Mark Lepper | Stanford University (original) (raw)
Papers by Mark Lepper
American Psychologist, 2021
Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a... more Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a knack for seeing the broad and deep psychological processes underlying individual episodes of rich, everyday behavior. Ross then crafted experiments that explored those processes in a way that was engaging and unusually memorable. After completing his PhD degree in 1969, Ross joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he taught for 52 years. Ross first achieved prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "the fundamental attribution error" to describe the tendency to attribute behavior primarily to a person's traits, attitudes, and other characteristics even when it should be clear that the person's behavior was largely the result of situational influences or constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011
Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological... more Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological barrier to conflict resolution. Study 1 used a role-play scenario in which a student negotiated with a professor for greater rewards for work on a collaborative project. A self-affirmation manipulation, in which participants focused on an important personal value, significantly reduced their tendency to derogate a concession offered by the professor relative to one that had not been offered. Study 2 replicated this effect and showed that the phenomenon did not depend on the self-affirmed participant's experience of a heightened sense of deservingness or a tendency to make positive attributions about the professor. Distraction and explicit mood enhancement were also ruled out as mediators of the self-affirmation effect, which appears to stem from motivational rather than explicit cognitive processes.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999
Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to ... more Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In 2 studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent selves than for Asian interdependent selves. In addition, Anglo American children showed less intrinsic motivation when choices were made for them by others than when they made their own choices, whether the others were authority figures or peers. In contrast, Asian American children proved most intrinsically motivated when choices were made for them by trusted authority figures or peers. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.-Thomas Jefferson Americans cherish choice. "Liberty," after all, is enshrined, subordinate only to life itself in our Declaration of Independence. Even today, the provision and the rhetorical appeal of choice permeates American life-from the plethora of options available
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1977
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986
The perseverance of erroneous self-assessments was examined among high school students. Subjects ... more The perseverance of erroneous self-assessments was examined among high school students. Subjects were first exposed to either highly effective or thoroughly useless filmed instruction, leading, respectively, to their consequent success or failure. No-discounting subjects received no assistance in recognizing the relative superiority or inferiority of their instruction. Discounting subjects, by contrast, were subsequently shown the opposite instructional film, highlighting the obvious differences in instructional quality. Subsequent measures revealed that all subjects recognized the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their instruction, although this contrast was clearer for discounting subjects. Nevertheless, both discounting and no-discounting subjects continued to draw unwarranted inferences-in line with their initial outcomes-about their personal capacities, immediately afterward. Dissociated and disguised measures of academic preferences and perceptions completed weeks later produced even more dramatic results: The continuing impact of initial outcomes was generally greater for discounting than no-discounting subjects.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1985
After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both... more After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated these programs, and those responsible for them, as being biased against their side. This hostile media phenomenon appears to involve the operation of two separate mechanisms. First, partisans evaluated the fairness of the media's sample of facts and arguments differently: in light of their own divergent views about the objective merits of each side's case and their corresponding views about the nature of unbiased coverage. Second, partisans reported different perceptions and recollections about the program content itself; that is, each group reported more negative references to their side than positive ones, and each predicted that the coverage would sway nonpartisans in a hostile direction. Within both partisan groups, furthermore, greater knowledge of the crisis was associated with stronger perceptions of media bias. Charges of media bias, we concluded, may reflect more than self-serving attempts to secure preferential treatment. They may result from the operation of basic cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, mechanisms that should prove relevant to perceptions of fairness or objectivity in a wide range of mediation and negotiation contexts. Social perceivers, it has long been recognized, are far from passive, impartial recorders of the events that unfold around them. Everyday we have occasion to marvel at the capacity of political, social, or even scientific partisans to find strong support for their views in data that more neutral and dispassionate observers find confusing, contradictory, and utterly indecisive. An impressive body of evidence documents the extent to which evaluations of social evidence can be distorted by preconceived theories and beliefs (
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979
People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical... more People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "discontinuing" evidence to critical evaluation, and as a result to draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. To test these assumptions and predictions, subjects supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to two purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented. The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate. (Bacon, 1620/1960) Often, more often than we care to admit, our attitudes on important social issues reflect only our preconceptions, vague impressions, and untested assumptions. We respond to social policies concerning compensatory education, water fluoridation, or energy conser-This research was
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984
It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure-first noted by Franci... more It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure-first noted by Francis Bacon-to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite. therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domainsbiased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demandladen alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1996
This experiment examined the effects on the learning process of 3 complementary strategies-contex... more This experiment examined the effects on the learning process of 3 complementary strategies-contextualization, personalization, and provision of choices-for enhancing students' intrinsic motivation. Elementary school children in 1 control and 4 experimental conditions worked with educational computer activities designed to teach arithmetical order-ofoperations rules. In the control condition, this material was presented abstractly. In the experimental conditions, identical material was presented in meaningful and appealing learning contexts, in either generic or individually personalized form. Half of the students in each group were also offered choices concerning instructionally incidental aspects of the learning contexts; the remainder were not. Contextualization, personalization, and choice all produced dramatic increases, not only in students' motivation but also in their depth of engagement in learning, the amount they learned in a fixed time period, and their perceived competence and levels of aspiration. Learning, every parent knows, can be fun. From the dogged dedication of the infant learning to walk and the voraciousness of the toddler first learning the names of objects to the insatiable curiosity of the preschooler wanting to know the "why" behind everything, astute observers from Plato to Piaget have remarked upon young children's intrinsic love for learning. There are, it appears, no preschool children with "motivational deficits." Yet only a few years later, after these same children have entered school, their motivation to learn has somehow become decidedly more problematic. Many of them seem to find the instructional activities in schools to be dull and
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975
In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly compreh... more In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose discrepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dissonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for aspiring researchers who want to understand what social psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middlerange” level of theorizing they find most comfortable. Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most provocative debates that had taken place within the field and a clear-eyed account of the waxing and waning of specific research programs (which he characterized as “bandwagons” a...
