Edward E. Jones
Encyclopedia
Edward Ellsworth Jones (1927–1993), also known as "Ned" Jones, was an influential social psychologist
who worked at Duke University
for most of his career. He moved to Princeton University
's Department of Psychology
in 1977.
in clinical psychology
at Harvard University
.
In the classic text Fundamentals of Social Psychology which he co-wrote with Harold B. Gerard and published in 1967, they explain:
Jones's work is centered on the attribution process, co-developing his theory of correspondent inferences with Keith Davis. Jones noted, "I have a candidate for the most robust and repeatable finding in social psychology: the tendency to see behavior as caused by a stable personal disposition of the actor when it can be just as easily explained as a natural response to more than adequate situational pressures." One of the best-known single papers co-authored with Victor Harris in 1967 tested this theory and led to the development of the fundamental attribution error
. He also developed the Actor-observer bias
with Richard E. Nisbett
.
He focused on the history and the advancement of the field of person perception in order to explore how perceivers and targets interact. One form of interaction that he examined closely resulted in a book on the psychology of ingratiation
. In his book on ingratiation, he utilized the models of Goffman, Homans, Thibaut, and Kelley to arrive at the following working definition:
"Combining these contributions, we may conclude that ingratiation is an illegitimate member of the social exchange family because the ingratiator presents himself as a party to one kind of exchange--with one set of terms and conditions--while in fact he is primarily engaged in another kind."
He further noted the importance of studying ingratiation where he wrote: "A more valid reason for studying ingratiation is that light might be shed on other common social phenomena such as the antecedents of group cohesiveness, the conditions of social influence and conformity, and the significance of social reinforcement in sequences of social interaction." He was also an opponent of behaviorism
.
In 2004, a book of his selected works was published by John Wiley & Sons
, edited by former student Daniel Gilbert.
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
who worked at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
for most of his career. He moved to Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
's Department of Psychology
Princeton University Department of Psychology
The Princeton University Department of Psychology, located in Green Hall, is an academic department of Princeton University on the corner of Washington St. and William St. in Princeton, New Jersey. For over a century, the department has been one of the most notable psychology departments in the...
in 1977.
Biography
He earned his Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in clinical psychology
Clinical psychology
Clinical psychology is an integration of science, theory and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development...
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
In the classic text Fundamentals of Social Psychology which he co-wrote with Harold B. Gerard and published in 1967, they explain:
Our aim has been to write a systematic presentation of social psychology that emphasizes the experimental approach....Social psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology that especially involves the scientific study of the behavior of individuals as a function of social stimuli. This definition seems to say something important and to say it with pedantic precision...By the end of World War II, the way was paved for an outpouring of experimental research involving the manipulation of experimental subjects' temporary social environment and an examination of the effects of this manipulation on attitudes, behavior, and various emotional states. Questions of behavioral causation could now be examined with closer scrutiny than was possible through questionnaires and interviews. The outlines of an empirical, and especially an experimental, social psychology have clearly emerged.
Jones's work is centered on the attribution process, co-developing his theory of correspondent inferences with Keith Davis. Jones noted, "I have a candidate for the most robust and repeatable finding in social psychology: the tendency to see behavior as caused by a stable personal disposition of the actor when it can be just as easily explained as a natural response to more than adequate situational pressures." One of the best-known single papers co-authored with Victor Harris in 1967 tested this theory and led to the development of the fundamental attribution error
Fundamental attribution error
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
. He also developed the Actor-observer bias
Actor-observer bias
The actor-observer asymmetry touches on the fundamental questions of how people gain access to their own and other people's minds and whether those modes of access are distinct....
with Richard E. Nisbett
Richard E. Nisbett
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...
.
He focused on the history and the advancement of the field of person perception in order to explore how perceivers and targets interact. One form of interaction that he examined closely resulted in a book on the psychology of ingratiation
Ingratiation
Ingratiation, a term coined by social psychologist Edward E. Jones, is a social psychological technique in which an individual attempts to become more attractive or likeable to their target. This outcome can be achieved by using several methods such as other-enhancement, opinion conformity, and...
. In his book on ingratiation, he utilized the models of Goffman, Homans, Thibaut, and Kelley to arrive at the following working definition:
"Combining these contributions, we may conclude that ingratiation is an illegitimate member of the social exchange family because the ingratiator presents himself as a party to one kind of exchange--with one set of terms and conditions--while in fact he is primarily engaged in another kind."
