About 100 years ago, Lewin (Reference Lewin1931) urged psychologists to move from Aristotelian to Galileian thinking. He argued that scholars should stop assuming that behavior emanates solely from a person’s traits and mental states and recognize the power of situational forces. He firmly believed that social contexts guide desires and beliefs as much as the gravitational pull of the sun influences the Earth’s orbit. If he were alive today, Lewin would love the Institutional Stance and how it offers a representational system for processing social relations to complement the dominant Mentalistic Stance. He might be dismayed, however, that Jara-Ettinger and Dunham largely overlooked the work of his intellectual progeny – the social psychologists – when formulating their ideas.

The argument for the Institutional Stance is mostly built from developmental psychology and ethology observations. The framework that emerges convincingly asserts that people are capable of deriving behavioral expectations from social roles. The points about role-filler independence and how perceivers might switch from an Institutional Stance to a Mentalistic Stance when individuals defy normative behaviors for their roles mesh well with social psychological perspectives on impression formation (e.g., Brewer, Reference Brewer, Srull and Wyer1988; Fiske & Neuberg, Reference Fiske, Neuberg and Zanna1990). There is a lot for social psychologists to laud. That said, we suspect that perceivers neglect to use the Institutional Stance more frequently than Jara-Ettinger and Dunham’s reasoning would dictate. We derive this prediction from classic social psychology research on causal attribution.

A troubling reality emerged for the situationists of the 1960s and 1970s. Although studies were showing the power of the situation (e.g., Asch, Reference Asch and Guetzkow1951; Milgram, Reference Milgram1963), perceivers seemed to overestimate the impact of person factors and underestimate that of situational factors when explaining psychological and behavioral responses (Gilbert & Malone, Reference Gilbert and Malone1995; Ross, Reference Ross and Berkowitz1977). These research participants were making the same mistake that irked Lewin about his scholarly contemporaries and that Jara-Ettinger and Dunham argue is still being made by researchers hyper focused on the Mentalistic Stance. Ross (Reference Ross and Berkowitz1977) famously labeled this phenomenon the fundamental attribution error.

A lot of the evidence for the fundamental attribution error came from studies that put people in social roles designed to constrain their behavior and then documented how observers made dispositional inferences anyway. Here, we highlight a handful of prominent examples. Jones and Harris (Reference Jones and Harris1967) found that people assumed that an essay reflected a writer’s true attitudes even when they were told that essay position was determined by a coin flip. Ross, Amabile, and Steinmeitz (Reference Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz1977) randomly assigned participants to either the role of questioner or contestant in a quiz game. Observers consistently rated the questioner as more intelligent than the contestant because they could answer more questions even though they were aware that the questioner chose the questions. Bierbrauer (Reference Bierbrauer1979) re-enacted Milgram’s study about obedience to authority and found that observers failed to recognize the situational forces operating upon the teacher delivering the shocks unless they were given considerable time to reflect on what had transpired. Guided by studies like these, social role theory (Eagly, Reference Eagly1987) pioneered the idea that people’s tendency for neglecting social role constraints has contributed to stereotypes, such as men are better leaders than women. In all of these examples, it appears that participants eagerly take a Mentalistic Stance and neglect to use the Institutional Stance to the degree warranted by their information processing task.

Bierbrauer’s findings indicate that neglect of the situation might occur automatically, and deliberate reasoning can result in more appreciation of situational influences. Gilbert’s three-stage model formalized this notion by arguing that observers first categorize the behavior of others, then characterize the actor in trait terms, and finally correct their initial inference with information about situational constraints if cognitive resources are available (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, Reference Gilbert, Pelham and Krull1988). According to Gilbert and colleagues, categorization and characterization occur automatically, consistent with Winter and Uleman’s (Reference Winter and Uleman1984) observations about spontaneous trait inferences, but the correction stage that considers situational explanations is a deliberate process. From this vantage, the Mentalistic Stance might be dominant because it can be accessed automatically when causal attributions need to be made, whereas it takes an extra step for the valuable social relation information tracked by the Institutional Stance to be incorporated into these judgments.

The last several decades of social psychology indicate that the interplay of the Mentalistic Stance and Institutional Stance might be culturally dependent. The moderating effect of culture is considered by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham, and they reference social psychological work by Gelfand, Nishii, and Raver (Reference Gelfand, Nishii and Raver2017) to make this point. Pertinent to attribution, the fundamental attribution error seems less prevalent in people from East Asian cultures compared to those from the Western ones that filled the participant pools of the foundational attribution studies (e.g., Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, Reference Choi, Nisbett and Norenzayan1999; Morris & Peng, Reference Morris and Peng1994). Other studies suggest that East Asian individuals process situational information more automatically than Westerners (Knowles et al., Reference Knowles, Morris, Chiu and Hong2001; Lee, Hallahan, & Herzog, Reference Lee, Hallahan and Herzog1996). The reasoning is that East Asian cultures prioritize understanding context and interdependence, whereas Western cultures emphasize the actor independent of the surrounding context (Nisbett et al., Reference Nisbett, Peng, Choi and Norenzayan2001). Thus, it is sensible to predict that the Institutional Stance is used more automatically by people reared in cultures that encourage interdependent construals.

We hope that our commentary highlights the value of the social psychology literature for unlocking theoretical insight about the Institutional Stance that might not otherwise be apparent. Jara-Ettinger and Dunham, for instance, state as self-evident that observers will infer a person’s liking for olive oil differently when cues in the environment suggest that the olive oil holder is a customer versus a grocer stocking the shelf (Figure 3 in the target article). Social psychology suggests that this might not occur. It could depend on whether automatic or deliberate processes are engaged. It could depend on the cultural orientation of the observer. More broadly, we encourage scholars of various disciplines studying social behavior to mine the social psychology literature for inspiration. We totally understand apprehension due to replication concerns (Nelson, Simmons, & Simonsohn, Reference Nelson, Simmons and Simonsohn2018; Spellman, Reference Spellman2015). However, within the muck, there are a lot of insightful gems if you dig beneath the surface.