10 Facts About Lee Ross

Lee David Ross was a Canadian-American professor.

Lee Ross held the title of the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and was an influential social psychologist who studied attributional biases, shortcomings in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper.

Lee Ross was known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media.

Lee Ross's interests included ongoing societal problems, in particular protracted inter-group conflicts, the individual and collective rationalization of evil, and the psychological processes that make it difficult to confront societal challenges.

Lee Ross went beyond the laboratory to involve himself in conflict resolution and public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other areas of the world.

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Lee Ross earned his B A degree in psychology at the University of Toronto in 1965 and his Ph.

Lee Ross first came into prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "fundamental attribution error" to describe the finding that people are predisposed towards attributing another person's behavior to individual characteristics and attitudes, even when it is relatively clear that the person's behavior was a result of situational demands .

Author of over 100 journal articles and book chapters, Lee Ross, co-authored two influential books with Richard Nisbett: Human Inference, which deals with the tasks, strategies, and shortcomings of the intuitive psychologist and The Person and the Situation .

Lee Ross was survived by his wife Judith Ross, and their four adult children.

Lee Ross was interested in – and has influenced – many fields of psychology, including attitude formation and change, social cognition, judgment and decision, influence, intergroup relations and political psychology.