Richard E. Nisbett Quote
Early in the 19th-century, the behaviorist E. L. Thorndike performed a series of experiments that satisfied two generations of American psychologists that abstractions were not importantly involved in learning how to perform skilled tasks. He asked his subjects to perform a particular task for varying amounts of time (e.g., cancelling Os from a sentence, and then switched them to another task; cancelling adverbs from a sentence). He found that transfer of training effects were slight and unstable. Sometimes he found that performance of the first task enhanced the second, sometimes that it made it more difficult, and, often, that it had no effect at all. One would, of course, assume that performance on the second task would be improved if subjects learned something general from performance of the first task. Since they so often failed to show improved training, Thorndike inferred that people don't, in fact, learn much that is general when performing mental tasks. This meant that training was going to be very much a bottom-up affair, consisting of little more than slogging through countless stimulus-response associations. This conclusion has suffused deeply into American psychology, cognitive science, and education. Newell (1980), based on some similar failed efforts to find training effects for reasoning tasks, has asserted that learned problem-solving skills generally are idiosyncratic to the task.
Early in the 19th-century, the behaviorist E. L. Thorndike performed a series of experiments that satisfied two generations of American psychologists that abstractions were not importantly involved in learning how to perform skilled tasks. He asked his subjects to perform a particular task for varying amounts of time (e.g., cancelling Os from a sentence, and then switched them to another task; cancelling adverbs from a sentence). He found that transfer of training effects were slight and unstable. Sometimes he found that performance of the first task enhanced the second, sometimes that it made it more difficult, and, often, that it had no effect at all. One would, of course, assume that performance on the second task would be improved if subjects learned something general from performance of the first task. Since they so often failed to show improved training, Thorndike inferred that people don't, in fact, learn much that is general when performing mental tasks. This meant that training was going to be very much a bottom-up affair, consisting of little more than slogging through countless stimulus-response associations. This conclusion has suffused deeply into American psychology, cognitive science, and education. Newell (1980), based on some similar failed efforts to find training effects for reasoning tasks, has asserted that learned problem-solving skills generally are idiosyncratic to the task.
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About Richard E. Nisbett
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, with over 13,000 citations. This article was the first comprehensive, empirically based argument that a variety of mental processes responsible for preferences, choices, and emotions are inaccessible to conscious awareness. Nisbett and Wilson contended that introspective reports can provide only an account of "what people think about how they think," but not "how they really think." Some cognitive psychologists disputed this claim, with Ericsson and Simon (1980) offering an alternative perspective.
Nisbett's 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.
Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009) argues that environmental factors dominate genetic factors in determining intelligence. The book received extensive favorable attention in the press and from some fellow academics; for example, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Osherson wrote that the book was a "hugely important analysis of the determinants of IQ". On the other hand, more critical reviewers such as Harvard's James J. Lee argued that the book failed to grapple with the strongest evidence for genetic factors in individual and group intelligence differences.
With Edward E. Jones, he named the actor–observer bias, the phenomenon where people acting and people observing use different explanations for why a behavior occurs. This is an important concept in attribution theory, and refers to the tendency to attribute one's own behaviour to situational factors while attributing other people's behaviour to their disposition. Jones and Nisbett's own explanation for this was that our attention is focused on the situation when we are actors, but on the person when we are observers, although other explanations have been advanced for the actor-observer bias.