Edward E. Jones - Biography

Biography

He earned his Ph.D. 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:

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. 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.