The perceiver as perceived: Everyday intuitions about the correspondence bias.

Abstract

This research examined people's intuitions about the correspondence bias, or the tendency to favor dispositional rather than situational explanations of behavior. In 3 studies, constrained actors overestimated the magnitude of observers' correspondent inferences. Additional studies indicated that this overestimation is due to people's oversimplified theories about the attributional processes of others. In one, Japanese participants, whose culture places greater emphasis on situational explanations of behavior, did not overestimate the correspondent inferences of observers. In other studies, participants indicated that they thought others' attributions are more influenced by an actor's behavior than by the factors constraining the behavior. Discussion focuses on whether people believe others are more prone to the correspondence bias than they are themselves and on the consequences of overestimating the correspondence bias in everyday interaction.