Attribution

EXPLAINING BEHAVIOR

KEY THEME

Attribution refers to the process of explaining your own behavior and the behavior of other people.

KEY QUESTIONS

On the first day of class, you sit down and turn to say hi to the classmate next to you. She ignores you and focuses on her phone. You think to yourself, “What a jerk.”

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Why did you arrive at that conclusion? After all, it’s completely possible that your classmate is having a very bad day and just doesn’t feel up to talking or is responding to an urgent text message.

Attribution is the process of inferring the cause of someone’s behavior, including your own. Psychologists also use the word attribution to refer to the explanation you make for a particular behavior. The attributions you make strongly influence your thoughts and feelings about other people.

MYTH SCIENCE

Is it true that you judge yourself more harshly than you judge other people when something goes wrong?

If your explanation for the silent classmate is that she is just an unpleasant, unfriendly person, you demonstrated a common cognitive bias. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to spontaneously attribute the behavior of others to internal, personal characteristics, while ignoring or underestimating the role of external, situational factors (Ross, 1977). Even though it’s entirely possible that situational forces were behind another person’s behavior, we tend to automatically assume that the cause is an internal, personal characteristic (Bauman & Skitka, 2010; Zimbardo, 2007).

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Blaming the Victim Elizabeth Smart is shown here talking about her experiences during captivity. At age 14, Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom and held captive for nine months. She was deprived of food and raped multiple times every day. After she was rescued, many people asked why she hadn’t done more to escape. After all, they pointed out, her captor often brought a veiled Smart out in public. Fighting back against victim blaming, Smart explained that she was terrified by her captor’s threats against her family: “You can never judge a child or a victim of any crime on what they should have done, because you weren’t there and you don’t know” (Serrano, 2013). Why do people often “blame the victim” after crimes, accidents, or other tragedies?
AP Photo/Jim Urquhart

Notice, however, that when it comes to explaining our own behavior, we tend to be biased in the opposite direction, a tendency called the actor–observer bias. Rather than internal, personal attributions, we’re more likely to explain our own behavior using external, situational attributions. She ignored you because she’s not nice; you ignored a classmate because you had to text your roommate to check the stove you think you left on. Some jerk pulled out in front of your car because she’s a reckless, inconsiderate moron; you pulled out in front of her car because an overgrown hedge blocked your view (Hennessy & others, 2005). And so on.

Why the discrepancy in accounting for the behavior of others as compared to our own behavior? Part of the explanation is that we simply have more information about the potential causes of our own behavior than we do about the causes of other people’s behavior. When you observe another driver turn directly into the path of your car, that’s typically the only information you have on which to judge his or her behavior. But when you inadvertently pull in front of another car, you perceive your own behavior in the context of the various situational factors, such as road conditions, that influenced your action. You also know what motivated your behavior and how differently you have behaved in similar situations in the past. Thus, you’re much more aware of the extent to which your behavior has been influenced by situational factors (Jones, 1990).

The fundamental attribution error plays a role in a common explanatory pattern called blaming the victim. The innocent victim of a crime, disaster, or serious illness is blamed for having somehow caused the misfortune or for not having taken steps to prevent it. For example, many people blame the poor for their dire straits, the sick for bringing on their illnesses, and victims of domestic violence or rape for somehow “provoking” their attackers.

The blaming the victim explanatory pattern is reinforced by another common cognitive bias. Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an event has occurred, to overestimate one’s ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome (Roese & Vohs, 2012). In everyday conversations, this is the person who confidently proclaims after the event, “I could have told you that would happen.” In the case of blaming the victim, hindsight bias makes it seem as if the victim should have been able to predict—and prevent—what happened (Goldinger & others, 2003).

Why do people often resort to blaming the victim? People have a strong need to believe that the world is fair—that “we get what we deserve and deserve what we get.” Social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1980) calls this the just-world hypothesis. Blaming the victim reflects the belief that, because the world is just, the victim must have done something to deserve his or her fate (Maes & others, 2012). Collectively, these cognitive biases and explanatory patterns help psychologically insulate us from the uncomfortable thought “It could have just as easily been me” (Alves & Correia, 2008; IJzerman & Van Prooijen, 2008).

