Blame the Player and the Game

Abstract

How do people assign credit for others’ actions? The Correspondence Bias — a classic bias in social psychology — purports that people are predisposed to attribute behaviors to dispositional, rather than situational, factors. However, recent work suggests that the pattern of data cited as evidence of a bias may be a natural consequence of attribution under uncertainty. Here we devise a novel “Bucket-Toss” task in which we can independently and parametrically manipulate and measure situation and disposition pressures to evaluate whether attribution to dispositions and situations are consistent with probabilistic inference. We find that as the strength of the situation or disposition is varied, attributions to the other (unobserved) cause follow roughly symmetric patterns of graded attribution. Together, these results confirm that social attribution appears to be largely consistent with unbiased inference under uncertainty.