The Person and the Situation

Even scientists who are most concerned with assessing individual differences in personality would concede that our ability to predict how particular people will respond in particular situations is very limited. This “predictability ceiling” is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of .30 between measured individual differences on

When trying to get people to change familiar ways of doing things, social pressures and constraints exerted by the informal peer group represent the most potent restraining force that must be overcome and, at the same time, the most powerful inducing force that can be exploited to achieve success.

the tension system principle helps us understand why apparently big situational manipulations sometimes have small effects and why apparently small situational manipulations sometimes have big effects. Big manipulations may fly in the face of, or even increase the strength and resistance of, even bigger restraining factors. Conversely, small manipu

what has been demonstrated through a host of celebrated laboratory and field studies is that manipulations of the immediate social situation can overwhelm in importance the type of individual differences in personal traits or dispositions that people normally think of as being determinative of social behavior.

Social psychology stands at the intersection between our eyes and the world in front of us, and helps us understand the difference between what we think we see and what is actually out there.