The previous chapter showed that we’re frequently ignorant about the influence of irrelevant, incidental, and scarcely noticed stimuli in producing our judgments and behavior. Unfortunately, we’re also frequently blind to the role played by factors that are not incidental or evanescent at all but rather are the prime movers affecting our judgments and behavior. In particular, we often underestimate—or fail to notice at all—some of the most important situational influences that markedly affect beliefs and behavior.
A direct consequence of this “context blindness” is that we tend to exaggerate the influence of personal, “dispositional” factors—preferences, personality traits, abilities, plans, and motives—on behavior in a given situation.
Both the slighting of the situation and the exaggeration of internal factors occur even when we’re trying to analyze the reasons for our own judgments and the causes of our own behavior. But the problem is much greater when it’s the causes of other people’s behavior we’re trying to figure out. I have to attend to many aspects of the context and situation if I’m going to be able to form a judgment or carry out some behavior. But the situation confronting another person may be difficult or impossible for me to see. So I’m particularly likely to underestimate the importance of the situation for another’s behavior and to overestimate internal factors.
The failure to recognize the importance of contexts and situations and the consequent overestimation of the role of personal dispositions is, I believe, the most pervasive and consequential inferential mistake we make. The social psychologist Lee Ross has labeled this the fundamental attribution error.
As it happens, there are big cultural differences in propensity to make this error. This fact offers the hope that people in more susceptible cultures may be able to overcome the error to some degree.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
Bill Gates is the richest person in the world. At the ripe old age of nineteen, Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, and in a few short years he made it the most profitable corporation in the world. It’s tempting to think that he must be one of the smartest people who ever lived.
Gates is undoubtedly extraordinarily bright. But what few people know about him is that his precollege life was blessed, computationally speaking. He was bored at his Seattle public school in eighth grade in 1968, so his parents switched him to a private school that happened to have a terminal linked to a mainframe computer. Gates became one of a small number of people anywhere who had substantial time to explore a high-powered computer. His luck continued for the next six years. He was allowed to have free programming time in exchange for testing the software of a local company; he regularly sneaked out of his house at three in the morning to go to the University of Washington computer center to take advantage of machine time made available to the public at that hour. There was not likely another teenager in the world who had the kind of access to computers that Gates had.
Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about. The economist Smith has twice as many publications in refereed journals as the economist Jones. We’re naturally going to assume that Smith is more talented and hardworking than Jones. But as it happens, economists who get their PhDs in a “fat year,” when there are many university jobs available, do much better in the academic job market and have more successful careers than economists who get their PhDs in a “lean year.” The difference in success between Smith and Jones may have more to do with dumb luck than with smarts, but we’re not going to see this.
The careers of many college students who got their degrees during the Great Recession are going to be forever stunted. Unemployment is bad not just because it’s demoralizing not to have a job, but because the repercussions may never cease. Parents are going to wonder where they went wrong with struggling Jane, who graduated from college in 2009, and what they did that was so different from how they brought up successful Joan, who graduated in 2004.
Important influences can be hidden, but even when powerful situational determinants of behavior are staring us in the face, we can be oblivious to their impact.
In a classic experiment from the 1960s, the social psychologists Edward Jones and Victor Harris showed people one of two essays about Cuba’s political system allegedly written by a college student in response to a requirement by a professor.1 One essay was favorable toward Cuba and the other was unfavorable. The experimenters informed the participants who read the essay favorable to Cuba that it had been written as an assignment: an instructor in a political science course (or, in another experiment, a debate coach) required the student to write a pro-Cuba essay. The experimenters told other participants that the student who wrote the unfavorable essay had been required to write an anti-Cuba essay. I think we can agree that the participants had learned nothing about the students’ actual attitudes toward Cuba. Yet the participants rated the first student as being substantially more favorable to Cuba than the second student.
In everyday life we ignore equally powerful influences on people’s behavior. A professor friend of mine regularly teaches two different courses to undergraduates at Stanford. One is a statistics course and the other is a community outreach course. The students who take his statistics course rate him at the end of the term as being rigid, humorless, and rather cold. The students who take the community outreach course rate him as flexible, funny, and quite warm.
