To help you examine your own attribution tendencies, we will recreate a classic experiment designed to study the impressions you form of individuals (and the groups to which they belong) on the basis of written descriptions of their behaviors.
We’ll describe brief episodes from the lives of twenty-seven individuals, one at a time. After reading each description, you will rate that person in terms of how much you would like to meet him or her.
The individuals who will be described in this exercise were selected at random from two different groups. In order not to influence your judgments of the individuals, we will not reveal the names of these groups. We will simply refer to the larger group as “Group A†and the smaller group as “Group B.â€
To be fair to these people, it’s very important that you read the entire description of each person before you make a decision about that person.