American Academy of Sciences

2008: Distinguished Scientist Award from Society of Experimental Social Psychology^[8]

2010: Elected to the National Academy of Science

Research

Lee Ross has been interested in – and has influenced – many fields of psychology, including attitude formation and change, social cognition, judgment and decision, influence, inter-group relations and political psychology. His research generally focuses on sources of bias and error and strategies to ameliorate them. With an interdisciplinary group of researchers, Ross was a co-founder of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).^[9] The motivational, cognitive, and perceptual barriers that thwart efforts to ease conflict and achieve mutually beneficial agreements has been a major focus both of his research and applied work over the past two decades.

His earliest work involved the under-appreciation of situational influences on actions and outcomes, and on the role of "construal" or subjective interpretation of the situations and choices one faces. For example, one study on the "fundamental attribution error" demonstrated that observers are relatively insensitive to role-conferred advantages and disadvantages in evaluating actions and outcomes. A study on the role of situational construal and the impact of situational labeling showed that the decision of research participants to cooperate vs defect when playing the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game could be heavily influenced by the "name of the game" (ie the Wall Street Game versus the Community Game." Much of his subsequent work has focused on these influences, and related ones, that govern a wide range of interferential and judgmental tasks, and the interactions between individuals and between groups.

Ross and his colleagues subsequently conducted ground-breaking work on other errors and biases in judgment and decision-making and in the attribution process, including biased assimilation of information and resulting belief perseverance, the false consensus effect, the hostile media effect, reactive devaluation, and most recently "naive realism" or the illusion of personal objectivity.

Selected publications

Notable contributions

• Attitude polarization
• Attribution theory
• Naive realism
• False consensus effect
• Fundamental attribution error
• Hostile media effect

References

Further reading

• http://lee.ross.socialpsychology.org/research
• Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965). From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in person perception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), "Advances in experimental social psychology," (Vol. 2, pp. 220–266). New York: Academic Press.
• Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). "Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment." Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 10). New York: Academic Press.
• Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). "The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology." New York: McGraw-Hill.

External links

• Home page at Stanford University