Whether you’re heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume. The social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané conducted a series of experiments studying what has come to be known as “bystander intervention.”2 They contrived a number of situations that seemed like emergencies—an epileptic seizure, a bookcase falling on a person in an adjacent room, someone who fainted on the subway. The likelihood of a person offering help to the “victim” was hugely dependent on the presence of others. If people thought they were the only witness, they usually attempted to help. If there was another “witness” (actually a confederate of the experimenter), they were much less likely to help. If there were many “witnesses,” people were quite unlikely to offer help.
In Darley and Latané’s “seizure” experiment, in which people thought they were communicating over an intercom, 86 percent of people rushed to help the “victim” when they thought they were the only person who knew about the incident. If they thought there were two bystanders, 62 percent of people offered help. When four people presumably heard the cries for help, only 31 percent volunteered their services.
To drive home the point that kindness and caring can be less important than situational factors, Darley and his colleague Daniel Batson conducted a study with theological students—people we might assume would be particularly likely to help someone in need.3 The researchers sent a number of Princeton theological students to a building across campus to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan (!), telling them the route to follow. Some of the students were told they had plenty of time to get to the building and others were told they were already late. On their way to deliver the sermon, each of the seminarians passed a man who was sitting in a doorway, head down, groaning and coughing and in obvious need of help. Almost two-thirds of the seminarians offered help to the man if they were in no rush. Only 10 percent offered help if they were late.
Of course, if you knew only that a particular seminarian helped and another one didn’t, you would have a much more favorable impression of the one who offered assistance than of the one who didn’t. A circumstance like being in a rush wouldn’t likely occur to you as a factor influencing the seminarian who failed to be a Good Samaritan. And in fact, when you describe the experimental setup to people, they don’t think that the situation—being late versus not—would have any effect at all on whether the seminarian would help or ignore the person in distress.4 Given this belief, they can only perceive failure to help as being due to poor character, something internal to the person.
Hidden situational factors can also influence how smart a person seems to be. The social psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues invited students to participate in a study with a TV quiz show format. One student, selected at random, was to ask the questions and the other student was to answer them. The questioner’s role was to generate ten “challenging but not impossible questions,” and the “contestant” was supposed to provide answers out loud. Questioners took advantage of their role to display esoteric knowledge in the questions they posed. “What is the sweet-smelling waxy stuff that comes from whales and is used as a base for perfume?” (Ambergris—in case you haven’t recently read Moby-Dick.) Contestants managed to answer only a fraction of the questions.
At the end of the session, both of the participants, as well as the observers, were required to rate both the questioner’s and the contestant’s general knowledge. You might think that it would have been clear to subjects and observers alike that the questioner’s role gave him a big advantage. The role guaranteed that he would reveal no area of ignorance, whereas the contestant’s role offered no opportunity for such selective, self-serving displays. But the role advantage of the questioner was not sufficiently obvious, either to the contestants or to the observers, to prevent them from judging the questioners to be unusually knowledgeable. Both the contestants and the observers rated the questioner as far more knowledgeable than either the contestant or the “average” student in the university.
The quiz study has profound relevance to everyday life. The organizational psychologist Ronald Humphrey set up a laboratory microcosm of a business office.5 He told participants he was interested in “how people work together in an office setting.” A showily random procedure selected some of the participants to be “managers” and to assume supervisory responsibilities. Some were selected to be mere “clerks” who followed orders. Humphrey gave the managers time to study manuals describing their tasks. While they were studying them, the experimenter showed the clerks the mailboxes, filing system, and so on. The newly constructed office team then went about their business for two hours. The clerks were assigned to work on a variety of low-skilled, repetitive jobs and had little autonomy. The managers, as in a real office, performed reasonably high-skill-level tasks and directed the clerks’ activities.
At the end of the work period, managers and clerks rated themselves and each other on a variety of role-related traits. These included leadership, intelligence, motivation for hard work, assertiveness, and supportiveness. For all these traits, managers rated their fellow managers more highly than they rated their clerks. For all but hardworkingness, clerks rated their managers more highly than they rated their fellow clerks.
People can find it hard to penetrate beyond appearances and recognize the extent to which social roles affect behavior, even when the random basis of role assignment and the prerogatives of particular roles are made abundantly clear. And, of course, in everyday life it’s often less clear why people occupy the roles they do, so it can be very difficult to separate role demands and advantages from the intrinsic attributes of the occupant of the role.
