The Person and the Situation

The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology

How does the situation we're in influence the way we behave and think? Professors Ross and Nisbett eloquently argue that the context we find ourselves in substantially affects our behavior in this timely reissue of one of social psychology's classic textbooks.
"I still remember when I first read The Person and the Situation. It was in 1996. I had never taken any psychology courses in college, so the name Nisbett and Ross – not to mention Kurt Lewin and Solomon Asch – meant nothing to me. I didn’t know what the Fundamental Attribution Error was. I had, from my days as a science writer at the Washington Post, a passing acquaintance with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and that was it. But by some happy series of coincidences I fell in love with psychology that summer, and started spending long afternoons at the New York University library, browsing through academic journals. I would find an article I really liked, and then read as many of the most interesting bits of the bibliography of that article as I could, and then the most interesting bits of the bibliography of those articles – and on and on, walking back the cat, as they say in the intelligence world. (You can kill a lot of afternoons at NYU library that way.) Anyway, the cat I kept finding at the end of those walks was The Person and the Situation. So one day, I sat down in one of the carrels at Bobst Library and devoured it in one sitting. And because I didn’t have borrowing privileges, I photocopied it, front to back, in violation – I am now ashamed to admit – of every rule of copyright. I still have that bundle of pirated pages on my bookshelf. I hope Professors Ross and Nisbett will consider this foreword as partial reparation."