Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias

“…number of studies demonstrating strong situational influences on the tendency to engage in immoral behaviour, such asMilgram’s studies on obedience (Milgram, 1963), Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973), or Darley and Latané’s studies on bystander intervention…”

“…between empirical and definitional propositions can be further illustrated by the common reaction to studies demonstrating a strong impact of situational factors on moral behaviour (e.g., Darley & Batson, 1973; Darley & Latané, 1968; Haney et al., 1973; Latané & Darley, 1968; Milgram, 1963).”

“Driving the match between the division of labor and gender beliefs is an important principle of human judgment, known as correspondent inference, or the belief that others' external behavior corresponds with their internal characteristics (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert, 1998).”

“Gawronski (2004) focuses on implicit theories of situational influences.”

“As in other areas of social perception and inference, people are more likely to infer a correspondence between distinctive people’s behaviour and invariant underlying personality attributes or ‘‘essences’’ (e.g., Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Haslam, Bastian, & Bissett, 2004).”

“People have a fundamental tendency to attribute others’ behaviors to stable traits rather than to unstable contextual influences (Gawronski 2004); therefore, consumers may attribute product wrongdoings to stable traits of humanized brands and consider them responsible.”

“This example demonstrates not only that the processes underlying correspondent dispositional inferences are much more complex and sophisticated than it is implied by the widespread assumption that people underestimate the role of situational factors (see Gawronski, 2004).”

“A fundamental tenet of this theory is that gender differences derive from the gendered division of labor within societies, which observers then attribute to intrinsic variations between men and women (Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert, 1998).”

“Research on the correspondence bias (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones, 1990) indicates that perceivers tend to draw correspondent dispositional inferences based on the behavior of others, even when situational factors are genuinely responsible for the behavior (Kunda, 2000).”

“Heider’s road map led researchers to jump pell-mell into ambitious programs of research on dispositional inference (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1979).”

“Even a cursory glance at past research on the link between causal attribution and dispositional inference reveals a troubled past (Gawronski, 2003b; Hamilton, 1998; Krull, 2001; Sabini et al., 2001; Solomon, 1978).”

“When judging another human, people tend to assume that an un‐ derlying stable disposition (e.g., values, personality traits) drives that person's behavior (Gawronski, 2004).”

“The attribution of characteristics to an agent or system relates to the correspondence bias, which refers to the human tendency to explain behaviors in terms of internal dispositions, traits, and motives, and to underestimate the influence of external situation factors (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995). The in…”

“Although insufficient discounting of situational pressures undoubtedly occurs (e.g., Bierbrauer, 1979), we note that this tendency is far from inevitable (for relevant reviews, see Gawronski, 2004; Hastie, in press; Hilton, 2007; McClure, 1998).”

“Even though people often do make correspondent inferences, the evidence that people actually systematically or generally underestimate the power of situations is weak and inconsistent (Gawronski, 2004;Malle, 2006).”

“An abundanceof researchhas examined theCB, and some underlying mechanisms have been identified (Gawronski, 2004).”

“Correspondent inference from behaviors to traits then underlies gender stereotypes (for the correspondent inference principle, see Gawronski, 2003, 2004; Gilbert, 1998).”

“When assessing and forming judgements of an individual's behavior we tend to overlook contextual information and attribute behavior to internal dispositions (Gawronski, 2004; Masuda & Kitayama, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995).”

“prone to interpret behavior as the product of a person’s character traits, rather than their situation, a phenomenon known as the ‘correspondence bias’ or ‘fundamental attribution error’ (Gawronski 2004; Gilbert et al. 1995; Jones and Harris 1967; Ross 1977).”

“Our expanded account therefore implies that other explanations for the prominence of trait-focused biases – ones that involve how andwhen alternate explanations are integrated (Krull & Erickson, 1995a; Trope &Gaunt, 2000) –maymore frequently account for this phenomenon (Gawronski, 2004).”

“…on correspondence bias has proposed several different processes underlying the tendency to make correspondent inferences (Gilbert and Malone 1995, Gawronski 2004): lack of awareness (i.e., observers may not be aware of the situational influences on the observed behavior), unrealistic…”

“…in this vein is that we tend to overattribute the causes of behavior to underlying traits or dispositions rather than situational factors—a phenomenon known as the ‘correspondence bias’ or the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (Gawronski 2004; Gilbert et al. 1995; Jones and Harris 1967; Ross 1977).”

“…to infer that a behavior or outcome is due to a corresponding characteristic of the person (rather than historical or situational constraints) is known as the fundamental attribution error (e.g., Jones, 1979; Ross, 1977) or the correspondence bias (e.g., Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995).”

“…ignoring the salience of diffuse characteristics, social situs, cultural legacies, and institutional constraints that confound assessments, such as that evidenced by Mitchell and Wood (1980), Mitchell and Kalb (1981), and Gawronski (2004). expectations are not accurate (Russell and Fiske, 2008).”

“Approaches in the tradition of attribution theory that do address lay causal theories often look at them only with respect to the person-situation distinction (Hansen, 1980; Ybarra, 2002; Gawronski, 2004).”

