The Person and the Situation
Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, two of the most influential social psychologists of their generation, lay out the field's core finding that human behavior is driven much more by situational context than by stable traits. They walk through landmark experiments from Solomon Asch's conformity studies to Stanley Milgram's obedience research and explain why people, including experts, consistently underestimate how powerful situations are. The book also examines tension and resistance, the role of subjective interpretation, and the implications for politics, education, and intervention design. Originally published in 1991, it was reissued with a new foreword that calls it one of the most important social psychology books of the twentieth century. It is widely used in undergraduate and graduate courses in the field.
What you might want to know about The Person and the Situation
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Two leading social psychologists argue that situations shape behavior far more than personality, and explain what that means for everyday life.
Gladwell wrote the foreword to the reissue, calling The Person and the Situation one of the books that most shaped how he thinks about behavior.
It is written for general readers but is widely assigned in university social psychology courses.
The Person and the Situation was written by Lee Ross, published in 1991 by Pinter and Martin.
The Person and the Situation is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Person and the Situation takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Person and the Situation is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.