ANDI am working with a colleague, for which we agreed to a work meeting. We agreed on the place and time in advance, and that day I arrived on time and waited. 15 minutes go by, 25, and my colleague doesn’t show up until 30 minutes later. I don’t say anything, but he bothers me, clearly he is an inconsiderate person who doesn’t care about other people’s time, a sociopath who mocks the very foundations of coexistence in society and who deserves to be executed as quickly as possible. . At the next meeting, I was late this time. It’s not my fault, there was traffic congestion downtown and the bus was delayed.
Once you get over the excitement of this account of my everyday misadventures (my life is glamorous like that), consider yourself welcome to another article. The anecdote is not gratuitous but is intended to illustrate a very common phenomenon regarding the way in which we explain the actions of others.
For human beings it is usual and useful to assign Causes to the actions of others – being able to explain an action allows us, for example, to predict future actions. This assigning causes to an action is what is called attribution in psychology (Malle, 2011), and it will be today’s topic.
The pit of the olive specifically concerns the because of an action: why was my colleague late, for example?
Generally speaking, let’s say that there are two forms of attribution to explain another person’s actions: we can attribute it to predispositionsmotivations, personality traits, or the situation or context in which the action occurs. That is, forces can be postulated as the cause of an action. internal to the person (My colleague arrived late because he is unpunctual and doesn’t mind arriving on time.), or forces external (He was late because traffic is difficult and the meeting is half an hour after he finishes work.), or a combination of both, and the direction the interpretation takes has consequences. Regarding my colleague’s lateness, my reaction will be very different if I explain it as laziness or tardiness (internal cause) or as a result of traffic and schedule (external cause).
The fundamental attribution error
It would be expected that in explaining any observed behavior of another person, the explanation would be determined by the predominant forces at play: if there are strong external factors we will explain the action by those factors; If there are internal factors, we will explain it by internal factors; If we cannot identify the factors or they are ambiguous, we will refrain from explaining the action. Logical… right?
It turns out that things are a little more complicated: in general we tend to overestimate the impact of dispositional or motivational factors on behavior, underestimating the impact of situational factors (Ross, 1977). This is what in psychology is called “Fundamental Attribution Error” (FAE), or “correspondence bias” (although both terms are used to describe similar phenomena, they are not entirely the same, see Gawronski, 2004).
Put more simply, when explaining a person’s actions we tend to attribute them to some predisposition, personality or internal factor, underestimating or omitting the impact of the person’s actions. context Of action. The person who pushed me on the bus did it because he is carelesswhoever blocked my way with the car did it because it is aggressivewhoever is with 11 items in the quick box of 10 does so because he is inconsiderate. When explaining the actions of others our first impulse is to attribute them to internal factors, even if quite obvious external factors are present. The EAF has been replicated in dozens of investigations, and is a fundamental stone particularly for social psychology.
The fundamental attribution error in specific situations
Since by now you must be mentally begging us to cite more articles and research, let’s walk through some of the typical situations in which we have encountered this phenomenon, as they appear in the scientific literature.
1) For the first example, let’s say you see a person trembling while another points a gun at his head. Would you attribute your nerves to a nervous personality or to the gun?
The answer may seem obvious, but in slightly less extreme situations, the answers tend to be more biased. For example, Snyder and Frankel (1976) conducted research in which they asked several subjects to observe an interview, with audio muted, in which the interviewee was seen acting somewhat anxiously. One group of subjects was told that the topic of the interview was sexual and another group was told that the interview had been about politics in general, and in both cases they were asked to evaluate the interviewees on various aspects. Given that an interview about sexual topics tends to generate a little more anxiety (we are talking about 76 in the USA, remember), it was expected that the subjects, observing the interview, would attribute the anxiety to the context of the interview (uncomfortable questions), rather than to an anxious disposition of the interviewee. In practice, however, the subjects explained the nervousness of the interviewees to a “high predisposition to anxiety,” even knowing that the topic of the interview was anxiety-inducing. To return to our previous example, even when seeing the gun pointed at the head, people interpreted that the tremors were due to an anxious personality.
