Lee Ross

Lee David Ross (1942 to 2021) was a Canadian-American social psychologist who spent his career at Stanford University, where he held a named professorship in the humanities and sciences. He studied the ways ordinary judgment goes wrong, including attributional biases and the shortcomings of decision making, and the barriers that keep opposing parties from resolving conflict, often working with his longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross is best known for identifying and explaining the fundamental attribution error, and for demonstrating other judgment effects that became standard textbook topics, among them the false consensus effect, the hostile media effect and naive realism. He took his doctorate at Columbia University under Stanley Schachter, co-wrote Human Inference and The Person and the Situation with Richard Nisbett, and applied his research to peace processes in the Middle East and Northern Ireland.