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Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 1st Edition

by Lee Jussim (Author)

5.0 7 ratings

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Social Perception and Social Reality contests the received wisdom in the field of social psychology that suggests that social perception and judgment are generally flawed, biased, and powerfully self-fulfilling. Jussim reviews a wealth of real world, survey, and experimental data collected over the last century to show that in fact, social psychological research consistently demonstrates that biases and self-fulfilling prophecies are generally weak, fragile, and fleeting. Furthermore, research in the social sciences has shown stereotypes to be accurate.

Jussim overturns the received wisdom concerning social perception in several ways. He critically reviews studies that are highly cited darlings of the bias conclusion and shows how these studies demonstrate far more accuracy than bias, or are not replicable in subsequent research. Studies of equal or higher quality, which have been replicated consistently, are shown to demonstrate high accuracy, low bias, or both. The book is peppered with discussions suggesting that theoretical and political blinders have led to an odd state of affairs in which the flawed or misinterpreted bias studies receive a great deal of attention, while stronger and more replicable accuracy studies receive relatively little attention. In addition, the author presents both personal and real world examples (such as stock market prices, sporting events, and political elections) that routinely undermine heavy-handed emphases on error and bias, but are generally indicative of high levels of rationality and accuracy. He fully embraces scientific data, even when that data yields unpopular conclusions or contests prevailing conventions or the received wisdom in psychology, in other social sciences, and in broader society.

ISBN-10

0195366603
ISBN-13

978-0195366600
Edition

1st
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

April 6, 2012
Language

English
Dimensions

1.8 x 6.4 x 9.3 inches
Print length

486 pages
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Social psychologists delight in showing us our biases and how these lead us astray in perceiving individuals and groups. Lee Jussim shows that in fact our biases are small, and our social perceptions largely accurate. He does this in the voice of the guy next door, amazed that the kings of social psychology are wearing no clothes." -- Clark McCauley, author of Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder and Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us

"Are stereotypes often accurate? It's an empirical question, not a moral one, and Lee Jussim is one of the very few scientists who have the guts to treat it as such. This important book will change how you think about stereotypes. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to study prejudice, or reduce it." -- Jonathan Haidt, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia

"Lee Jussim is the pre-eminent neo-realist in social psychology today. In this book, he makes a compelling and impassioned case for the idea that ordinary people get many of their social perceptions and judgments right, in sharp contrast to the prevalent academic view that they do not. As much as Jussim's work is an apologia for the common man and woman, it is an indictment of the fault-finding research program that dominates the field and the textbooks." -- Joachim I. Krueger, Professor of Psychology, Brown University

"What a terrific book! For many decades, psychological research has lured observers into believing that biased reasoning is both rampant in everyday life and profoundly dangerous. Lee Jussim meticulously dissects that literature and issues a startling corrective to conventional wisdom by documenting many ways in which human psychology has been mischaracterized. The bottom line of his work is an illuminating portrait of human nature and a humbling portrayal of inferences so often based on psychological research findings." -- Jon A. Krosnick, Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology, Stanford University

"This delightful book provides a lively tour through research on error, bias, and accuracy in social judgment. Along the way, it provides valuable lessons in research methodology and the sociology of social psychology, as it develops a carefully documented and nuanced argument that human judgment is more sensible than the research literature often makes it appear." -- David Funder, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside

"Lee Jussim poses fundamental and long ignored questions about the relative balance of data-driven versus theory-driven information processing in social judgment. Moreover, he is coming up with answers that just might require rewriting big sections of social psychology textbooks." -- Philip Tetlock, Leonore Annenberg University Professor, Department of Psychology, and The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"This is a dense book, presenting decades of social science data and conclusions and an occasional table for good academic measure. It's a serious book, a serious argument by a serious scholar, and anyone with an interest in the topic (especially those who study or teach the issues raised in the book) should have a copy on a nearby bookshelf. It is also written in a great voice -- a somewhat cranky, fist-raised voice trying to make the reader sees what the author sees, because it's important." -- PsychCENTRAL

