In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.Kelley, H.H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Attributions are the judgments and assumptions people make about why others behave a certain way. However, these judgments may not always reflect the true situation. Instead of being completely objective, people often make errors in perception that lead to skewed interpretations of social situations.Nisbett, R.E. & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Attribution biases are present in everyday life. For example, when a driver cuts someone off, the person who has been cut off is often more likely to attribute blame to the reckless driver's inherent personality traits (e.g., "That driver is rude and incompetent") rather than situational circumstances (e.g., "That driver may have been late to work and was not paying attention").
Additionally, there are many different types of attribution biases, such as the ultimate attribution error, fundamental attribution error, actor-observer bias, and hostile attribution bias. Each of these biases describes a specific tendency that people exhibit when reasoning about the cause of different behaviors.
This field of study helps to understand how people make sense of their own and others' actions. It also shows us how our preconceptions and mental shortcuts can impact our decision-making. Researchers have delved deeper into these biases and explored how they influence emotions and actions.Jones, E.. & Nisbett, R.E. (1971). The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behaviors. New York: General Learning Press.
History
Early influences
Attribution theory Research on attribution biases is founded in attribution theory, which was proposed to explain why and how people create meaning about others' and their own behavior. This theory focuses on identifying how an observer uses information in his/her social environment in order to create a causal explanation for events. Attribution theory also provides explanations for why different people can interpret the same event in different ways and what factors contribute to attribution biases.
Psychologist Fritz Heider first discussed attributions in his 1958 book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Heider made several contributions that laid the foundation for further research on attribution theory and attribution biases. He noted that people tend to make distinctions between behaviors that are caused by personal disposition versus environmental or situational conditions. He also predicted that people are more likely to explain others' behavior in terms of dispositional factors (i.e., caused by a given person's personality), while ignoring the surrounding situational demands.
Correspondent inference theory Building on Heider's early work, other psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s extended work on attributions by offering additional related theories. In 1965, social psychologists Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis proposed an explanation for patterns of attribution termed correspondent inference theory. A correspondent inference assumes that a person's behavior reflects a stable disposition or personality characteristic instead of a situational factor. They explained that certain conditions make us more likely to make a correspondent inference about someone's behavior:
Intention: People are more likely to make a correspondent inference when they interpret someone's behavior as intentional, rather than unintentional. Social desirability: People are more likely to make a correspondent inference when an actor's behavior is socially undesirable than when it is conventional. Effects of behavior: People are more likely to make a correspondent, or dispositional, inference when someone else's actions yield outcomes that are rare or not yielded by other actions.
Covariation model Soon after Jones and Davis first proposed their correspondent inference theory, Harold Kelley, a social psychologist famous for his work on interdependence theory as well as attribution theory, proposed a covariation model in 1973 to explain the way people make attributions. This model helped to explain how people choose to attribute a behavior to an internal disposition versus an environmental factor. Kelley used the term 'covariation' to convey that when making attributions, people have access to information from many observations, across different situations, and at many time points; therefore, people can observe the way a behavior varies under these different conditions and draw conclusions based on that context. He proposed three factors that influence the way individuals explain behavior: Consensus: The extent to which other people behave in the same way. There is high consensus when most people behave consistent with a given action/actor. Low consensus is when not many people behave in this way. Consistency: The extent to which a person usually behaves in a given way. There is high consistency when a person almost always behaves in a specific way. Low consistency is when a person almost never behaves like this. Distinctiveness: The extent to which an actor's behavior in one situation is different from his/her behavior in other situations. There is high distinctiveness when an actor does not behave this way in most situations. Low distinctiveness is when an actor usually behaves in a particular way in most situations.
Kelley proposed that people are more likely to make dispositional attributions when consensus is low (most other people do not behave in the same way), consistency is high (a person behaves this way across most situations), and distinctiveness is low (a person's behavior is not unique to this situation). Alternatively, situational attributions are more likely reached when consensus is high, consistency is low, and distinctiveness is high. His research helped to reveal the specific mechanisms underlying the process of making attributions.
Later development As early researchers explored the way people make causal attributions, they also recognized that attributions do not necessarily reflect reality and can be colored by a person's own perspective. Certain conditions can prompt people to exhibit attribution bias, or draw inaccurate conclusions about the cause of a given behavior or outcome. In his work on attribution theory, Fritz Heider noted that in ambiguous situations, people make attributions based on their own wants and needs, which are therefore often skewed. He also explained that this tendency was rooted in a need to maintain a positive self-concept, later termed the self-serving bias.
Kelley's covariation model also led to the acknowledgment of attribution biases. The model explained the conditions under which people will make informed dispositional versus situational attributions. But, it assumed that people had access to such information (i.e., the consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness of a person's behavior). When one does not have access to such information, like when they interact with a stranger, it will result in a tendency to take cognitive shortcuts, resulting in different types of attribution biases, such as the actor-observer bias.
Cognitive explanation Although psychologists agreed that people are prone to these cognitive biases, there existed disagreement concerning the cause of such biases. On one hand, supporters of a "cognitive model" argued that biases were a product of human information processing constraints. One major proponent of this view was Yale psychologist Michael Storms, who proposed this cognitive explanation following his 1973 study of social perception. In his experiment, participants viewed a conversation between two individuals, dubbed Actor One and Actor Two. Some participants viewed the conversation while facing Actor One, such that they were unable to see the front of Actor Two, while other participants viewed the conversation while facing Actor Two, obstructed from the front of Actor One.
Following the conversation, participants were asked to make attributions about the conversationalists. Storms found that participants ascribed more causal influence to the person they were looking at. Thus, participants made different attributions about people depending on the information they had access to. Storms used these results to bolster his theory of cognitively-driven attribution biases; because people have no access to the world except through their own eyes, they are inevitably constrained and consequently prone to biases. Similarly, social psychologist Anthony Greenwald described humans as possessing a totalitarian ego, meaning that people view the world through their own personal selves. Therefore, different people may interpret the world differently and in turn reach different conclusions.
Motivational explanation Some researchers criticized the view that attributional biases are a sole product of information processing constraints, arguing that humans do not passively interpret their world and make attributions; rather, they are active and goal-driven beings. Building on this criticism, research began to focus on the role of motives in driving attribution biases. Researchers such as Ziva Kunda drew attention to the motivated aspects of attributions and attribution biases. Kunda in particular argued that certain biases only appear when people are presented with motivational pressures; therefore, they cannot be exclusively explained by an objective cognitive process. More specifically, people are more likely to construct biased social judgments when they are motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion, so long as they can justify this conclusion.
Current theory Early researchers explained attribution biases as cognitively driven and a product of information processing errors. In the early 1980s, studies demonstrated that there may also be a motivational component to attribution biases, such that their own desires and emotions affect how one interprets social information. Current research continues to explore the validity of both of these explanations by examining the function of specific types of attribution biases and their behavioral correlates through a variety of methods (e.g., research with children or using brain imaging techniques).
Recent research on attribution biases has focused on identifying specific types of these biases and their effect on people's behavior. Additionally, some psychologists have taken an applied approach and demonstrated how these biases can be understood in real-world contexts (e.g., the workplace or school). Researchers have also used the theoretical framework of attributions and attribution biases in order to modify the way people interpret social information. For example, studies have implemented attributional retraining to help students have more positive perceptions of their own academic abilities (see below for more details).
Mental health