He further noted the importance of studying ingratiation where he wrote: "A more valid reason for studying ingratiation is that light might be shed on other common social phenomena such as the antecedents of group cohesiveness, the conditions of social influence and conformity, and the significance of social reinforcement in sequences of social interaction." He was also an opponent of behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
.
In 2004, a book of his selected works was published by John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...
, edited by former student Daniel Gilbert.
Notable contributions
- Work on Fritz HeiderFritz HeiderFritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creation of balance theory and marked the starting point of attribution theory...
's attribution error, termed fundamental attribution errorFundamental attribution errorIn social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
by Lee RossLee RossLee D. Ross is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and an influential social psychologist who has studied attribution theory, attributional biases, decision making and conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper...
, which is also known as "correspondence bias". As Gilbert noted, "As geometry was to architecture, so attribution theories were to person perception. Experiments revealed that people's attributional inferences looked very much like the attributional inferences that a thinking system would generate if it was relying on formal attributional rules such as the calculus of non-common effects, the covariation and discounting principles and so on. But no one knew whether people were actually using those rules, and if they were, certainly no one knew how." - outgroup homogeneity biasOutgroup homogeneity biasThe outgroup homogeneity effect is one's perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members. I.e. "they are alike; we are diverse". The outgroup homogeneity effect, or "relative outgroup homogeniety" has been explicitly contrasted with the "outgroup...
- self-handicappingSelf-handicappingSelf-handicapping is the process by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem. It was first theorized by Edward E...
- self-presentation theory
Former students
- Robin Akert
- Joshua Aronson
- Alaine Brown
- Roy BaumeisterRoy BaumeisterRoy F. Baumeister is Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, and...
- Stephen Berglas
- Joel Cooper
- Keith Davis
- Ken Gergen
- Daniel Gilbert
- George "Al" Goethals
- Linda Ginzel
- Victor Harris
- Reiko Hasuike
- C. Anderson (Andy) JohnsonC. Anderson JohnsonC. Anderson Johnson is currently Professor and Dean of the Claremont Graduate University School of Community and Global Health...
- Patti Linville
- Dan McGillis
- Charles Perdue
- Fred Rhodewalt
- Janet Morgan Riggs
- Judy Schwartz
- Kelly Shaver
- Lloyd Stires
- Dianne Tice
- Carolyn Weisz
- Steve Worchel
- Camille Wortman
Books and articles by and about Edward E. Jones
- Jones, Edward E., and Harold B. Gerard, Fundamentals of Social Psychology, published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1967.
- Jones, Edward E., Interpersonal PerceptionInterpersonal perceptionInterpersonal perception is an area of research in social psychology which examines the beliefs that interacting people have about each other. This area differs from social cognition and person perception by being interpersonal rather than intrapersonal, and thus requiring the interaction of at...
, published by WH Freeman and Co., 1990. - Jones, E.E. & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3, 1–24.
- Jones, E. E., & NisbettRichard E. NisbettRichard 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...
, R. E. 1971. The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior. New York: General Learning Press. - Jones, E.E., McGillis, Daniel, "Correspondence Inferences and the Attribution Cube: A Comparative Reappraisal," in John H. Harvey, William J. Ickes, and Robert F. Kidd, ed., New Directions in Attribution Research, Vol. 1 (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1976), pp. 389–420.
- Jones, E.E., Davis, Keith E., "From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in Person Perception," in Leonard Berkowitz, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1965), p. 225.
- Gilbert, D. T. (1998). Speeding with Ned: A personal view of the correspondence bias. In J. M. Darley & J. Cooper (Eds.), Attribution and social interaction: The legacy of E. E. Jones. Washington, DC: APA Press. PDF.
- Gilbert, D. T. (Ed.). (2004). The Selected Works of Edward E. Jones. ISBN 0-471-19226-0
- Harvey, J., Ickes, W., & Kidd, R., "A conversation with Edward E. Jones and Harold H. Kelley", In J. Harvey, W. Ickes, and R. Kidd (Eds.), New Directions in Attribution Research, Vol. 2 (pp. 371–388). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum., 1978.