Profile of Lee D. Ross

Social psychologist Lee Ross has never felt content to confine his research to the laboratory. He prefers to wade knee-deep through global issues, finding ways to apply his expertise to problems ranging from climate change and healthcare to education and the legal system. Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) and recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, has devoted a long and distinguished career to observing how people behave in real-life situations, including second-track negotiations and conflict resolution in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. His findings have offered valuable insights into the factors that influence personal judgment and decision-making processes. Ross’ concepts have not only become central to social psychology, but they have had broad impacts on fields ranging from developmental and cognitive psychology to behavioral economics.

Lee D. Ross.

Bias and Behavior

Ross received a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, where he met Richard Nisbett, a fellow graduate student in the laboratory of Stanley Schachter. The pair stayed in touch well after Ross accepted a professorship in 1969 at Stanford University, where he began studying attribution theory to determine how people explain the causes of behaviors and events. “At the time, attribution theory was important but kind of dull,” he says. “I became interested not in how we go about making attributions but when and why we do it wrong. That made attribution theory come alive!”

Together with Nisbett, Ross coauthored nearly 100 journal articles and book chapters as well as two widely cited books (1, 2). The books, which explore human judgment and the relationship between social situations and personality, constitute some of Ross’ most important contributions, describing the core ideas of social psychology in a way that could be appreciated by scientists in many other fields.

In 1977, a few years before authoring his first book with Nisbett, Ross published a key paper detailing his most important early findings. This influential paper by Ross (3) introduced the term “the intuitive psychologist” and explored the various cognitive and motivational biases that people are susceptible to when interpreting data. He also coined the term “fundamental attribution error” to describe the tendency to attribute someone’s behavior to their individual characteristics and attitudes, while underestimating the influence that the actual situation might have had. As Ross points out, the fundamental attribution error is ingrained in humans—from the way that we perceive actions to the language that we use to describe them. “It’s natural to attribute the action to the actor doing the acting,” Ross explains. “We say ‘he was a brave person’ or ‘it was a brave act,’ but we don’t know how to say ‘it was a situation that made it easy to be brave’ or a ‘bravery-inducing situation;’ it just sounds strange to say that.” It is not that we cannot do it, Ross says. We know how to use that language for emotions and task performance. For example, we might describe a stimulus as frightening or certain tasks as hard or easy. “But we don’t normally use that kind of language for things like generosity, bravery, or cowardice,” he says.

Ross took particular interest in studying the various biases that people have (for example, how people are overconfident in their judgments or slow to change their beliefs even in the face of evidence). People also tend to think that their own behaviors are more appropriate and common than alternative behaviors—a concept Ross named the “false consensus effect” (4). “These are all phenomena that we see in the world, and we began to see if we could demonstrate them in an experimental setting, explore why they happened, and what factors produced them,” Ross says.

Experimental Approach

In exploring errors and biases, Ross favored an experimental approach. “If you were a social psychologist in my generation, you did experiments,” he says. However, Ross says, the research was less a test of deep theoretical principles and more an attempt to capture real-world phenomena in the laboratory. “We sometimes joked that we’d see things in the real world and want to study if what was true in practice was also possible, and ideally understandable, in theory,” Ross says.

He held a particular fondness for studies that “told a story in a way that students understood.” One such study (5) was a modified version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, a classic demonstration of game theory from the 1950s. In the standard game, two robbers are arrested and separately asked to testify against their partner. If both betray each other, they get 3 months in jail, whereas if both cooperate, then they each get only 1 month in jail. If only one defects, however, he gets released, and the cooperator gets a 1-year sentence. Researchers have long studied what governs choices in such situations, but Ross decided to try changing the name of the game.

Ross asked participants to play a standard version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game in which the stakes were financial but named it either the Community or Wall Street game. His research revealed that two times as many people cooperated when they thought that they were playing the Community game rather than the Wall Street game. Interestingly, the players’ previous reputations as likely cooperators or defectors did not predict their behavior at all. “It’s one of my favorite studies,” Ross says. “At the most general level, it said that the way in which we respond to a situation depends on how we subjectively perceive it,” even when it is the sort of situation that economists normally think of in terms of objective self interests, he says.

In another prominent study, Ross looked at perceived media bias during the US Presidential debates. When the media does not see the world that the way we do, we accuse the media of bias, Ross says, a phenomenon that he describes as the “hostile media effect.” “If I think my candidate won the debate, and you think your candidate won the debate, when someone describes it objectively, we’re both frustrated that the other person didn’t see things the way we think they really were,” he says. “Both sides think that their side won the debate, and so, the media wasn’t fair, because it didn’t give their side credit for the victory.”