"He does review many studies in detail, includes tables summarizing results of the research he covers, and makes a case for his choice of studies not being biased. The book is well
organized and clearly written. Jussim sets out a road map for the arguments he will make
and follows it. He has read the original sources very carefully. His is a book that scholars in
these areas likely will want to read―many to see how their own work is critiqued! Students also could learn a great deal about the importance of attending to the details of classic and current studies from reading this book.." -- Margaret S. Clark and Elizabeth Clark-Polner, PsycCRITIQUES

"This is a very important book. It is an extensive and painstaking refutation of a set of mistaken assumptions that have dominated social science research since the 1950s, and continue to bias the thinking of most professionals in the field. It is a book for specialists [that] systematically dismantles the illusions that helped give rise to today's reflexive suspicion of whites." --American Renaissance

Book Description

research in the social sciences has shown stereotypes to be accurate.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (April 6, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 486 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195366603
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195366600
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.84 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1.8 x 6.4 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,404,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,656 in Psychiatry (Books)
- #5,162 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions

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Samantha

Read this book and make your friends and family read it too

Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2017

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This book changed everything I think about stereotypes and many other topics in social psychology. I will say that it drives me insane now to see how often people repeat lies that I now know aren't true. This book and Dr. Jussim's work need more coverage to correct the record on stereotypes. As he says, stereotypes have been stereotyped.

Stereotypes are just pattern recognition! It's really actually quite evil for our society to have a war on pattern recognition when it's one of the "super powers" of homo sapiens that allow us to achieve such great things on this little planet.

3 people found this helpful

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M. H. Raful

Nothing sexy here.......

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2014

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Looking for the latest review of published research to tell us how we're controlled by processes of which we are unaware and are therefore often wrong? Not in this book. Through pains taking argument and review of the oft sited studies in psychology textbooks, Jussim shows how humans are usually correct in their perceptions and, if not correct usually, learn so that perceptions eventually correspond to reality. One has to wonder how Psychology researchers can claim that people are commonly and easily biased then present their findings as if they and their research escapes what they claim bedevils the rest of humanity.

5 people found this helpful

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Chris C. Martin

Excellent book for advanced social psychology students

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2015

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I have little to add that hasn't already been said by other reviewers. Jussim's book is an excellent review of the literature on perceptual accuracy. I would strongly recommend this to any graduate student or advanced undergraduate student who is interested in conducting social psychological research, even if that research is not necessarily related to person perception or stereotyping. The larger message from this book isthat many of the canonical writers in psychology have chosen to ignore taboo topics, one such topic being stereotype accuracy.

5 people found this helpful

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Putzorro

Thorough and Important

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2013

This key work successfully uses good science as an antidote to the almost religious fervor with which academia discourages stereotyping people, to the point where the social sciences are probably harmed through inaccuracy. The author convincingly lays out a case that our stereotypes tend to be pretty darn accurate-- that we're not perfect, but quite good at picking up social cues, and therefore social differences, particularly when we have a lot of exposure to who we're stereotyping. There's also some useful information about how self-fulfilling prophecy effects (treating people different makes them different) can be overemphasized in size and importance sometimes (he doesn't at all negate their importance- on the contrary- but tries to show the need to place these special cases within a generalized context of remarkable accuracy in our social perception).