Child Development, Apr 1, 1982
Psp, 1976
Reiss and Sushinsky criticize several of our studies investigating the "over-justification&q... more Reiss and Sushinsky criticize several of our studies investigating the "over-justification" hypothesis that extrinsic rewards may undermine intrinsic interest. Our reply focuses on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motiva-tion, proposed alternative explanations for our data, other ...
Psp, 1982
... Mark R. Lepper, Gerald Sagotsky, Janet L. Dafoe, and David Greene Stanford University ... Ger... more ... Mark R. Lepper, Gerald Sagotsky, Janet L. Dafoe, and David Greene Stanford University ... Gerald Sagotsky is currently affiliated with Benton & Bowles in New York; David Greene is currently an educational consultant in Palo Alto, California. ...
Child Develop, 1970
Page 1. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS DETERMINING OBEDIENCE OF FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN TO A... more Page 1. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS DETERMINING OBEDIENCE OF FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN TO ADULT FEMALES ... Experi- mental Analysis of the Factors Determining Obedience of Four-Year-Old Children to Adult Females. ...
American Psychologist, 2021
Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a... more Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a knack for seeing the broad and deep psychological processes underlying individual episodes of rich, everyday behavior. Ross then crafted experiments that explored those processes in a way that was engaging and unusually memorable. After completing his PhD degree in 1969, Ross joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he taught for 52 years. Ross first achieved prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "the fundamental attribution error" to describe the tendency to attribute behavior primarily to a person's traits, attitudes, and other characteristics even when it should be clear that the person's behavior was largely the result of situational influences or constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011
Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological... more Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological barrier to conflict resolution. Study 1 used a role-play scenario in which a student negotiated with a professor for greater rewards for work on a collaborative project. A self-affirmation manipulation, in which participants focused on an important personal value, significantly reduced their tendency to derogate a concession offered by the professor relative to one that had not been offered. Study 2 replicated this effect and showed that the phenomenon did not depend on the self-affirmed participant's experience of a heightened sense of deservingness or a tendency to make positive attributions about the professor. Distraction and explicit mood enhancement were also ruled out as mediators of the self-affirmation effect, which appears to stem from motivational rather than explicit cognitive processes.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999
Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to ... more Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In 2 studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent selves than for Asian interdependent selves. In addition, Anglo American children showed less intrinsic motivation when choices were made for them by others than when they made their own choices, whether the others were authority figures or peers. In contrast, Asian American children proved most intrinsically motivated when choices were made for them by trusted authority figures or peers. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.-Thomas Jefferson Americans cherish choice. "Liberty," after all, is enshrined, subordinate only to life itself in our Declaration of Independence. Even today, the provision and the rhetorical appeal of choice permeates American life-from the plethora of options available
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1977
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986
The perseverance of erroneous self-assessments was examined among high school students. Subjects ... more The perseverance of erroneous self-assessments was examined among high school students. Subjects were first exposed to either highly effective or thoroughly useless filmed instruction, leading, respectively, to their consequent success or failure. No-discounting subjects received no assistance in recognizing the relative superiority or inferiority of their instruction. Discounting subjects, by contrast, were subsequently shown the opposite instructional film, highlighting the obvious differences in instructional quality. Subsequent measures revealed that all subjects recognized the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their instruction, although this contrast was clearer for discounting subjects. Nevertheless, both discounting and no-discounting subjects continued to draw unwarranted inferences-in line with their initial outcomes-about their personal capacities, immediately afterward. Dissociated and disguised measures of academic preferences and perceptions completed weeks later produced even more dramatic results: The continuing impact of initial outcomes was generally greater for discounting than no-discounting subjects.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1985