“Several competing theories have been put forward to explain why people often discount situational information (see Gawronski, 2004; Sabini et al., 2001, for reviews), some of which emphasizing a single factor, and others proposing a dual process.”

“…that undoing the tendency to over-attribute negative dispositional inferences towards a target is particularly difficult when one expects to see immoral or antisocial behaviour (Gawronski, 2004; Reeder, Kumar, Hesson-McInnis, and Trafimow, 2002; for a review see: Skowronski, Carlston, 1989).”

“However, recently the situational factors have been increasingly recognized as a factor in perceptions of correspondence bias (Gawronski 2004).”

“Most relevant to the present purposes, there is evidence that people engage in such reasoning automatically (Gilbert, 1989). For example, in the domain of impression formation, people tend to see traits in behaviors, that is, they interpret peoples’ behaviors in terms of causally relevant traits without having to walk…”

“Some experiments, however, suggest that perceivers commit the so-called fundamental attribution error even when they consider the impact of situational factors (e.g., Trope & Gaunt, 1999; see Gawronski, 2003a, 2003b for a discussion).”

“This interpretation would be consistent with research on the correspondence bias (for a review, see Gawronski, 2004) and spontaneous trait inference (for a review, see McCarthy & Skowronski, 2014), which suggests that people draw strong inferences about underlying dispositions based on relatively…”

“They tend instead to attribute the negative behavior to internal causes, that is, to the other person’s personality [8], a phenomenon referred to as the fundamental attribution error [9].”

“As discussed by Gawronski (2004), the correspondence bias may arise from a number of different processes involving how people apply causal theories about the role of situation on behavior (S-Theory).”

“…attribution error – that is the attitude to underestimate situational influences on human behaviour, giving more weight to internal dynamics (Gawronski, 2004); self-serving bias, which consists of claiming responsibility for success while attributing failure to situational dynamics…”

“Ein prominentes Beispiel hierfür ist der fundamentale Attributionsfehler (Gawronski 2004), bei dem Kommunikation und Handeln des Gegenübers ohne Rücksicht auf situationsund sozialisierungsbedingte Faktoren interpretiert werden.”

“actor’s behavior yet nonetheless make dispositional inferences due to how they apply situational-causal theories in correcting their dispositional attributions (see Gawronski, 2004, for a review). This means that people may regard situational influences as irrelevant when they believe that the behavior is diagnostic o…”

“However, these respective accounts and proposed causes have not been without their critics (see Gawronski, 2004; Sabini et al., 2001).”

“…on theory-based bias correction Research has produced findings consistent with theory-based correction in diverse domains including attribution (Gawronski, 2004), courtroom judgment (Fleming et al., 1999;Wegener, Kerr, Fleming, & Petty, 2000), impression formation (Lambert, Khan, Lickel, &…”

“, the tendency to believe that people€s actions reƒect who they are [8].”

“Importantly, identification is considered unintentional and effortless while the actual attribution involves an effortful recomputation of the encoded information (Gawronski, 2004; Trope, 1986).”

“…products and influence of automatic processes through increased motivation to be accurate or unbiased (Monteith et al 2002; Kunda & Spencer 2003), consciousness of accountability (Lerner et al 1998), and careful and reflective thought in general (Wegner & Bargh 1998; Hogarth 2001; Gawronski 2004).”

“This general phenomenon is known as the correspondence bias (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995).”

“A variety of theoretical factors are apparently involved in correspondence bias (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Ross, 1977).”

“For reviews, see Gilbert and Malone (1995) and Gawronski (2004).”

“More generally, decades of research have demonstrated that people tend to attribute behavior to dispositional rather than situational factors (e.g. Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Ross, 1977), even if they are aware that situational influences are present (e.g. Gawronski, 2004).”

“…is inconsistent with the joint implication of Propositions 2 and 3, Proposition 2 is inconsistent with the joint implication Propositions 1 and 2, and Proposition 3 is inconsistent with the joint implication of Propositions 1 and 2 (for a similar example on moral attribution, see Gawronski, 2004).”

“Subjects have high ‘negative capability,’ that is, they are not motivated, by the desire to explain, to reach an obvious explanation too quickly or easily (Fletcher, 1995, pp. 73–79; Gawronski, 2004)”

“…when attempting to make sense of a person’s behavior, the characteristics of the person are typically more “salient” than their situation, resulting in an automatic attribution to the former, and an insufficient situational correction (Gilbert, 1989; Gilbert and Malone, 1995; Gawronski, 2004).”

“This is a cognitive bias, commonly known in social psychology as attributional bias that includes a correspondence bias (Gawronski 2004) or a fundamental attribution error (Gifford and Nilsson 2014).”

“The correspondence bias is often only reduced by information providing a situational explanation for the behaviour (Gawronski, 2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Klein et al., 2018).”

“When attributing credit and blame, people tend to overlook situational constraints and ex-ternal factors, focusing instead on internal, dispositional factors (e.g., Gilbert and Malone 1995; Gawronski 2004).”

“(Gawronski, 2004).”