Episode 11: Exploit the Situation

Episode 11 – Exploit the Situation > Uncut conversation with Lee Ross > Uncut conversation with Lee Ross

• If we start with the person, can you tell us what personality factors or howthey differ from situational factors and what that difference is? Well, as laypsychologists, as ordinary people walking around, when we’re asked to explainevents or account for behavior, we characteristically cite things about theactor, the actor’s personality.
• We talk about some people who are brave and some people who are cowardly,or some people who are adventurous or others who are shy.
• That’s the way we normally think about things, but there’s an interestingresearch tradition in psychology which showed that if you expose people tosituations, usually novel situations under well-controlled circumstances and, tosome extent, even if you observe them in their day-to-day life, the degree ofcross-situational consistency in behavior is relatively low.
• The people who are boisterous and loud in the dining hall aren’t necessarilythe people who are outgoing at parties or the people who are willing to put uptheir hand in class.
• One of the things that Dick Nisbett and I began to write about was the way inwhich getting straight about the power of the situation versus the predictivepower of individual differences was something about which people commonlyhad some illusions or errors.
• We don’t just see people responding to a situation; we see people who occupyparticular roles, have particular relationships.
• I mean, I think probably from most people would think-I mean, when you’reexplaining that somebody’s laid-back or honest or something, it feels thatthat’s valuable, that it’s very predictive of future sorts of situations.
• Well, I’m saying that the research that was done in the case of honesty thatlooked at people in different situations-who might cheat on an exam, whowould take more candy than their share from the table, who would perhaps lie-it just turned out that the degree of predictability was relatively low.
• The people who I deal with and I find honest, first of all, they’re honest withme, so I’m part of the situation, and I’m always there in their dealings with me.
• Well, if you observe people jogging on the playground, you might find that oneperson jogs faster one day; the other person jogs faster the next day.
• We have to say, “Well, this is the kind of situation of which the average personis honest, and only very dishonest people will be dishonest in this situation,”or, “It’s a kind of situation in which most people take some liberties, but onlythe most extremely honest people can be counted on.” We have to engage inthis very complicated language.
• We can say, “How would you characterize a situation in which you expect mostpeople to be brave?” We literally don’t have a word.
• That’s a really useful shorthand for saying we expect most people to do well atit, or only exceptionally able people to do well at it, and that kind of thing.
• Why do you think that is? It seems like a bit of the chicken and the eggproblem, doesn’t it? I mean, why is it so compelling if it’s so not predictive?Why is personality explanations of saying that Johnny’s honest or laid-back orsomething-I mean, if it isn’t-if we have a correlation of about 0.15, as you said,I mean, that’s not going to get us very far, so why do we stick with it? Well,because, most of the time, we’re not given the task of predicting the behaviorof a bunch of people in a novel situation.
• What we care about, as lay psychologists, is knowing the people in our world.
• Can you tell us a bit about some of those demonstrations for the situation?Well, let’s first say-when we say that, it’s given that we expect a great deal ofconsistency in behavior of people across situations.
• By contrast, since we expect and think we know people well, it’s easy to designa study in which we use the various tricks and insights of social psychologistsand create a situation in which ordinary people behave in ways that we thinkare extraordinary: extraordinarily altruistic, or extraordinarily cowardly, orextraordinarily foolish, and the like.
• What he showed is that the degree to which people seem able to resisttemptation, the extent to which people seem to have a degree of self-controland the ability to delay gratification, and he showed that the behavior ofchildren in the nursery school predicted rather well things like their success ingetting into college and things like that.
• The finding, as I think most people in psychology are aware now, is that if youlooked at European countries, and some of those countries have the policywhere you had to sign the back of your driver’s license to make you a potentialorgan donor.
• A lot of people look at that and say, “Well, these people are lazy,” but it wassubtler than that.
• In the cases of the opt-out countries, it was seen as something very modestlike letting other people ahead of you in line if they were in a hurry.
• I mean, it’s-and I think that people aren’t really taking advantage of it, as faras in the Occupy movement or in climate change and so on.
• In trying to motivate a large number of people to do one particular thing, theydon’t really seem to be taking advantage of the situation as much as theycould.
• To some extent, it’s been negative in the sense that they no longer worry aboutpersuading people.
• One is getting early commitment, getting people who say they’re going to vote,you say, “Can we count on you? Can we call you back on election day and makesure you voted?” Getting them to register, instead of saying, “Will you goregister,” you say, “Okay, let’s do it right now. Take out your cellphone andmake this call, and someone will come and pick you up.” I mean, there’s many,many things that you can do, but the point was to make sure that people whogenerally were disposed to behave in a particular way but, often in history,have not done so, in this case, they would and they could be counted on.
• When he had shown it to me, I said, “Well, that’s really interesting, Dick, butthe fundamental thing is that people overestimate the degree of cross-situational consistency, and they make trait attributions in general when theyshouldn’t.” Then, in a later paper, when I was discussing various kinds oferrors and biases in distinguishing my work from what I thought was thecentral message of social psychology, I had said, “Well, the fundamental erroris the tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation.” What I meant bythat was not that it was fundamental in the sense that it was irreducible.
• No, what I meant is it was an error in the most fundamental task that weattempt in life, which is to say, “What does that situation tell me about theactor? What does that situation tell me about the observer?” The termfundamental attribution error referred to the fact that people characteristicallymake an error in that fundamental task.
• The fundamental failing that really is much more basic is the tendency toassume that the way we see the world is the way the world really is, thatreasonable people should see it the same way, and if they don’t see it the sameway, it’s because there’s something wrong with them, some bias that’saffecting them.
• We readily think that when people disagree with us, it’s because there’ssomething wrong with them, not something wrong with us, or at least notsomething that’s affecting both of us that’s making us simply disagree.
• The books you’ve read, you’d think most other educated people have surelyread that, and when someone tells you about a book you don’t know, you say, “My, they must be really deeply educated or have this esoteric interest.” Thereis this overwhelming tendency to feel that not just the way that we see theworld but the way we respond to the world, our priorities, the things we findeasy, the things we find difficult, will be shared by other people.
• The false consensus effect just refers to the fact that, all things being equal,people who behave in a particular way are more likely to think that other peoplewill behave in that way than people who behave in a different way.
• We initially assume that other people would respond the same way as we do.
• We sometimes even can understand why other people see it that way.
• Most people I know would say that they rarely, if ever, have deliberately givenoffense to another person, that they’ve deliberately tried to hurt the feelings ofanother person.
• Most of us, as observers or at least as the targets of action, can think of lots ofcases where people said things to us that were hurtful or painful.
• One is what’s changing in social psychology? I think what’s changing is thatwe’re increasingly getting beyond the laboratory, classic social psychologyexperiment where you take people, expose them for a short period of time tosomething novel, and see what they do.
• Increasingly, we’re getting interested in the kind of behavior that occurs infamiliar contexts where people know each other and have an existing role ininstitutional relationships, and we see behavior unfold over time in ways thathave cumulative consequences-much more interesting natural experiments thatoccur where different people, different institutions, do things in different ways,and looking at what we can learn from those.
• Do you have any advice for us? Obviously, there had been several attemptsbefore to improve people’s thinking, to make them less prone to superstitionand so on that haven’t succeeded very well.
• I know you and Dick have written before about, for example, ways of trying toget people to think, make better decisions, to think better, do better.
• If you’re trying to influence people and it isn’t working, it may be because thething you’re doing is being understood very differently by the other personthan what you intend.