KEY THEME

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

KEY QUESTIONS

On your way to class, you notice two men preparing to move a large file cabinet. But when they lift it, the top two file drawers fly out, smashing to the floor. As the men struggle to replace the drawers, you think to yourself, “They are completely clueless.”

Why did you arrive at that conclusion? After all, it’s completely possible that the workers are not dimwits. Maybe the lock on the file drawers slipped or broke when they tipped the cabinet.

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.

If your explanation for the file cabinet incident was that the workers were a couple of clumsy doofuses, 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).

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. He dropped the file cabinet because he’s a dimwit; you dropped the file cabinet because there wasn’t a good way to get a solid grip on it. 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 battered women and rape survivors 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).

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.

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 12.1.