Are Our Social Perceptions Often Inaccurate?

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ISSUE 3. Are Our Social Perceptions Often Inaccurate?

YES: LEE ROSS AND RICHARD E. NISBETT, FROM PERSPECTIVES OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (MCGRAW-HILL, 1991)

NO: DAVID C. FUNDER, FROM “ERRORS AND MISTAKES: EVAL‎UATING THE ACCURACY OF SOCIAL JUDGMENT,” PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN (VOL. 101, 1987)

Social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett believe that peoples perceptions of others are often inaccurate because of the dispositionalist biasthe tendency for people to mistakenly believe that the behavior of others is due largely to their personality or disposition. David C. Funder, a personality psychologist, believes that the artificial laboratory experiments cited by Ross and Nisbett do not necessarily indicate that peoples perceptions in the real world are often mistaken. In the real world, peoples behavior is often due to their disposition.