Abstract
When explaining others' behaviors, achievements, and failures, it is common for people to attribute too much influence to the individual's disposition and too little influence to the structural and situational influences impinging on the actor. Although performance is a joint function of ability and situational facilitation or impediments, dispositional inference ascribes too much to individual ability. We hypothesize that this tendency leads university admissions decisions to favor students coming from institutions with lenient grading because they will have their high performance mistaken for evidence of high ability. In four studies using both laboratory experiments and actual admissions decisions, we show that those who display high performance simply due to lenient grading or to an easy task are favored in selection. These results have implications for research on attribution, because they provide a more stringent test of the correspondence bias, and allow for a more precise measure of its size. Implications for admissions and personnel selection decisions are also discussed.
Highlights
Who is likely to be the more ambitious and hard-working employee—the one who was born into privilege and attended excellent and expensive private schools, or the one who, starting from the most humble beginnings, clawed her way out of the ghetto and worked to put herself through college? Hiring and promotion decisions are some of the most important ones in any organization, and they are filled with exactly this sort of difficult attribution problem
Participants might have wondered what compelled the essay-writer to write in praise of Castro: What exactly was the punishment for writing an essay that did not sufficiently comply with the assignment? Perhaps it should not be surprising that in these and other studies on the correspondence bias, people neglect the power of the Situation given the difficulties determining its strength
If it was impossible to determine the strength of the situation, it becomes impossible to use it when making attributions. This fact suggests that the correspondence bias, as it has been demonstrated previously, might not be a bias, but rather an incomplete information problem. We address this possibility by examining if the correspondence bias persists when people have all the information they need in order to adjust their attributions of individual abilities based on the influence of the situation: participants in our experiments are given quantified information about both the behavior and the situation
Summary
Who is likely to be the more ambitious and hard-working employee—the one who was born into privilege and attended excellent and expensive private schools, or the one who, starting from the most humble beginnings, clawed her way out of the ghetto and worked to put herself through college? Hiring and promotion decisions are some of the most important ones in any organization, and they are filled with exactly this sort of difficult attribution problem. If it was impossible to determine the strength of the situation, it becomes impossible to use it when making attributions This fact suggests that the correspondence bias, as it has been demonstrated previously, might not be a bias, but rather an incomplete information problem. We address this possibility by examining if the correspondence bias persists when people have all the information they need in order to adjust their attributions of individual abilities based on the influence of the situation: participants in our experiments are given quantified information about both the behavior (i.e., grades) and the situation (i.e., grading leniency). Prior studies failed to specify the strength of the situation and left important questions unanswered about the causes for the effects they obtained
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