Richard E. Nisbett
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Richard Nisbett is Theodore M. Newcomb 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 social cognition, culture, social class and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.
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 changed the way psychologists thought about 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.
With, Edward E. Jones, he named the Actor-observer bias, the phenomenon where people acting and people observing these actors use different information to explain why a behavior occurs.
[edit] Awards
- Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Research in Social Psychology, awarded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 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
