Quotes from Lee Ross

Social psychology stands at the intersection between our eyes and the world in front of us, and helps us understand the difference between what we think we see and what is actually out there.

People's inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions, together with their failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior, has been termed the "fundamental attribution error

people often make correct predictions on the basis of erroneous beliefs and defective prediction strategies.

When trying to get people to change familiar ways of doing things, social pressures and constraints exerted by the informal peer group represent the most potent restraining force that must be overcome and, at the same time, the most powerful inducing force that can be exploited to achieve success.

More collectivist cultures, including especially those of East Asia, not only show less focus on the self and more on family and other in-group members, they also are less dispositionist in their world view and in fact less prone to the fundamental attribution error. They focus less on the actor and more on the social situation surrounding the actor.

The first principle concerns the power and subtlety of situational influences. The second involves the importance of people's subjective interpretations of the situation. The third speaks to the necessity of understanding both individual psyches and social groups as tension systems or energy "fields" characterized by an equilibrium between impelling and restraining forces.

The presence of a salient social model appears to be a particularly potent channel factor in inducing people to engage in behavior that is socially desirable, that is, in facilitating the link between positive attitudes and positive actions. Effect sizes vary, but they are generally quite large both in absolute terms and relative to most people's intuitions