He followed this study with a study of media coverage (6) surrounding a massacre in a Lebanese refugee camp to answer a controversial question: what degree, if any, did people think that Israel was responsible for the massacre? “We showed that people who were pro-Israeli thought the television coverage was anti-Israeli, and people who were anti-Israeli thought the same coverage was pro-Israeli,” Ross says. “From a psychologist’s perspective, this was particularly interesting, because we mostly see the world the way we want to see it.” However, when it came to media coverage, people thought it was biased against them.

This phenomenon involves a concept known as naïve realism that Ross considers to be central to social psychology. “We think the world is the way we perceive it to be, and we expect other people to see it the same way,” he says. “So, when they see it differently and disagree with us, we tend to attribute it to their stupidity, their lack of attention, their lack of information, their biases, or something else that is preventing them from seeing it accurately.”

Conflict Resolution

Although Ross’s early work explored how an individual behaves when confronted with information, he eventually began to consider what happens when people with different biases and worldviews interact with each other. This consideration spawned a natural interest in conflict resolution. “Each person has to believe that their view of reality is how it really is, but that creates problems when we have to deal with each other,” he says. “And conflicts arise when people have different views.”

Most recently, Ross has performed research on conflict and peace proceedings to determine how social psychology can reveal the factors that prevent opposing parties from reaching an agreement. Together with an interdisciplinary group of researchers, Ross helped found the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN). “We were invited to participate in peace-making efforts in Ireland and the Middle East,” he says. “In the aftermath of the Gulf War, when Palestinians and Israelis wanted to start negotiating again, we were asked to hold a conference, basically to provide cover for them to meet.” Since that experience, Ross has taken a special interest in observing and advising people engaged in peace-making efforts.

The laboratory has yielded several lessons relevant to conflict resolution. “Parties in conflict believe that they see things the way they really are, so if they could just get together with the other side and explain how things really are, they could make progress. But, of course, when they get together, they’re really frustrated and disappointed, because they tell the other side how things really are and the other side doesn’t agree,” he says. During such conflicts, Ross and his SCICN colleagues encourage people to view the sources of their deadlock and even view the conflict itself in terms of ordinary psychological processes rather than focusing on the aspects of their conflict that are unique. “You make some progress when people who are frustrated with each other come to see the problem in terms of characteristics that make us all human rather than the unique negative characteristics of people on the other side of the conflict,” he says.

His work with real-world conflicts has had lasting impacts, Ross says. “You come to recognize the importance of things that haven’t received enough attention in the laboratory,” he says. In particular, he learned how personal relationships serve as key sources of frustration and interfere with dispute resolution. “Many theorists and diplomats think the way to improve relations is by drafting a good agreement; but often the thing that’s making it impossible to get an agreement is the relationship between the parties, the lack of trust,” he says. “Sometimes you have to work on the relationship first,” Ross says.

Ross is currently exploring the roles of emotions and sentiments in this process. His recent work also explores the phenomenon of collective rationalization. Individuals do not just justify their own behaviors; they also do it for others by making excuses for each other or buying each other’s excuses, Ross says. “Great evils, such as slavery, apartheid, the Holocaust, were made possible, because people rationalized for each other,” he notes.

The notion of rationalization as a collective process came out in a recent study (7), wherein the work by Ross et al. (7) explored the interplay between Christianity and politics in the United States. In particular, Ross was intrigued by how people reconciled their liberal or conservative political views with their religious values. “There was this paradox; to be liberal and Christian means that you’re somewhat at odds with the teachings of your church on issues of morality like gay rights, abortion, and that kind of thing, and if you’re a conservative Christian, you’re going to be somewhat at odds with the teachings of the gospels on issues of fellowship and helping your fellow man when it comes to how you feel about income redistribution and illegal immigrants,” he says. Ross found that both liberal and conservative Christians attribute views to Jesus that are similar to their own views. “They collectively rationalize their own views by projecting them onto Christ.”

Social Psychologist’s Perspective

Ross has studied divisive issues such as capital punishment and climate change, and he has provided a psychologists’ perspective to Stanford’s climate researchers. “Climatologists might think the problem is that people are ignorant, and we have to convince them, change their hearts and minds, while the social psychologist would focus on situational factors,” he says. This focus means that, to make a change, we need to make it easier for people to engage in the kind of behavior in which we want them to engage. He points to recycling campaigns as an example. “A long time ago, when we tried to get people to recycle, we wanted them to pack their garbage in their car and separate their cans and bottles and paper and drive to the recycling center,” he says. However, a more successful strategy was to just collect recyclable materials in cans that people can put at the curb every week. “People don’t think much about it, they don’t think they’re being proecology or concerned about global warming—it’s just the way they and their neighbors put out the garbage,” Ross says. “Sometimes, if people change their behavior, that changes their hearts and minds. Their attitudes and beliefs follow their behavior instead of preceding it,” he says.

As Ross delves deeper into the complexities of social behavior, he continues to learn more about the ways that people make decisions and assumptions. By uncovering the ingrained biases governing human behavior, Ross has helped remove some of the barriers to solutions, while simultaneously providing insights into social psychology.