Jones, Edward Ellsworth 1926-1993

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The American social psychologist Edward Ellsworth Jones earned his AB (1949) and PhD (1953) from Harvard University, both under the direction of Jerome Bruner. He held professorial appointments at Duke University from 1953 to 1977, and was the Stuart Professor of Psychology at Princeton University from 1977 until his untimely death in 1993.

Social psychologists had been interested in the accuracy of interpersonal judgments from the field’s inception, but in the 1950s seminal figures such as Solomon Asch and Fritz Heider sparked a new interest in understanding the cognitive processes by which such judgments were made. Heider in particular suggested that ordinary people think of behavior as a product of an actor’s enduring dispositions and the situation within which that behavior unfolds, and that a small set of inferential rules allows them to determine to which of these variables an actor’s behavior should be attributed on any occasion.

Jones offered social psychology its first formal model of these attributional rules (Jones and Davis 1965). His correspondent inference theory, along with some like-minded theories (e.g., those outlined in Bem 1967, Kelley 1967, and Schachter and Singer 1962), created a sea change in social psychology, and by the early 1970s attribution theory had replaced cognitive dissonance theory as the field’s premiere theoretical engine. (A full history of attribution theory can be found in Gilbert 1998).

One prediction of correspondent inference theory was that rational observers should not infer dispositions from actions that are performed under extreme duress. But in his experimental work, Jones found that observers do, in fact, infer dispositions under these circumstances (Jones and Harris 1967), and much of his research in the following decades was devoted to exploring the causes and consequences of this “correspondence bias,” or “fundamental attribution error.” His discovery and analysis of this important and robust phenomenon set the stage for the explosion of research in social psychology on biases in human inference that took place in the 1980s.

Having established that observers tend to make a particular kind of mistake when drawing inferences about others, Jones suggested that observers make precisely the opposite mistake when drawing inferences about themselves (Jones and Nisbett 1971). He argued that people tend to think of their own actions as having been controlled by situational forces, but tend to think of others– actions as expressions of the other’s enduring beliefs, desires, and propensities. His analysis of this “actor-observer effect” implicated perceptual and cognitive factors rather than emotional or motivational factors as the primary sources of what was often a self-serving pattern of inferences, and in so doing, it pioneered a new style of explanation in social psychology.

Jones also argued that if people use attributional rules to draw inferences about others, then they can use these same rules to manipulate the inferences that others draw about them. For example, ingratiation is a tactic by which actors attempt to make observers like them, and Jones’s early analysis of this phenomenon (Jones 1964) laid the groundwork for his later, more general work on strategic self-presentation (Jones and Pittman 1982). His work on self-handicapping (Berglas and Jones 1978) showed that people sometimes use these tactics to deceive themselves. He summarized much of his thinking on these and other issues in his final book, Interpersonal Perception (1990).

Jones won virtually all the major awards his field could offer, including the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1977. He was an influential and productive social psychologist who combined a deep insight into human affairs with an unflagging commitment to clear theorizing and experimental investigation. In a half-century of careful and inspiring work, he built a significant part of the foundation on which modern social psychology rests.

SEE ALSO Attribution; Ingratiation; Self-Presentation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Berglas, Steven, and Edward E. Jones. 1978. Drug Choice as a Self-handicapping Strategy in Response to Noncontingent Success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (4): 405–417.

Jones, Edward E. 1964. Ingratiation. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Jones, Edward E. 1990. Interpersonal Perception. New York: W. H. Freeman.

Jones, Edward E., and Keith E. Davis. 1965. From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in Person Perception. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 2, ed. Leonard Berkowitz, 219–266. New York: Academic Press.

Jones, Edward E., and Victor A. Harris. 1967. The Attribution of Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3: 1–24.

Jones, Edward E., and Richard E. Nisbett. 1971. The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior. In Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. Edward E. Jones, David E. Kanouse, Harold H. Kelley, et al., 77–94. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

Jones, Edward E., and Thane S. Pittman. 1982. Toward a General Theory of Strategic Self-presentation. In Psychological Perspectives on the Self, Vol. 1, ed. Jerry Suls, 231–260. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

SECONDARY WORKS

Bem, Daryl J. 1967. Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena. Psychological Review 74: 183–200.

Gilbert, Daniel T. 1998. Ordinary Personalogy. In Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th ed., Vol. 2, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey, 89–150. New York: McGraw Hill.

Kelley, Harold H. 1967. Attribution Theory in Social Psychology. In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 15, ed. David Levine, 192–238. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Schachter, Stanley, and Jerome Singer. 1962. Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State. Psychological Review 69: 379–399.

Daniel Gilbert