After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both... more After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated these programs, and those responsible for them, as being biased against their side. This hostile media phenomenon appears to involve the operation of two separate mechanisms. First, partisans evaluated the fairness of the media's sample of facts and arguments differently: in light of their own divergent views about the objective merits of each side's case and their corresponding views about the nature of unbiased coverage. Second, partisans reported different perceptions and recollections about the program content itself; that is, each group reported more negative references to their side than positive ones, and each predicted that the coverage would sway nonpartisans in a hostile direction. Within both partisan groups, furthermore, greater knowledge of the crisis was associated with stronger perceptions of media bias. Charges of media bias, we concluded, may reflect more than self-serving attempts to secure preferential treatment. They may result from the operation of basic cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, mechanisms that should prove relevant to perceptions of fairness or objectivity in a wide range of mediation and negotiation contexts. Social perceivers, it has long been recognized, are far from passive, impartial recorders of the events that unfold around them. Everyday we have occasion to marvel at the capacity of political, social, or even scientific partisans to find strong support for their views in data that more neutral and dispassionate observers find confusing, contradictory, and utterly indecisive. An impressive body of evidence documents the extent to which evaluations of social evidence can be distorted by preconceived theories and beliefs (
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979
People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical... more People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "discontinuing" evidence to critical evaluation, and as a result to draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. To test these assumptions and predictions, subjects supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to two purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented. The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate. (Bacon, 1620/1960) Often, more often than we care to admit, our attitudes on important social issues reflect only our preconceptions, vague impressions, and untested assumptions. We respond to social policies concerning compensatory education, water fluoridation, or energy conser-This research was
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984
It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure-first noted by Franci... more It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure-first noted by Francis Bacon-to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite. therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domainsbiased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demandladen alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1996
This experiment examined the effects on the learning process of 3 complementary strategies-contex... more This experiment examined the effects on the learning process of 3 complementary strategies-contextualization, personalization, and provision of choices-for enhancing students' intrinsic motivation. Elementary school children in 1 control and 4 experimental conditions worked with educational computer activities designed to teach arithmetical order-ofoperations rules. In the control condition, this material was presented abstractly. In the experimental conditions, identical material was presented in meaningful and appealing learning contexts, in either generic or individually personalized form. Half of the students in each group were also offered choices concerning instructionally incidental aspects of the learning contexts; the remainder were not. Contextualization, personalization, and choice all produced dramatic increases, not only in students' motivation but also in their depth of engagement in learning, the amount they learned in a fixed time period, and their perceived competence and levels of aspiration. Learning, every parent knows, can be fun. From the dogged dedication of the infant learning to walk and the voraciousness of the toddler first learning the names of objects to the insatiable curiosity of the preschooler wanting to know the "why" behind everything, astute observers from Plato to Piaget have remarked upon young children's intrinsic love for learning. There are, it appears, no preschool children with "motivational deficits." Yet only a few years later, after these same children have entered school, their motivation to learn has somehow become decidedly more problematic. Many of them seem to find the instructional activities in schools to be dull and
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975
In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly compreh... more In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose discrepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dissonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for aspiring researchers who want to understand what social psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middlerange” level of theorizing they find most comfortable. Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most provocative debates that had taken place within the field and a clear-eyed account of the waxing and waning of specific research programs (which he characterized as “bandwagons” a...
Child Development, Apr 1, 1982
Psp, 1976
Reiss and Sushinsky criticize several of our studies investigating the "over-justification&q... more Reiss and Sushinsky criticize several of our studies investigating the "over-justification" hypothesis that extrinsic rewards may undermine intrinsic interest. Our reply focuses on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motiva-tion, proposed alternative explanations for our data, other ...
Psp, 1982
... Mark R. Lepper, Gerald Sagotsky, Janet L. Dafoe, and David Greene Stanford University ... Ger... more ... Mark R. Lepper, Gerald Sagotsky, Janet L. Dafoe, and David Greene Stanford University ... Gerald Sagotsky is currently affiliated with Benton & Bowles in New York; David Greene is currently an educational consultant in Palo Alto, California. ...
Child Develop, 1970
Page 1. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS DETERMINING OBEDIENCE OF FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN TO A... more Page 1. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS DETERMINING OBEDIENCE OF FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN TO ADULT FEMALES ... Experi- mental Analysis of the Factors Determining Obedience of Four-Year-Old Children to Adult Females. ...