November 15, 2025

It's Not Just You

The most popular initiatives in education tend to be strategies for "fixing the kids." A focus on the deficits of individual students, rather than a critical analysis of systemic issues, is the common denominator of academic remediation, behavior management programs, and efforts to equip children with more self-regulation, grit, or a "growth mindset." Yet the entire field of social psychology warns us that we err in underestimating the impact of the environments in which people, including students, find themselves. Alas, this message has become muddled because some classic social psych research is widely misunderstood, including Milgram's obedience experiments and Mischel's marshmallow studies. So let's explore what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error -- and consider how the individualistic underpinnings of our education system (and of our culture more generally) prevent us from taking that insight to heart.

RESOURCES:

Lee Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977): 173-220 [https://tinyurl.com/3d9xdjtd]

Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961/1988) [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819561947/the-robbers-cave-experiment/]

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (Harper, 1974/2009) [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/obedience-to-authority-stanley-milgram]

Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment: See prisonexp.org.

Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiments: Alfie Kohn, "S'More Misrepresentation of Research: What Waiting for a Second Marshmallow Doesn't Prove," Education Week, September 10, 2014 [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/smore-misrepresentation-research/]; Walter Mischel, “From Good Intentions to Willpower,” in The Psychology of Action, ed. P. M. Gollwitzer and J. A. Bargh (Guilford, 1996); Mischel et al., “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 204-18.

Alfie Kohn, "How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1997 [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/teach-values/]

Ruth Butler, "What Young People Want to Know When: Effects of Mastery and Ability Goals on Interest in Different Kinds of Social Comparisons," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 934-43.

Nona M. Flynn and Judith L. Rapoport, "Hyperactivity in Open and Traditional Classroom Environments," Journal of Special Education 10 (1976): 285-90; Rolf G. Jacob et al., "Formal and Informal Classroom Settings: Effects on Hyperactivity," Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 6 (1978): 47-59.

 

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ART: Abi Kohn