Only after I read about these experiments did I understand why I was typically so impressed with the astute questions my colleagues asked in the final oral examinations of PhD candidates—and usually somewhat disappointed by my students’ less than trenchant answers!
The fundamental attribution error gets us in trouble constantly. We trust people we ought not to, we avoid people who really are perfectly nice, we hire people who are not all that competent—all because we fail to recognize situational forces that may be operating on the person’s behavior. We consequently assume that future behavior will reflect the dispositions we infer from present behavior. (So that you won’t think this generalization fails to square with the assertion that past behavior is the best guide to future behavior, note that it’s past behavior over the long run, observed in many diverse situations, that is the excellent predictor, not behavior observed in only a few situations, especially a few situations all of the same type.)
Why Do Some Kids Sell Drugs and Other Kids Go to College?
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
—Jim Rohn, American entrepreneur and motivational speaker
When my son was fifteen years old, I happened to be looking out my office window when I saw him walking across a parking lot with another boy. They were both smoking cigarettes, which was something my wife and I assumed that my son didn’t do and wouldn’t do. That evening I said to my son, “I was disappointed to see you smoking a cigarette today.” “Yes, I was smoking,” he said defiantly. “But it wasn’t because of peer pressure.”
Yes it was. Or at any rate, he was smoking because a lot of his peers were smoking. We do things all the time because other people are doing them. They model behavior for us and often encourage us, openly or tacitly, to follow their example. They can be successful beyond our imagining.
Social influence is perhaps the most researched topic in all social psychology. We can be blind to it not only when we’re observing other people’s behavior but when we’re trying to explain to ourselves the causes of our own behavior.
The first social psychology experiment was conducted by Norman Triplett in 1898.6 He found that cyclists had much better times when they competed against another cyclist than when they merely competed against the clock. The general point has been made in scores of subsequent experiments. People perform more energetically not just when they’re in competition with others but even when other people are merely observing. The social facilitation effect on performance has even been found for dogs, possums, armadillos, frogs, and fish.
(You’re probably wondering whether the effect is found for cockroaches as well. It is indeed! The social psychologist Robert Zajonc had cockroaches run for cover when he turned on a light. A cockroach ran faster if there was another cockroach next to it. The cockroaches ran faster even if other cockroaches were mere observers, watching from specially constructed cockroach bleachers.)
Many years ago, I bought a Saab automobile, and shortly thereafter started noticing that several of my colleagues were driving Saabs. Later, my wife and I started playing tennis and were surprised that lots of my friends and acquaintances had taken up tennis as well. After a few years, we drifted away from tennis. I began to notice that the tennis courts I had frequented, instead of being lined with people waiting their turn to play, were standing mostly empty. We took up cross-country skiing—at about the same time that several of our friends did. That, too, we eventually lost interest in. I subsequently noticed that most of my skiing friends had also more or less dropped skiing. And I won’t even bother to tell you about serving after-dinner drinks, minivans, going to obscure art films …
I was quite unaware of what I can now see as the influence of our friends and neighbors on the behavior of my wife and me. But at the time I would have said the favorable rating Consumer Reports gave to Saab was the main reason I bought one. My wife and I wanted to have regular exercise, and there was a tennis court across from our house, so that seemed the natural exercise to take up. There were always things to attribute our behavior to other than the influence of our acquaintances.
We should choose our acquaintances carefully because we’re going to be highly influenced by them. This is especially true for young people: the younger you are, the more influenced you are by peers’ attitudes and behaviors.7 One of a parent’s most important and challenging roles is to make sure their children’s acquaintances are likely to be good influences.
The economists Michael Kremer and Dan Levy examined the grade point averages of students whose freshman roommate had been assigned to them at random.8 The investigators found out how much alcohol each student had tended to consume in high school. Students who had been assigned a roommate who came to college with a history of substantial drinking got grades a quarter point lower than students assigned a teetotaler. That can easily mean a GPA of B plus versus A minus or C plus versus B minus. If the student himself had been a drinker prior to going to college, that student got grades a full point lower if his roommate had been a drinker than if he had not! That can mean a good medical school for him versus no medical school. (I use the word “him” deliberately; there was no effect on females of having a drinking roommate.)
