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- People constantly search for the causes of events,
and their attributions are important for their behavior.
People have chronically different explanatory
styles. Some people have a pessimistic style, attributing
good outcomes to external, unstable, and local
causes and bad outcomes to internal, stable, and
global causes. This style is associated with poor
health, poor performance, and depression.
- Some attributions are made after witnessing a single
instance of behavior, and to make an attribution
based on a single observation we make use of the
discounting and augmentation principles. If situational
constraints could plausibly have caused an
observed behavior, we discount the role of the person's
dispositions. If there were strong forces that
would typically inhibit the behavior, we augment
its implications, and assume that the actor's dispositions
were particularly powerful.
- In the multiple-observation case, we have much
more information about the person, the situation,
and other people's behavior. When we have made
multiple observations of a behavior, we can use the
covariation principle to analyze that behavior. When
we know that a person engages in a given behavior
across many situations, and that other people tend
not to engage in the behavior, we tend to attribute
the behavior to the person. When we know that the
person only engages in the behavior in a particular
situation, and that most people in that situation also
engage in the behavior, we tend to attribute the
behavior to the situation.
- Counterfactual thoughts can powerfully affect attribution.
We often perform mental simulations, adding
or subtracting elements about the person or the situation
and using these simulations to guide our
attributed outcomes. Joy or pain in response to an
event is amplified when it is easy to see how things
might have turned out differently.
- Our attributions are not always fully rational. We
sometimes attribute events to causes that flatter us
beyond what the evidence calls for—revealing self-serving
attributions.
- The fundamental attribution error (also known as the
correspondence bias) is the tendency to attribute
behavior to real or imagined dispositions of the person
and to neglect influential aspects of the situation
confronting the person. Even when it ought to
be obvious that the situation is a powerful influence
on behavior, we often attribute behavior to presumed
traits, abilities, and motivations.
- One of the reasons we make such erroneous attributions
is due to the just world hypothesis. We like to
think that people get what they deserve and that
bad outcomes are produced by bad or incompetent
people.
- Another reason for the fundamental attribution
error is that people and their behavior tend to be
more salient than situations.
- A final reason for the fundamental attribution error
is that attribution appears to be a two-step process.
People are initially and automatically characterized
in terms consistent with their behavior, and this initial
characterization is only later adjusted to take
account of the impact of prevailing situational
forces.
- There are actor-observer differences in attributions. In
general, actors tend to attribute their behavior much
more to situations than do observers. This is partly
due to the fact that actors can usually see the situations
they confront better than observers can.
- There are marked cultural differences in susceptibility
to the fundamental attribution error. Interdependent
peoples are less likely to make the error
than independent peoples, in part because their tendency
to pay attention to context encourages them
to look to the situation confronting the actor. For
bicultural people, it is possible to prime one culture
or the other and get very different causal
attributions.
- Much of the time we are concerned with more than
whether to attribute behavior to the situation versus
the person, and are interested in discerning the
intentions and reasons that underlie a person's
behavior.
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