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The Self-Serving Bias

USING EXPLANATIONS TO MEET OUR NEEDS

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Explaining Misfortune: The Self-Serving Bias Given the self-serving bias, are these NASCAR drivers–including Dale Earnhardt, Jr., in car #88–likely to explain their accident by listing internal factors such as their own carelessness or recklessness? Or are they more likely to blame external factors, such as another driver’s poor handling of his vehicle or slick conditions on the Daytona International Speedway?
Jamie Squire/Getty Images

If you’ve ever listened to other students react to their grades on an important exam, you’ve seen the self-serving bias in action. When students do well on a test, they tend to congratulate themselves and to attribute their success to how hard they studied, their intelligence, and so forth—all internal attributions. But when a student bombs a test, the external attributions fly left and right: “They were all trick questions!” “I couldn’t concentrate because the guy behind me kept coughing” (Kruger & Gilovich, 2004).

In a wide range of situations, people tend to credit themselves for their success and to blame their failures on external circumstances (Krusemark & others, 2008; Mezulis & others, 2004). Psychologists explain the self-serving bias as resulting from an attempt to save face and protect self-esteem in the face of failure (Kurman, 2010; Kwan & others, 2008). Some evolutionary psychologists argue that the self-serving bias leads people to feel and appear more confident than might be justified in a particular situation (von Hippel & Trivers, 2011). If others then perceive us as more confident, we may have more access to resources that allow us to survive and pass on our genes.

CULTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Explaining Failure and Murder: Culture and Attributional Biases

Although the self-serving bias is common in individualistic cultures such as Australia and the United States, it is far from universal. In many collectivistic cultures, an opposite attributional bias is often demonstrated (Mezulis & others, 2004; Uskul & Kitayama, 2011). Called the self-effacing bias or modesty bias, it involves blaming failure on internal, personal factors, while attributing success to external, situational factors.

For example, compared to American students, Japanese and Chinese students are more likely to attribute academic failure to personal factors, such as lack of effort, instead of situational factors (Dornbusch & others, 1996). Thus, a Japanese student who does poorly on an exam is likely to say, “I didn’t study hard enough.” In contrast, Japanese and Chinese students tend to attribute academic success to situational factors. For example, they might say, “The exam was very easy” or “There was very little competition this year” (Stevenson & others, 1986).

One study asked participants to rate people who were answering questions about their achievements (Chen & Jing, 2012). Collectivistic participants tended to prefer the people who gave modest answers, whereas individualistic participants tended to like people who boasted in their answers.

Cross-cultural differences are also evident with the fundamental attribution error. In general, members of collectivistic cultures are less likely to commit the fundamental attribution error than are members of individualistic cultures (M. Bond & Smith, 1996; Koenig & Dean, 2011). That is, collectivists are more likely to attribute the causes of another person’s behavior to external, situational factors rather than to internal, personal factors—the exact opposite of the attributional bias that is demonstrated in individualistic cultures (Uskul & Kitayama, 2011).

To test this idea in a naturally occurring context, psychologists Michael Morris and Kaiping Peng (1994) compared articles reporting the same mass murders in Chinese-language and English-language newspapers. In one case, the murderer was a Chinese graduate student attending a U.S. university. In the other case, the murderer was a U.S. postal worker. Regardless of whether the murderer was American or Chinese, the news accounts were fundamentally different depending on whether the reporter was American or Chinese.

The American reporters were more likely to explain the killings by making personal, internal attributions. For example, American reporters emphasized the postal worker’s “history of being mentally unstable.” In contrast, the Chinese reporters emphasized situational factors, such as the fact that the postal worker had recently been fired from his job.

Clearly, then, how we account for our successes and failures, as well as how we account for the actions of others, is yet another example of how human behavior is influenced by cultural conditioning.

Haughtiness invites ruin; humility receives benefits.

—Chinese Proverb

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Although common in many societies, the self-serving bias is far from universal, as cross-cultural psychologists have discovered (see the Culture and Human Behavior box). The various attributional biases are summarized in Table 11.1.

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