E. Nisbett and Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
The quiz game experiment is described in: “Lee D. Ross, Teresa M. Amabile, and Julia L. Steinmetz, “Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social Perception Process,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1977), vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 485–494.
Page 161.
The birth order myth is brilliantly dissected in Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 365.
Page 162.
Walter Mischel, “Continuity and Change in Personality,” American Psychologist (1969), vol. 24, pp. 1012–1017.
Page 163.
John Darley and Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973), vol. 27, pp. 100–119.
Page 168.
Myra Friedman, “My Neighbor Bernie Goetz,” New York, February 18, 1985, pp. 35–41.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POWER OF CONTEXT (PART TWO)
Page 176.
George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven,” Psychological Review (March 1956), vol. 63, no. 2.
C. J. Buys and K. L. Larsen, “Human Sympathy Groups,” Psychology Reports (1979), vol. 45, pp. 547–553.
Page 177.
S. L. Washburn and R. Moore, Ape into Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
Dunbar’s theories have been described in a number of places. The best academic summary is probably: R. I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469–493.
He has also written a marvelous work of popular science: Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Page 187.
Daniel Wegner, “Transactive Memory in Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1991), vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 923–929.
Another good discussion of the issue is: Daniel Wegner, “Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,” in Brian Mullen and George Goethals (eds.), Theories of Group Behavior (New York: Springer Verlag, 1987), pp. 200–201.
CHAPTER SIX: CASE STUDY
Page 196.
Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross, “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” Rural Sociology (1943), vol. 8, pp. 15–24.
The study is nicely described (along with other work on diffusion theory) in Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1995).
Page 197.
Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 9–14.
Page 201.
Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), pp. 135–158.
Page 204.
Thomas Valente, Robert K. Foreman, and Benjamin Junge, “Satellite Exchange in the Baltimore Needle Exchange Program,” Public Health Reports, in press.
CHAPTER SEVEN: CASE STUDY
Page 216.
The story of Sima is beautifully told by the anthropologist Donald H. Rubinstein in several papers, among them: “Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia,” Contemporary Pacific (Spring 1995), vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 21–53.
Donald H. Rubinstein, “Epidemic Suicide Among Micronesian Adolescents,” Social Science and Medicine (1983), vol. 17, p. 664.
Page 220.
W. Kip Viscusi, Smoking: Making the Risky Decision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 61–78.
Page 221.
These statistics on the teen smoking rise come from a number of sources, and they differ according to how “new smokers” are measured. According to a Centers for Disease Control study released in October of 1998, for example, the number of American youths—people under the age of 18—taking up smoking as a daily habit increased from 708,000 in 1988 to 1.2 million in 1996, an increase of 73 percent. The rate at which teens became smokers also increased. In 1996, 77 out of every 1,000 nonsmoking teens picked up the habit. In 1988, the rate was 51 per 1,000. The highest rate ever recorded was 67 per 1,000 in 1977, and the lowest was 44 per 1,000 in 1983. (“New teen smokers up 73 percent”: Associated Press, October 9, 1998.) It is also the case that smoking among college students—a slightly older cohort—is also on the rise. In this study by the Harvard School of Public Health—published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, November 18, 1998—the statistic used was percentage of college students who had smoked at least one cigarette in the past 30 days. In 1993, the number was 22.3 percent. By 1997, it had increased to 28.5 percent.
Page 222.
David Phillips’s first paper on suicide rates after news stories of celebrity suicides was: D. P. Phillips, “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review (1974), vol. 39, pp. 340–354. A good summary of that paper—and the statistic about Marilyn Monroe—can be found at the beginning of his paper on traffic accidents, David P. Phillips, “Suicide, Motor Vehicle Fatalities, and the Mass Media: Evidence toward a Theory of Suggestion,” American Journal of Sociology