Attribution biases in social psychology occur when people evaluate others based on incomplete evidence. This leads to overemphasizing dispositional explanations of behavior over situational ones. Avoiding bias can be difficult, but giving others the benefit of the doubt, investigating circumstances, and considering one’s own behavior can help. Eliminating bias is unlikely, but minimizing its effects is possible through reflective thinking.
Attribution biases in social psychology are a class of cognitive errors triggered when people evaluate the dispositions or qualities of others based on incomplete evidence. For example, in a famous 1967 study, participants observed two groups of people reading essays aloud: one reading essays pro-Fidel Castro, others anti-Castro.
Although observers were told that readers were randomly assigned to groups, watching them read the essays caused them to attribute more likelihood that those who read pro-Castro essays were actually pro-Castro and those who they read the anti-Castro essays were in fact anti-Castro. This is an example of the so-called fundamental attribution error, in which people overemphasize dispositional (personality-based) explanations of behavior over situational explanations.
Attribution biases are ubiquitous in psychology, and one famous researcher has even called them the foundation of modern social psychology. Attribution bias leads us to underestimate the importance of inanimate and situational factors over animate and human factors. For example, we might talk to a person from another country who says she only ventures out once a week for outdoor recreation and assume that this means she is someone who enjoys being indoors. However, we may not know that they live in a cold place where it is cold outside most of the season. The consistent human tendency to attribute qualities to dispositional explanations is not only intuitively obvious: it is also experimentally measurable, and the effect has been reproduced in hundreds of different experiments subjected to numerous possible manipulations.
Another example of attribution bias might be a situation where we observe someone kicking a soda machine and we assume it is an angry person. But maybe they just had a bad day, only to waste their money at this soda machine, and under similar circumstances, we’d do the same thing ourselves. This application of different standards to self and others, or an observer and an actor, fall into the category of egocentric biases and observer/actor differences, respectively.
Avoiding attribution bias can be difficult. An imbalance strategy is simply giving other people the benefit of the doubt. Another would be to investigate the background behind the circumstances of a situation, to clarify whether a dispositional explanation is indeed the most plausible. Still another would be to ask how one would behave in a similar situation. Eliminating attributional bias seems completely impossible, as it is likely to be built into human nature. However, through reflective thinking, it seems possible to minimize its effects.
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