It seems highly improbable that the unsuspecting student would have recognized that his roommate’s drinking was the main cause of his disappointing scholastic achievement. Indeed, the investigators themselves don’t know exactly why a roommate’s behavior should be so important, though it seems likely that the drinking roommate just made drinking seem like a natural pastime. And of course the more you drink, the less you study, and the less effective you are when you do study.
You can reduce college students’ drinking, incidentally, by simply telling them how much drinking goes on at their school.9 This tends to be substantially less than students think, and they move their drinking in line with that of their peers.
I understand why [President Obama] wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.
—Senator Rick Santorum, during his 2012 presidential campaign
So was Senator Santorum right about what college does to people? Does it really push them toward President Obama’s political camp?
Indeed it does. The economist Amy Liu and her colleagues conducted a study of students at 148 different colleges and universities—large and small, public and private, religious and secular.10 They found that the number of students at the end of college who described themselves as liberal or far left in their politics increased by 32 percent over the number who described themselves as such when they were incoming freshmen. The number who described themselves as conservative or far right decreased by 28 percent. Students moved left on questions of marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, abortion, abolition of the death penalty, and increasing taxes for the wealthy. If fewer people went to college, Republicans would win more elections.
It’s likely that you moved left in college, too. If so, does it seem to you that the liberalism of your professors was responsible? A desire to adopt the views of prestigious older students? I would bet not. It seemed to me that my own leftward drift in college was the consequence not of spongelike absorption of professors’ views or slavish imitation of my fellow students, but rather the result of coming independently to a better understanding of the nature of society and the kinds of things that improve it.
But of course, my leftward drift was indeed the result in good part of social influence from students and professors. And those professors were influencing not just their students but each other as well. A conservative student group has claimed that publicly available numbers from the Federal Election Commission showed that, in 2012, 96 percent of Ivy League professors’ political donations went to President Obama. They reported that precisely one professor at Brown University gave money to Mitt Romney. (And it may have been sheer cussedness rather than political convictions that prompted the donation!)
Those political contribution trends may be exaggerated, but as a social psychologist and former Ivy League professor, I can assure you that those professors (a) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and (b) don’t recognize the conformity pressures influencing their own opinions. Left to themselves, you wouldn’t find 96 percent of Ivy League professors reporting that they think daily tooth brushing is a good idea.
Other institutions are also hothouses of liberalism. A Republican Party operative trying to recruit techies from Google discovered that people were much more likely to be out as gay than out as Republican.
Needless to say, some communities are undoubtedly equally successful at fostering and enforcing conservatism. My candidates would include Bob Jones University and the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
And of course, the whole country isn’t moving drastically to the left with each successive generation. Students from those liberal colleges are going to reenter a world of people with a wide range of views—which will now begin to influence them in a more rightward direction on average.
It’s not just attitudes and ideology that are influenced by other people. Engage in a conversation with someone in which you deliberately change your bodily position from time to time. Fold your arms for a couple of minutes. Shift most of your weight to one side. Put one hand in a pocket. Watch what your conversation partner does after each change and try not to giggle. “Ideomotor mimicry” is something we engage in quite unconsciously. When people don’t do it, the encounter can become awkward and unsatisfying.11 But the participants won’t know what it is that went wrong. Instead: “She’s kind of a cold fish”; “we don’t share much in common.”
Awareness of Social Influence
The social psychologists George Goethals and Richard Reckman conducted the granddaddy of all studies showing the power of social influence, together with the blissful absence of any awareness of it.12 They asked white high school students their opinions about a large number of social issues, including one that was very salient and very controversial in their community at the time, namely busing for the purpose of racial integration.13 A couple of weeks later the investigators called the participants and asked them to participate in a discussion of the busing issue. Each group comprised four participants. Three of the group’s participants in a given group were like-minded. Either those members had all indicated that they were probusing or they had all indicated that they were antibusing. The fourth person assigned to each group was a ringer employed by the experimenters, armed with a number of persuasive arguments against the other group members’ opinion. After the discussion, the participants filled out another questionnaire with a different format. One question asked their opinion on the busing issue.
The original antibusing students shifted their position substantially in a probusing direction. Most of the probusing students were actually converted to an antibusing position. The investigators asked the participants to recall, as best they could, what their original opinions on the busing question had been. But first, the investigators reminded the participants that they were in possession of the original opinion scale and would check the accuracy of the participants’ recall. Participants who had not been asked to participate in a discussion were able to recall their original opinions with high accuracy. But among the members of the discussion groups, the original antibusing participants “recalled” their opinions as having been much more probusing than they actually were. The original probusing participants actually recalled their original opinions as having been, on average, antibusing!