Buried in the many stereotype chapters is some evidence-based speculation that part of the reason for our academic reluctance to stereotype may be ideological- that American liberals tend to either miss differences, or purposefully gloss over them, so that they make assumptions that stereotyping is bad or dangerous (or, even if admitted, display a kind of 'yes, but' attitude that may decrease accuracy in judgement). This subject is treated perfunctorily, but the ideology connection fits, given the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of social psychology college professors. For some, that connection glows and throbs; with this book's release, there was a mini-flurry in the conservative blogosphere, with one commenter even worrying about noting their approval publicly: "If he is one of us, then we should think long and hard as to not do the kiss of Judas on him." Indeed, the author has entries about this ideological connection on his blog at Psychology Today, so I missed examples in this work that probably come readily to the author's mind, where poor attitudes- bad stereotypes, really- about stereotype cost us important research and conclusions. Nothing about Shockley- horrors- or any other of probably oodles of cases where useful but upsetting stereotypical findings or assertions were left unused, or were turned against a researcher. Including the painful examples would've made this book far more tangibly useful to lay people and the academy alike. Even controversial examples (Jussim is very good at circumspection, at using "often", "may", "tends", etc., as well as providing alternatives, to make his points inclusive of other possibilities). Conservatives display much less compunction with using stereotypes to judge social situations, as any cursory review of said blogosphere will reveal: indeed, that's probably one of the most clear linguistic/semiotic differentials between the two ideologies. American liberals often view this conservative characteristic as reproachable, even reflective of an underlying prejudice. But there's good implication that our individual comfort with stereotyping may have more to do with our ideology than empirical accuracy. This is quite reasonable it turns out, because ideology has recently been shown (Hatemi, 2012) to be as fundamental as personality to our makeup, with broader, unintuitive implications (correlations) to personality and human behavior than we normally assume our political ideology would have in day-to-day existence.

It's a long book to be making a few rather simple, powerful, important points, but is in spirit an academic treatise containing two thoughtful meta-analyses. It's complete, careful, and circumspect, yet much more readable than most such ambitious efforts. Hopefully, there's a 3-minute video version of conclusions somewhere, along with some great condensations that made it into magazines for regular folks- no non-academic could be imagined to trudge through these nearly 500 pages to get the main point (though the intro or chapter 1 are great standalone). The book deserves some kind of award for a scintillatingly academic, unclear title, and the publisher did a dodo move with their pricing strategy.

No, it didn't go as far as I might've liked in examining the causes of these problems. But 5 stars for a thorough, convincing, well-written treatment of a hugely important, large subset of social psychology.

23 people found this helpful

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Thesois

Great work, widely overlooked!

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2014

It takes a lot of strength to go against the academic mainstream and it is usually rewarded with scorn, hate, or ignorance. This did not stop Lee Jussim.

We all know that "stereotype" is bad and always incorrect. The media tells us so. In case the stereotype is correct it is not because of some intrinsic reason, no, it is because of "self-fulfilling prophecies". You are not dumb because you are born that way, you are dumb because society expects that of you, e.g. because of the existing stereotype that people with lots of muscles are dumb. There is a subconscious urge to follow those unwritten rules of the other people. Stereotypes are bad, get rid of them or you are a bad person.

This is just an example. To make it short, Lee Jusim tells it the other way. He says that stereotypes are overall relatively accurate and that - despite what press and social scientists often claim - stereotypes can be easily altered by experience that disconfirms held beliefs. Self-fulfilling prophecies usually only have a small effect and in a few cases they can be large, but not as a rule.

That does not sound overly spectacular but runs contrary to that what the mainstream media postulates, fed by a generation of social psychologists and scientists. It all runs together with the idea that social engineering is working and a good idea, so you can mold human nature the way you want. Also, everything bad in the world is the result of bad people and their bad ideologies.

Of course, in truth stereotypes are not always bad. They can be useful. Imagine your parents telling you that you should avoid tigers because they are dangerous. If you follow that stereotype you will survive. Do not follow it, you are dead. And cannot procreate. Evolution at work.

The author also spends time to review many famous studies whose results and interpretations have often been taken for granted in the past and have become the foundation of many theories about society. He debunks many of them. This shows that even classic studies are often never properly checked at some point any more, they have become "gospel". One most wonder how often that is the case for many things science and the general population now holds to be true.

Despite using an entertaining writing style and not the typical dry-academic-we-are-smart-approach the book is still long and hard to read because it is filled with statistical jargon. Footnotes often make attempts to explain it but I doubt that someone without proper statistical training will truly get most of the stuff. Definitely not "layman" stuff!

Despite this being a great piece of work it has not penetrated mainstream science and opinion very much. Some of the reasons why this is the way I have stated above. The book is out by now for two years and there are hardly any reviews.

What I suggest to Mr Jussim now is that he should write a shorter, more pop-science version of this book so he can get more exposure. It is an important topic. A must read for all social scientists out there.

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