Sublime

Richard Nisbett articulates the essence of the paradoxical Middle Way of language and thought in his book The Geography of Thought:

The Geography of Thought: How Westerners and Asians Think Differently—and Why (2003).

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped

people have a general tendency to stick with their current situation.

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.

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

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.