Richard E. Nisbett
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Richard Nisbett is a distinguished professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in culture, social class and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Perhaps his most influential publication is Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes (with T. D. Wilson, 1977, Psychological Review, 84, 231-259), one of the most often cited psychology articles published in the seventies. This article was the first comprehensive and compelling demonstration that a variety of mental processes responsible for encoding (interpretations, judgments), preferences, and even emotions are not accessible to conscious awareness. In their review of a large body of empirical evidence, Nisbett and Wilson permanently undermined the basic assumptions of the previous decade of popular research on so-called attribution processes, by demonstrating that introspective reports can provide only an account of "what people think about how they think" but not "how they really think."
Nisbett's most recent book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... And Why (Free Press; 2003) contends that "human cognition is not everywhere the same," that Asians and Westerners "have maintained very different systems of thought for thousands of years," and that these differences are scientifically measurable.
He also developed the Actor-observer bias with Edward E. Jones.
[edit] Awards
- Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Research in Social Psychology, awarded by the American Psychological Association, 1982.
- Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association, 1991.
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1992.
- Distinguished Senior Scientist Award, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, 1995
- Wei Lun Visiting Professor of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995.
- William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievements, American Psychological Society, 1996.
- Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 2002
