What are attribution biases and when do they occur?

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What are attribution biases and when do they occur?

Attribution theories such as Kelley's co variation model tended to suggest that laypeople act like psychologists, trying to produce rational explanations for other people's behaviour. In fact, everyday attributions do not always conform to such exacting scientific standards. These traditional accounts can therefore be taken as normative models which describe how people ought to explain behaviour given unlimited time and resources rather than how they actually do explain events under normal circumstances. When judgements deviate systematically from these standards, attribution is said to be biased.

The correspondence bias

"The correspondence bias ... is the tendency to conclude that a person has a disposition that corresponds to his or her behavior even when that behavior is attributable to the situation" (Gilbert, 1995, p. 105). When explaining actions, observers seem to believe that its causes are more likely to be found in the actor's personality or abilities than in the surrounding situational context and generally underestimate the power of external forces.

        The correspondence bias (otherwise known as the fundamental attribution error, Ross, 1977) was first noted when testing Jones and Davis's (1965) normative model of the attribution process: correspondent inference theory. According to this theory, observers should attribute another person's freely chosen behaviour to an underlying intention, and then to the personal disposition that produced that intention. This process is known as correspondent inference because dispositions and intentions are inferred in the actor that corresponds to the nature of the observed action (e.g., aggressive behaviour may be caused by aggressive intentions which arise from an aggressive personality).

        According to correspondent inference theory, there should be no inferences about personal dispositions when strong situational pressures are obviously operating to produce the observed behaviour. Similarly, Kelley's (1967) discounting principle proposes that if a factor is known to be working towards the production of the effect, then other factors should be seen as playing a reduced facilitative causal role. For example, if we are already aware of a powerful situational factor that is influencing behaviour (so that anybody exposed to it would react in a similar way) then we should discount the impact of personal factors and draw no firm conclusions about the actor's underlying dispositions.

Contrary to their predictions, Jones and Harris (1967) found that participants tended to attribute expressed opinions to corresponding personal attitudes even in situations where actors clearly had no choice about what opinion to express. Observers apparently fail to take into account the role of situational pressure in determining behaviour under these circumstances.

In Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz's (1977) famous experimental demonstration of the correspondence bias, participants were randomly assigned to the role of either question master or contestant in a quiz-game situation. The quizmaster's task was to devise ten difficult factual questions based on his or her own general knowledge and deliver this "quiz" to the contestant. Despite the fact that quizmasters were at a situationally determined advantage because they were able to ask questions based on their own idiosyncratic areas of expertise, which contestants were, unlikely to share, observers (as well as contestants themselves) nevertheless consistently rated quizmasters as genuinely higher in general knowledge than contestants. Again, people seemed reluctant to discount personal factors even when there were strong situational constraints on the other person's behaviour, and inappropriately assumed that internal characteristics were the main cause of performance.

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The actor-observer difference

"There is a pervasive tendency for actors to attribute their actions to situational requirements, whereas observers tend to attribute the same actions to stable personal dispositions".

The actor-observer difference (or self-other difference, Watson, 1982) is related to the fundamental attribution error. It suggests that although observers tend to explain other people's behaviour in internal dispositional terms, actors tend to emphasize situational causes when explaining their own behaviour. For example, Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, and Maracek (1973) found that participants tended to use more external explanations when explaining their own choice of course at college than they did when explaining ...

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