Summary of Lee Ross & Richard E. Nisbett's The Person and the Situation

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The experience of serious graduate students who, over the course of four or five years, are immersed in the problems and orientation of the field, is different from that of undergraduates who take their first course in social psychology.

#2 The contributions of social psychology are often difficult to reconcile with common sense, but they are important to understand and appreciate. They challenge, reform, and expand common sense.

#3 The predictability ceiling is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of. 30 between measured individual differences in a given trait and behavior in a novel situation that tests that trait. This ceiling is by no means trivial, but it is still lower than what most people expect when they make predictions about each other’s behavior.

#4 The challenge of accounting for the discrepancy between beliefs about everyday experience and empirical evidence is one of the most important faced by psychologists.