On overestimating the importance of personality when explaining behaviour and underestimating context

It is natural — reflexive even — to see the causes of human action in the character and disposition of those doing the acting. But as George Eliot noted at the end of Middlemarch, “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”

Excerpt from: The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights by Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross