Jawn Lam

Lee Ross

Thinkers1942 to 2021Social psychologist

Works

  • The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, volume 10, 1977
  • Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social-Perception Processes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1977

In Tactics of Organizational Politics

Ideas

The fundamental attribution error. Ross named the fundamental attribution error: observers tend to explain other people's behavior by their personal traits and to underestimate the situation they were in, even when situational pressures are plain.

Role advantages in perceived competence. In a quiz game with randomly assigned roles, participants who wrote the questions were rated more knowledgeable than those who had to answer them, by the answerers and by observers, though the roles alone produced the difference.

What it explains

Ross explains why people are blamed for failures their circumstances produced, and credited for successes their position made easy. Whoever controls assignments, resources, and roles can therefore shape how others' competence is judged.

Tactics that draw on Lee Ross (45)

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