As well as showing massive social influence and near-total failure to recognize it, the Goethals and Reckman study also makes the disconcerting and important point that our attitudes about many things, including some very important ones, are not pulled out of a mental file drawer but rather are constructed on the fly. Just as disconcerting, our beliefs about our past opinions are also often fabricated. I have a friend who told me in 2007 he would vote for any of the Republican candidates over the faddish and untried Obama. When I reminded him of this just before he enthusiastically voted for Obama in 2008, he was angry that I could have concocted such a story. I’m frequently told that a current strongly held opinion of mine conflicts with one I expressed in the past. When that happens, I can find it impossible to reconstruct the person—namely me—who could have expressed that opinion.
Actor-Observer Differences in Assessing the Causes of Behavior
A few years ago, a graduate student who was working with me told me something about himself that I would never have guessed. He had done prison time for murder. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but he had been present when an acquaintance committed the murder, and he was convicted of being an accessory to the crime.
My student told me a remarkable thing about the murderers he met in prison. To a man, they attributed their homicides to the situation they had been in. “So I tell the guy behind the counter to give me everything in the register and instead he reaches under the counter. Of course I had to plug him. I felt bad about it.”
There are obvious self-serving motives behind such attributions. But it’s important to know that people generally think that their own behavior is largely a matter of responding sensibly to the situation they happen to be in—whether that behavior is admirable or abominable. We’re much less likely to recognize the situational factors other people are responding to, and we’re consequently much more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error when judging them—seeing dispositional factors as the main or sole explanation for the behavior.
If you ask a young man why he dates the girl he does, he’s likely to say something like, “She’s a very warm person.” If you ask that same young man why an acquaintance dates the girl he does, he’s likely to say, “Because he needs to have a nonthreatening girlfriend.”14
When you ask people to say whether their behavior, or their best friend’s, usually reflects personality traits or whether their behavior depends primarily on the situation, they’ll tell you that their friend’s behavior is more likely to be consistent across different situations than their own is.15
The main reason for differences in the attributions actors and observers make is that the context is always salient for the actor. I need to know what the important aspects of my situation are in order to behave adaptively (though of course I’m going to miss or ignore many important things). But you don’t have to pay such close attention to the situation that I confront. Instead, what’s most salient to you is my behavior. And it’s an easy jump from a characterization of my behavior (nice or nasty) to a characterization of my personality (kindly or cruel). You often can’t see—or may ignore—important aspects of my situation. So there are few constraints on your inclination to attribute my behavior to my personality.
Culture, Context, and the Fundamental Attribution Error
People who grew up in Western culture tend to have considerable scope and autonomy in their lives. They can often pursue their interests while paying little attention to other people’s concerns. People in many other cultures lead more constrained lives. The freedom of the West begins with the remarkable sense of personal agency of the ancient Greeks. In contrast, the equally ancient and advanced civilization of China placed much more emphasis on harmony with others than on freedom of individual action. In China, effective action always required smooth interaction with others—both superiors and peers. The differences between West and East in degree of independence versus interdependence remain today.
In a book called The Geography of Thought, I proposed that these different social orientations were economic in origin.16 Greek livelihoods were based on relatively solitary occupations such as trading, fishing, and animal husbandry, and on agricultural practices such as kitchen gardens and olive tree plantations. Chinese livelihoods were based on agricultural practices, especially rice cultivation, requiring much more cooperation. Autocracy (often benevolent, sometimes not) was perhaps an efficient way of running a society where every man for himself was not an option.
So it was necessary for Chinese to pay attention to social context in a way that it wasn’t for Greeks. The differences in attention have been demonstrated in a dozen different ways by experiments conducted with the Western inheritors of Greek independence and the Eastern inheritors of Confucian Chinese traditions. One of my favorite experiments, conducted by the social psychologist Takahiko Masuda, asks Japanese and American college students to rate the expression of the central figure in the cartoon below.17
Japanese students rate the central figure as less happy when he’s surrounded by sad figures (or angry figures) than when he’s surrounded by happier figures. The Americans were much less affected by the emotion of the surrounding figures. (The experiment was also carried out with sad or angry figures in the center and with happy, sad, or angry faces in the background, with similar results.)
