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Key Words neighborhood, setting, social ecology, risk
* Abstract This chapter identifies "context minimization error" as the tendency to ignore the impact of enduring neighborhood and community contexts on human behavior. The error has adverse consequences for understanding psychological processes and efforts at social change. The chapter describes a series of theoretical models of how neighborhoods and community settings are associated with various aspects of human welfare and reviews evidence of associations of contexts with health, psychological distress, risky behaviors, psychological attitudes, and child development. It suggests that many psychological processes may play out differently in different contexts and that contextual factors interact with sociocultural characteristics of individuals in predicting outcomes. People, in turn, can shape community contexts. A more sophisticated understanding of the effects of contexts depends on more sophisticated approaches to assessing them.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The central thesis of this chapter is that psychologists should pay more attention to the community contexts of human behavior. Conditions in neighborhoods and community settings are associated with residents' mental and physical health, opportunities, satisfactions, and commitments. They are associated with children's academic achievement and developmental outcomes, from behavior problems to teenage childbearing. Contexts also moderate other individual or family processes, suggesting that many psychological theories may not hold across the range of environments in which ordinary Americans live their lives. For example, optimal types of parenting may depend on levels of neighborhood risk. Further, as we show below, contextual effects may masquerade as effects of individual characteristics, leading to flawed inferences.
The tendency of observers to underestimate the effects of immediate social situations and overestimate the effects of individual dispositions is sufficiently pervasive that Ross (1977) labeled it the fundamental attribution error. There is a parallel, less readily identified error of ignoring the effects of more enduring contexts, or where situational and personal characteristics are confounded, of attributing all shared variance to individuals. We dub this "undeniable proclivity to attribute causal influences" on individual outcomes "to individual differences in personality, motivation or intellect" (Earls & Buka 2000) as "context minimization error." This error leads to impoverished theory. It also means that social programs and policies that fail to recognize the complex interplay of individuals and social contexts may fail to resolve the social problems...