Progress-focused

Richard Nisbett, who I have mentioned here before , has written a brief but interesting article about the fundamental attribution error.Together with Lee Ross, he once wrote a classical book about this, The Person and the Situation . The fundamental attribution error means that we systematically underestimate the influence of situations, structures, and systems on our behavior en systematically overestimate the influence of personal traits and dispositions on our behavior. As Nisbett says it: we are, wrongly, inclined to think about human behavior in purely dispositional terms.

I came across an intriguing bit in Richard Nisbett's book Mindware which was about what he called the leftward drift. This leftward drift refers to the fact that the number of college and university students who self-identify as liberal or far left in their political orientation increase as they move through college. At the same time, the number of students who call themselves conservative or far left decreases. In other words, college makes many students drift to the left in their political views.

Psychologist Richard Nisbett has written a new book called Mindware: tools for smart thinking. I think it is essential reading for students of psychology. Here is my review. As a psychology student in the 1980s I first learned about the work of the Richard Nisbett. Together with Lee Ross (who coined the term fundamental attribution error; which I will come back to later) he wrote the classic book Human Inference (1980) about how people use rules of thumb in social judgment and decision making and about how we often systematic mistakes in the way we judge events and people. Nisbett & Ross' work build on and was closely related to the work done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.