The attention to context carries through to physical context. To see how deep this difference in attention to context goes, take a look at the scene below, which is a still from a twenty-second color video of an underwater scene. Masuda and I have shown such videos to scores of people and then asked them to tell us what they saw.18
Americans are likely to start off by saying, “I saw three big fish swimming off to the left; they had pink fins and white bellies and vertical stripes on their backs.” Japanese are much more likely to say, “I saw what looked like a stream, the water was green, there were rocks and shells on the bottom, there were three big fish swimming off to the left.” Only after the context was established did the Japanese zoom in on what are the most salient objects for Americans. Altogether, the Japanese reported seeing 60 percent more background objects than did the Americans. That’s what you’d expect, given that East Asians pay more attention to context than do Westerners.
The differential attention to context results in Easterners’ having a preference for situational explanations for behavior that Westerners are more likely to explain in dispositional terms. A study by Korean social psychologists found that if you tell someone that a particular person behaved as did most people in the person’s situation, Koreans infer, quite reasonably, that something about the situation was the primary factor motivating the person’s behavior.19 But Americans will explain the person’s behavior in terms of the person’s dispositions—ignoring the fact that others behaved in the same way in the situation.
Easterners are susceptible to the fundamental attribution error, just not as susceptible as Westerners. For example, in a study similar to the one by Jones and Harris demonstrating that people tend to assume an essay writer holds the opinion required by the assignment, Incheol Choi and his coworkers showed that Korean participants made the same mistake as Americans.20 But when participants were put through the same kind of coercive situation as those whose essays they were about to read, the Koreans got the point and didn’t assume that the writer’s real attitudes corresponded to their essay position. Americans, however, learned nothing from having the situation made so obvious and assumed they had learned something about the essay writer’s opinion.
Easterners tend to have a holistic perspective on the world.21 They see objects (including people) in their contexts, they’re inclined to attribute behavior to situational factors, and they attend closely to relationships between people and between objects. Westerners have a more analytic perspective. They attend to the object, notice its attributes, categorize the object on the basis of those attributes, and think about the object in terms of the rules that they assume apply to objects of that particular category.
Both perspectives have their place. I have no doubt that the analytic perspective has played a role in Western dominance in science. Science is at base a matter of categorization and discovering the rules that apply to the categories. And in fact, the Greeks invented science at a time when Chinese civilization, though making great progress in mathematics and many other fields, had no real tradition of science in the modern sense.
But the holistic perspective saves Easterners from some serious errors in understanding why other people behave as they do. Moreover, the reluctance to make dispositional attributions contributes to Eastern belief in the capacity of people to change. As we’ll see in Chapter 14 on dialectical reasoning, the assumption of malleability of human behavior helps Asians to be correct about important questions that the Western perspective gets wrong.
Summing Up
One of the main lessons of these first two chapters is that there is vastly more going on in our heads than we realize. The implications of this research for everyday life are profound.
Pay more attention to context. This will improve the odds that you’ll correctly identify situational factors that are influencing your behavior and that of others. In particular, attention to context increases the likelihood that you’ll recognize social influences that may be operating. Reflection may not show you much about the social influences on your own thinking or behavior. But if you can see what social influences might be doing to others, it’s a safe bet you might be susceptible as well.
Realize that situational factors usually influence your behavior and that of others more than they seem to, whereas dispositional factors are usually less influential than they seem. Don’t assume that a given person’s behavior in one or two situations is necessarily predictive of future behavior. And don’t assume that the person has a trait or belief or preference that has produced the behavior.
Realize that other people think their behavior is more responsive to situational factors than you’re inclined to think—and they’re more likely to be right than you are. They almost certainly know their current situation—and their relevant personal history—better than you do.
Recognize that people can change. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, Westerners have believed that the world is largely static and that objects, including people, behave as they do because of their unalterable dispositions. East Asians have always thought that change is the only constant. Change the environment and you change the person. Later chapters argue that a belief in mutability is generally both more correct and more useful than a belief in stasis.
These injunctions can become part of the mental equipment you use to understand the world. Each application of the principles makes further applications more likely because you’ll be able to see their utility and because the range of situations in which they can be applied will consequently increase.