Table of Contents
Foreword Malcolm Gladwell ix
Preface xi
Preface To The First Edition xiii
Acknowledgements xvi
1 Introduction 1
The Lessons and Challenges of Social Psychology 2
The Weakness of Individual Differences 2
The Power of Situations 3
The Subtlety of Situations 4
The Predictability of Human Behavior 6
The Conflict Between the Lessons of Social Psychology and the Experience of Everyday Life 7
The Tripod on Which Social Psychology Rests 8
The Principle of Situationism 8
The Principle of Construal 11
The Concept of Tension Systems 13
Predictability and Indeterminacy 17
Prediction by Social Scientists 17
Prediction by Laypeople 18
The Problem of Effect Size 20
Statistical Criteria of Size 21
Pragmatic Criteria of Size 22
Expectation Criteria of Size 23
Overview and Plan of the Book 24
2 The Power Of The Situation 27
Social Influence and Group Processes 28
Uniformity Pressures in the Laboratory: Sherif's" Autokinetic" Studies and the Asch Paradigm 28
The Bennington Studies 35
Sherif's Studies of Intergroup Competition and Conflict 38
Inhibition of Bystander Intervention 41
Why Is Social Influence So Powerful? 44
Channel Factors 46
On Selling War Bonds 47
Time to Be a Good Samaritan 48
Effects of Minimal Compliance 50
Putting It All Together: Stanley Milgram and the Banality of Evil 52
3 Construing The Social World 59
Subjectivist Considerations in Objective Behaviorism 60
Relativity in Judgment and Motivation Phenomena 62
Some Nonobvious Motivational Consequences of Reward 65
The Construal Question in Social Psychology 67
Solomon Asch and the "Object of Judgment" 69
Partisanship and Perception 72
The Tools of Construal 75
The Attribution Process 77
Normative and Descriptive Principles of Causal Attribution 78
Attributions Regarding the Self 19
Failure to Allow for the Uncertainties of Construal 82
The False Consensus Effect 83
Overconfident Social and Personal Predictions 86
Situational Construal and the Fundamental Attribution Error 87
4 The Search For Personal Consistency 90
An Overview of Conventional Theories of Personality 91
The Scientific Findings and the Debate 94
The Challenge of 1968 95
Empirical Studies of Cross-Situational Consistency 96
Implications of the Empirical Challenge 100
Professional Responses to the Challenge of 1968 102
Bern's Revival of the Nomothetic-Idiographic Distinction 102
Methodological Objections and Alternative Empirical Approaches 105
Epstein's Claims for the Power of Aggregation 107
Making Sense of "Consistency" Correlations 109
Predictions Based on Single Observations 111
Predictions Based on Multiple Observations 114
The Relative Likelihood of Extreme Behaviors 116
5 Lay Personologyand Lay Social Psychology 119
Qualitative Aspects of Lay Personality Theory 120
Quantitative Aspects of Lay Personality Theory 122
Lay Dispositionism and the Fundamental Attribution Error 125
Inferring Dispositions from Situationally Produced Behavior 126
Slighting the Situation and Context in Favor of Dispositions 128
Overconfidence in Predictions Based on Dispositions 133
Dispositionism and the Interview Illusion 136
When Are Dispositional Data Useful? 138
The Sources of Lay Dispositionism 139
Perception and the Dispositionist Bias 139
Differing Causal Attributions for Actors and Observers 140
Construal and the Dispositionist Bias 141
Statistics and the Dispositionist Bias 142
How Could We Be So Wrong? 143
6 The Coherence Of Everyday Social Experience 145
Scientific Disentangling versus Real-World Confounding 147
Scientific Disentangling of Person and Situation 148
Real-World Confounding of Person and Situation 149
Audience-Induced Consistency and Predictability 150
When People Create Their Own Environments 154
Choosing and Altering Situations 154
Responsiveness to Others' Needs for Predictability 156
Continuity of Behavior over the Lifespan 158
Situations, Construals, and Personality 160
The Utility of Lay Personology Reconsidered 160
The Search for More Powerful Conceptions of Personality 162
7 The Social Psychology Of Culture 169
Situational Determinants of Culture 170
Effects of Ecology, Economy, and Technology 170
The Situation of the "Middleman" Minority 174
Culture, Ideology, and Construal 176
The Protestant Vision and the Growth of Capitalism 177
Associationism and Economic Development 179
Collectivism versus Individualism 181
Social Context and Attribution in East and West 184
Social Class and Locus of Control 186
Regional Differences in the United States as Cultural Differences 188
Enforcement of Cultural Norms 192
Cultures as Tension Systems 193
Cultural Change in America 193
Blacks and Whites in the American South 196
Traditional Japanese Culture and Capitalism 199
Traits, Ethnicities, and the Coordinates of Individual Differences 200
Can Ethnicities Substitute for Traits? 201
Why Is Ethnicity an Increasingly Important Factor in Modern Lite? 202
8 Applying Social Psychology 204
Methodological Lessons for Research Practitioners and Consumers 205
The Value of "True Experiments" 206
The Hawthorne Saga 210
When "Big" Interventions Fail 213
Situationism, Liberalism, and the Politics of Intervention 213
A Case History: The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study 214
When "Small" Interventions Succeed 219
Lewinian Discussion Groups and Democratic Procedures 219
"Modeling" Effects on Prosocial Behavior 222
Interventions that Encourage Minority-Student Success 224
Distal versus Proximal Interventions 226
Labeling and Attribution Effects in the Classroom 227
Social Labels and Self-Fulfilling Expectations 227
Labeling versus Exhortation to Achieve Behavior Change 228
Motivational Consequences of Superfluous Inducements 230
Attributions for Classroom Success and Failure 232
Subjective Perceptions and Objective Health Consequences 235
Placebo Effects and Reverse Placebo Effects 235
The Beneficial Effect of Forewarning and Coping Information 238
The Health Consequences of Perceived Efficacy and Control 240
Everyday Application of Social Psychology 243
Afterword 247
References 255
Index of Authors And Names 275
Subject Index 280
