 You and Lee Ross have written a book about the distinction between the person and the situation. Can you tell me about that distinction? Well, the effort in the book was to examine how people explain their own behavior and how they explain other people's behavior. And there are two broad classes of factors that would help to explain someone's behavior. What kind of situation is the person in and what kind of person you have. And obviously any behavior that you get out of anybody is a function of what's going on, what he's responding to, and what's in the person, what traits, what kind of temperament the person has, what kind of abilities the person has. These are enduring aspects of the person, which we call dispositions. And situational factors are, you know, what's the weather? Am I talking to somebody I enjoy talking to? Am I getting paid for this? All kinds of things that have nothing, I mean, conceptually have nothing to do with the person. They're just things that are out there. And the person's attributes and his current state, emotional state, and so on. And that situation or what's producing the behavior. We have a problem, however, which is that for other people it's much easier to invoke these dispositions to explain their behavior. Because when I'm looking at you behave, I'm looking at you. I mean, that's my focus. And I'm not attending that much to other things. They may be literally invisible to me, things that are visible to you. But in any case, they're not as salient because you are what I'm responding to. While we're talking about this dispositionism, one of the things that's worth noting is that in our culture it's kind of over-determined. In part because we observe people in the same situations most of the time. In part just because when we see someone act, we focus on the actor, not on the situation. In our particular culture it's almost a theory that people are responsible for their behavior. We don't look kindly on people who are fair-weather friends or who adjust their behavior to the prevailing winds, we would say. But also even our language predisposes this. You notice we talk about an honest person, but we don't have a term for a situation that prompts honesty. If we have to say, well this is the kind of situation in which the average person is honest. And only very dishonest people will be dishonest in this situation or it's the kind of situation in which most people take some liberties. But only the most extremely honest people can be counted on. We have to engage in this very complicated language. But we can say this is an honest person and that's a shorthand for saying something about what we expect the actor to do across the situations. And we can say that how would you characterize a situation in which you expect most people to be brave? We literally don't have a word. Now it isn't that we can't conceive of such a thing. We do have one domain, one that we care about a great deal in our culture where we do have that. When we talk about a test, we can say the test is easy or hard. And that's a really useful shorthand for saying we expect most people to do well at it or only exceptionally able people to do well at it and that kind of thing. We also have it for emotion words so we can talk about a scary movie or a sexy poster or things like that that again have that property that they're telling us what to expect from the average person. But it's interesting that we don't have these terms when it pertains to what we normally think of as personality traits. It's even worse than that. You can have a subject interact with someone else and say we want you to find out whether this person is an extrovert or an introvert. And here's the list of questions that you're going to ask. And I'm going to tell you which of these responses that subject is to give. And the experimenter says, okay, wouldn't you say you've been the life of the party sometimes? Yes, I've been the life of the party. You can say, yes, I've been the life of the party sometimes. I have told this person what to say. And after I'm through with all that, if I'm told to present himself as an extrovert, you ask me, what do you think that guy's like? He's kind of extroverted, I think. Or in the case of, you know, write this essay, if I put you through the situation yourself, I'm here, I want you to write an essay. Pro-French, do that right now. By the way, this guy wrote an essay, Pro-French. What do you think? He's probably Pro-French. How do you feel? Neutral. Maybe a little negative. We just don't pick that social influence up, which just seems so obvious to you when you say it like that. Given what we know about kind of the weakness of personality factors and the strength of situational factors, if I were an employer and hiring a new employee in my company, what sort of advice would you have then for what would be the most predictive of their future behavior? Well, obviously, if you had evidence about how they've behaved in very, very similar situations in the past, that would be useful. But my advice to an employer would be to create the kind of context, the kind of corporate norms and reinforce them in such a way that they produce the kinds of behavior that you want. That is to say, I'd try hard to model that kind of behavior. I would celebrate it when I saw it. I would respond immediately to behavior that was inconsistent with what I wanted. We see this in the area that I work in conflict resolution. There's often a feeling that you have to find the right guy to make a deal with. The evidence that we find is that the same person who might be a terrorist at one point in time can become a heroic peace fighter at another period of time. This was true in the work we've done in Northern Ireland where we looked at ex-bombers who became peace activists. And to some extent it's true even in the life of Nelson Mandela. And so lots of times people say we're looking for Mandela on the other side when what they should be doing is how can we create a context that creates a Mandela on the other side? Are we good at putting ourselves in the shoes of others? Since we tend to be blind to some degree about many situational factors that are affecting people, it's going to be hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes because we don't even know they're wearing shoes. If you don't see the situation, it's very difficult. Just a point about, since I mentioned Lee Ross who's my lifelong friend, he happens to be extremely good for giving advice about how to deal with some problem. Most of our problems, many of our problems are interpersonal problems. I've had a real problem with this guy and he's amazingly good. My God, that probably would work and then it does work. And I asked him very recently, why are you so good at this? He says, oh, it's easy. Most of the time you say I'm having this problem with this person. People say, oh, terrible. It's a terrible person. Who has to, you know, terribly have to deal with that? Lee doesn't empathize with you. He says, I'm guessing this is the situation you're confronting. I'm guessing this is what this guy is concerned about. I'm guessing this, you did this thing. So in other words, he's buying it completely out of me. He's trying to scan the situation, suggest things to me that might have been going on. And it's tremendously useful. I don't need somebody's commiseration. I need their help in solving the problem. And he can do that because he is genuinely much more tuned to situations than far more than I am, that's for sure.