Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a knack for seeing the broad and deep psychological processes underlying individual episodes of rich, everyday behavior. Ross then crafted experiments that explored those processes in a way that was engaging and unusually memorable. After completing his PhD degree in 1969, Ross joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he taught for 52 years. Ross first achieved prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "the fundamental attribution error" to describe the tendency to attribute behavior primarily to a person's traits, attitudes, and other characteristics even when it should be clear that the person's behavior was largely the result of situational influences or constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological barrier to conflict resolution. Study 1 used a role-play scenario in which a student negotiated with a professor for greater rewards for work on a collaborative project. A self-affirmation manipulation, in which participants focused on an important personal value, significantly reduced their tendency to derogate a concession offered by the professor relative to one that had not been offered. Study 2 replicated this effect and showed that the phenomenon did not depend on the self-affirmed participant's experience of a heightened sense of deservingness or a tendency to make positive attributions about the professor. Distraction and explicit mood enhancement were also ruled out as mediators of the self-affirmation effect, which appears to stem from motivational rather than explicit cognitive processes.

Four experiments focused on ways children could be trained to imitate others in imposing on themselves higher performance standards in game situations. The study also attempted to determine whether this internal achievement motivation behavior would be transferred by the children to situations such as learning in a classroom. The subjects were 122 male and 119 female elementary school children in grades two through six. The experiments involved children observing a peer model exhibiting high or low standards of self-reward in a novel game after which the subjects played the game, or subjects observing peer models choosing either difficult or easy goals in a novel athletic game after which the subjects played the same game, and, finally, subjects beillg given training in self-monitoring and simple goal-setting. Substantial persistence of the effects of exposure to the models and generalization of these effects to a new game was demonstrated. Subjects who ,d seen a model prefer more difficult goals had, themselves, chosen more difficult goals. Exposure to self-monitoring training produced an interest in achievement, although the goal-setting procedures had no effect on either study behavior or achievement. The study suggests that even relatively brief systematic attempts to affect children's goal-setting and self-monitoring behavior have significant beneficial effects, and that investigation into the adaptation of such techniques to educational contexts seems highly worthy of further pursuit.(Author/MS) Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished materials .tot available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort to obtain the best copy available. Nevertheless, items of marginal reproducibility are often encountered and this affects the quality of the microfiche and hardcopy reproductions ERIC makes available via the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). EDRS is not responsible for the quality of the original document. Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original. U S DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH EDUCATION WELFARE NATIOUAL INSTI'I.ITE OF ***/) EDUCATION tIS Dot ',Mt NT HAS Rt FN REPRO. (WU() t A TI r AS RECEivED 1.140An THE PE WSON OW ORGANIZAT ION ORIC,1N ATINC, IT POINTS OE VIEW OR OPINIONS r4N STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRL rI SENT OF F ILIAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OT EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY

In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose discrepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dissonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for aspiring researchers who want to understand what social psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middlerange” level of theorizing they find most comfortable. Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most provocative debates that had taken place within the field and a clear-eyed account of the waxing and waning of specific research programs (which he characterized as “bandwagons” and “sinking ships”). Although we generally refrain from summarizing these debates and contributions, we do try to build upon them—not only with some updating, but also with further consideration of the challenges confronting our discipline, and the various ways in which those challenges have been met. Any history of a field of study reflects particular values and tastes. Ours include a fondness for studies that employ consequential behavioral measures and an appreciation of social psychology’s potential to speak to applied problems in the real world. In short, this chapter represents a history, rather than the history of social psychology, an account of contributions, problems, insights, and events seen through the particular interpretive lenses of its authors. The chapter includes five sections, each of which includes various subsections:

(1988). Motivational Considerations in the Study of Instruction. Cognition and Instruction: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 289-309.

Two studies were conducted to determine how gender and age moderate the long-term and post-failure motivational consequences of person versus performance praise. In Study 1, fourth- and fifth-grade students (n = 93) engaged in a puzzle task while receiving either no praise, person praise, product praise, or process praise. Following a subsequent failure experience, behavioural measures indicated that product and process praise enhanced motivation and person praise dampened motivation for girls, but that there were few effects of praise on subsequent motivation for boys. In Study 2, a parallel procedure with preschool children (n = 76) showed that person, product, and process praise all enhanced motivation, relative to neutral feedback, for both girls and boys.

Age differences in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the relationships of each to academic outcomes were examined in an ethnically diverse sample of 797 3rd-grade through 8th-grade children. Using independent measures, the authors found intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to be only moderately correlated, suggesting that they may be largely orthogonal dimensions of motivation in school. Consistent with previous research, intrinsic motivation showed a significant linear decrease from 3rd grade through 8th grade and proved positively correlated with children’s grades and standardized test scores at all grade levels. Extrinsic motivation showed few differences across grade levels and proved negatively correlated with academic outcomes. Surprisingly few differences based on children’s sex or ethnicity were found. Causes and consequences of the disturbingly low levels of motivation for older, relative to younger, children are discussed.

Attitude Representation Theory (ART) holds that attitude-relevant responses are informed by mental representations of the attitude object, which include the individual's actions toward that object. Action Identification Theory (AIT) holds that the same action can be identified at multiple levels. Individuals who identify their actions at lower levels have less flexibility in how they perform the action, and thus enact the action less consistently. An integration of ART and AIT suggested that individuals who spontaneously (Experiment 1) or through manipulation (Experiments 2 and 3) identify their attitude-relevant actions toward a social group at lower levels might display less attitude-intention congruence than would individuals who identify their attitude-relevant actions at higher levels. ART and AIT are discussed as having links with each other and with other theories of attitude and judgment processes.

Attitude representation theory (C. G. Lord & M. R. Lepper, 1999) explains both attitude-behavior consistency and attitude change with the same principles. When individuals respond evaluatively to an attitude object, they activate and combine assumptions about the attitude object with perceptions of the immediate situation. The assumptions activated can vary across time, even without additional information. Previous research has shown that individuals activate exemplars when answering attitude questions, attitude reports vary with the valence of the assumptions activated, and activating differently liked exemplars reduces attitude-behavior consistency. The present research completed study of the theoretical implications of exemplar stability by showing that individuals with temporally unstable exemplars, whether spontaneous (Experiment 1) or manipulated (Experiments 2 and 3), are more susceptible to subsequent attitude change than are individuals with stable exemplars.