Leonard S. Newman Quotes

Clearly, it is difficult for an observer to disentangle all the reciprocal influ­ences that people and situations have on each other. Perhaps more surpris­ing, though, is just how poorly people appreciate how their own behavior can shape their social contexts. Social actors do not always appreciate or acknowl­edge the extent to which they affect situations - including how they affect the
other people in those situations - even when their influence would seem to be obvious.

[P]eople cannot be influenced by ideas to which they are not exposed.

The social nature of anti-Semitic beliefs is substantiated by the fact that dur­ing the late nineteenth century, most Germans had little, if any, contact with Jews. Jews made up only about 1% of the total German population (Goldhagen, 1996). Because of the general anti-Semitic social representation associated with Volkstum, many Jews had left Germany for safer havens elsewhere. Thus, most of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Jews was based on social consensus, not actual experience. As Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory argues, social reality becomes paramount when physical reality provides few, if any, cues upon which one can base an opinion.

[S]ituations do not only interact with dispositional factors to affect behavior, they
also shape and change those dispositions.

Thus, social repre­sentations are believed because they are shared, not because they are inher­ently valid outside of our social reality.

[R]esearch on perceiver-induced constraint reveals that people do not always account for situational constraints on behavior, even when they themselves have constructed the situation. Thus, perpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justifica­tion for both their past and their future victimization, even though the per­petrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.