2) Now suppose, for a second example, that a professor has asked you to write an essay in favor of the death penalty. After writing it, they show it to an acquaintance and tell them “the teacher ordered me to write this.” Would this person be expected to infer that you are indeed in favor of the death penalty or would he/she consider it as a task, imposed by the teacher, that probably does not reflect his/her intentions?
Again, research yields unexpected results. In much more recent research, Bauman and Skitka (2010) asked 380 participants to read a short essay. They were told that the essay had been written by a student as part of a practice exercise for a discussion group and that the topic had been determined randomly by flipping a coin.
Some participants then read a version of the essay in which the student wrote in favor of affirmative action policies (these are measures to ensure the inclusion of minorities in workplaces), while others read a version of the essay that was against of such affirmative policies. All participants were then asked to determine what the attitude of the student regarding the topic of the essay. 53% of the participants attributed to the student the attitude that corresponded to the essay: pro-affirmative attitudes when the essay had been affirmative, anti-affirmative attitudes when the essay had been anti-affirmative. What is notable is that the participants knew that the topic had been assigned to the student at random, and yet they attributed an attitude corresponding to that of the essay. Only 27% of participants expressed that there was no way to know the student’s attitude from the essay topic (for very similar seminal research see Jones & Harris, 1967).
3) We could give another example using the works of Milgram. As you know, in the 1960s Stanley Milgram conducted some research in which the participant (a volunteer) had to follow the orders of a researcher and give electric shocks to a person who was tied to a chair in the laboratory when he responded in kind. incorrect way to some questions. The shocks were simulated and the person in the chair worked with the researchers, faking the reaction to the electric shocks, since the objective of the research was to determine the extent to which the participant would administer electric shocks to the supposed research subject. Chillingly, almost all of the participants administered electric shocks to the subject even when he pretended to be experiencing a lot of pain. The point of Milgram’s research is that under certain situational conditions (an authority figure, for example), beyond his convictions.
Now, several investigations have been carried out in which participants witnessed a recording or a reconstruction of Milgram’s experiments, receiving information about the experiment and explicitly knowing that the situation generates obedience. In these investigations, people tended to attribute immoral traits to the participants in Milgram’s experiment, even knowing that those participants were coerced by the context and that most people tend to follow orders in those situations (Bierbrauer, 1979; Safer, 1980). Safer chose a title for his publication that well describes what he observed: “Attributing Evil to the person, not the situation”, since even though the situation was clearly perverse, people blamed the personality of the participants. The EAF is here in attributing immoral characteristics to someone who is clearly acting coerced by a situation.
4) Now, the EAF is not limited to the attribution of “negative” personal characteristics, but also positive ones. A fourth way in which EAF manifests itself is the tendency to see the advantages of a position of power as derived from personal abilities rather than from the situation. Suppose that in a work team I am randomly assigned the role of leader or coordinator, so I am in charge of making the team’s decisions. Does this make me a more capable person than the rest of my teammates? Not in theory, since I have been given that role (and the advantages that come with it), randomly, but the literature on the EAF suggests something different.
In everyday life our social roles give us certain advantages: when I am a teacher I have some advantages and disadvantages that I do not have as a student, for example (in things like deciding when to end or extend the class, having to stay until the end of the class, etc.). Well, the literature on the EAF has indicated that people tend to see those advantages and disadvantages, which are children of the situation, as if they were generated by personal abilities and traits (Jouffre & Croizet, 2016).
The fundamental attribution error outside of research
They’re probably bored to death by now. Don’t complain, it could be worse, I could make you see, for example. Unlike that movie, however, these investigations do have some substance and point to a trend that could be dangerous.
Taken together, this research indicates that we tend to “read” attitudes or personality into a person’s actions, overlooking the effect of context on those actions. We are almost blind to the influence that situational factors have. If this bias only…