![]() Let’s consider some of the ways that our attributions may go awry. In fact, causal attributions, including those relating to success and failure, are subject to the same types of biases that any other types of social judgments are. ![]() However, although people are often reasonably accurate in their attributions-we could say, perhaps, that they are “good enough” (Fiske, 2003)-they are far from perfect. Because successful navigation of the social world is based on being accurate, we can expect that our attributional skills will be pretty good. ![]() In relation to our preceding discussion of attributions for success and failure, if we can determine why we did poorly on a test, we can try to prepare differently so we do better on the next one. We have seen that person perception is useful in helping us successfully interact with others. Describe victim-blaming attributional biases.Explore group-serving biases in attribution.Outline the self-serving bias in making attributions.Explore the related concept of the fundamental attribution error.Review a variety of common attibutional biases, outlining cultural diversity in these biases where indicated.Actor-observer bias is evident when subjects explain their own reasons for liking a girlfriend versus their impressions of others’ reasons for liking a girlfriend. In contrast, observers tend to provide more dispositional explanations for a friend’s behavior ( Figure). This supports the idea that actors tend to provide few internal explanations but many situational explanations for their own behavior. In contrast, when speculating why a male friend likes his girlfriend, participants were equally likely to give dispositional and external explanations. The participants’ explanations rarely included causes internal to themselves, such as dispositional traits (for example, “I need companionship.”). When asked why participants liked their own girlfriend, participants focused on internal, dispositional qualities of their girlfriends (for example, her pleasant personality). One study on the actor-observer bias investigated reasons male participants gave for why they liked their girlfriend (Nisbett et al., 1973). However as observers, we have less information available therefore, we tend to default to a dispositionist perspective. As actors of behavior, we have more information available to explain our own behavior. The actor-observer bias is the phenomenon of attributing other people’s behavior to internal factors (fundamental attribution error) while attributing our own behavior to situational forces (Jones & Nisbett, 1971 Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973 Choi & Nisbett, 1998). If you came home from school or work angry and yelled at your dog or a loved one, what would your explanation be? You might say you were very tired or feeling unwell and needed quiet time-a situational explanation. When it comes to explaining our own behaviors, however, we have much more information available to us. ![]() Due to this lack of information we have a tendency to assume the behavior is due to a dispositional, or internal, factor. The only information we might have is what is observable. Why do you think we underestimate the influence of the situation on the behaviors of others? One reason is that we often don’t have all the information we need to make a situational explanation for another person’s behavior. So a naïve observer would tend to attribute Greg’s hostile behavior to Greg’s disposition rather than to the true, situational cause. Returning to our earlier example, Greg knew that he lost his job, but an observer would not know. ![]()
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