American academic (1942–2021)
Lee David Ross (August 25, 1942 – May 14, 2021) was a Canadian-American professor. He held the title of the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and was an influential social psychologist who studied attributional biases, shortcomings in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross was known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media. His interests included ongoing societal problems, in particular protracted inter-group conflicts, the individual and collective rationalization of evil, and the psychological processes that make it difficult to confront societal challenges. Ross went beyond the laboratory to involve himself in conflict resolution and public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other areas of the world.
Life.
Ross was born in Toronto on August 25, 1942. He earned his B.A. degree in psychology at the University of Toronto in 1965 and his Ph.D. in social psychology at Columbia University in 1969 under the supervision of Stanley Schachter. His primary interests include biases in human inference, judgment, and decision-making; intergroup relations and dispute resolution; political psychology; and points of contact between psychology, law, and ethics.
Ross first came into prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "fundamental attribution error" to describe the finding that people are predisposed towards attributing another person's behavior to individual characteristics and attitudes, even when it is relatively clear that the person's behavior was a result of situational demands (Ross, 1977; This effect is closely linked to, but somewhat broader than, "correspondence bias" identified by Jones &amp; Davis, 1965). With Robert Vallone and Mark Lepper he authored the first study to describe the hostile media effect. He has also collaborated with Richard Nisbett in books on human judgment (Nisbett &amp; Ross, 1980) and the relation between social situations and personality (i.e. "the person and the situation"; Ross &amp; Nisbett, 1991). His 1977 chapter, on "The Intuitive Psychologist and his Shortcomings" has been one of the most cited articles in social psychology over the past four decades.
Author of over 100 journal articles and book chapters, Ross, co-authored two influential books with Richard Nisbett: "Human Inference" (1980), which deals with the tasks, strategies, and shortcomings of the intuitive psychologist and "The Person and the Situation" (Ross &amp; Nisbett, 1991; reissued in 2011 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, who commented that "all of my books have been, in some sense, intellectual godchildren of the "Person and the Situation""). Most recently, Ross has co-authored, with Tom Gilovich, "The Wisest One in the Room", which explores what the authors consider to be the most important and the most personally and societally useful ideas to have emerged from social psychology and related disciplines.
Ross died on May 14, 2021, at the age of 78 from heart and kidney failure at his home in Palo Alto. He was survived by his wife Judith (née Spinks) Ross, and their four adult children.
Research.
Lee Ross was interested in – and has influenced – many fields of psychology, including attitude formation and change, social cognition, judgment and decision, influence, intergroup relations and political psychology. His research generally focused on sources of bias and error and strategies to ameliorate them. With an interdisciplinary group of researchers, Ross was a co-founder of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN). The motivational, cognitive, and perceptual barriers that thwart efforts to ease conflict and achieve mutually beneficial agreements has been a major focus both of his research and applied work over the past two decades.
His earliest work involved the under-appreciation of situational influences on actions and outcomes, and on the role of "construal" or subjective interpretation of the situations and choices one faces. For example, one study on the "fundamental attribution error" demonstrated that observers are relatively insensitive to role-conferred advantages and disadvantages in evaluating actions and outcomes. A study on the role of situational construal and the impact of situational labeling showed that the decision of research participants to cooperate vs defect when playing the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game could be heavily influenced by the "name of the game" (i.e. the Wall Street Game versus the Community Game). Much of his subsequent work focused on these influences, and related ones, that govern a wide range of interferential and judgmental tasks, and the interactions between individuals and between groups.
Ross and his colleagues subsequently conducted ground-breaking work on other errors and biases in judgment and decision-making and in the attribution process, including biased assimilation of information and resulting belief perseverance, the false consensus effect, the hostile media effect, reactive devaluation, and most recently "naive realism" or the illusion of personal objectivity.
References.
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