No writer has done more to popularize Professor Ross’s ideas than Malcolm Gladwell. The New York Times columnist David Brooks called it an exemplary case of a scientific concept whose spread could “improve everybody’s cognitive tool kit.” Others recommend it as a self-help tip for employees - and for bosses. ![]() It has been used to suggest that leaders should not be considered responsible for the successes of their institutions - or for their failures. The term has been used to critique claims about differences across cultures - and to argue in favor of those differences. You might think, “What a jerk,” when in reality this person has never skipped ahead in a line before and is doing so now only because he would otherwise miss a flight to see a dying relative.ĭelivering folk wisdom in multisyllabic packaging, “the fundamental attribution error” became one of those academic phrases that add a whiff of sophistication to any argument they adorn. A 2014 article in Psychology Today titled “Why We Don’t Give Each Other a Break” used the example of someone who cuts into a line in front of you. The term vaulted into popular discourse, sometimes as a tool for promoting sympathy. “Lee illuminated the central mistake that people make in their social understanding,” Professor Gilbert said in a phone interview, adding that Professor Ross’s paper introducing the fundamental attribution error had become one of the most cited works in psychology. Thus began what Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University, called “the reign of error in social psychology,” as Professor Ross’s area of focus “came to dominate the field.” Behavior caused by randomly assigned social roles struck those involved as arising instead from intrinsic character traits. That was a fundamental attribution error. Other students observed.Īfter the game, observers said they considered the quizmaster exceptionally knowledgeable and the contestant notably ignorant. The quizzer was asked to devise difficult trivia questions and pose them to the contestant, who invariably struggled to answer. He devised a game in which Stanford undergraduates drew cards that assigned them the roles of quizmaster or contestant. Professor Ross, who remained on the faculty of Stanford until his death, demonstrated the existence of the fundamental attribution error with an experiment. His son Josh said the cause was kidney and heart failure. Professor Ross died on May 14 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He called that phenomenon “the fundamental attribution error.” The term became a foundational concept in psychology, and it provided a buzzy phrase to commentators on everything from leadership to crime fighting to workplace socializing. ![]() Professor Ross broadened that notion in his 1977 paper “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings,” in which he argued that much social misunderstanding is caused by a general tendency to attribute human behavior to personalities, rather than to external circumstances. The experience, he said, taught him the “tremendous difference between being the questioner and being the answerer - or, more generally, being the person who sets the agenda for what’s going on, versus the person who has less power.” ![]() “I, too, could ask questions that revealed particular bits and pieces of knowledge that I happened to have for various reasons, and I could ask the questions in a nice or, if I chose, slightly contemptuous way.” “I had this remarkable experience that the student seemed intimidated, and seemed to regard me just like the other faculty,” Professor Ross recalled in an oral history created last year by Stanford. He found himself at another dissertation defense, this time cast in the role of professor. That same month, he went to Stanford University, where he’d gotten a job as a junior professor. Ross thought: to know about stuff like angstroms. That’s what it meant to be a real academic, Mr. What, one inquisitor asked, was the wavelength of the dim light, calculated in the infinitesimal unit of measurement known as angstroms? ![]() Ross had done a study of how perceptions differed under bright and dim light. In 1969, when he defended his graduate dissertation at Columbia University, a committee of faculty members let loose a downpour of esoteric questions. Personal humiliation inspired Lee Ross’s greatest insight.
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