Attribution Asymmetry Research Articles

Asymmetrical genetic attributions for the presence and absence of health problems

Objective Recent research has suggested that people more readily make genetic attributions for positively valenced or desirable traits than for negatively valenced or undesirable traits—an asymmetry that may be mediated by perceptions that positive characteristics are more ‘natural’ than negative ones. This research sought to examine whether a similar asymmetry in genetic attributions would emerge between positive and negative health outcomes. Design Across seven experiments, participants were randomly assigned to read a short vignette describing an individual experiencing a health problem (e.g. hypertension) or a corresponding healthy state (e.g. normal blood pressure). Main Outcome Measures All participants provided ratings of naturalness and genetic attributions for the outcome described in their assigned vignette. Results For diagnoses other than addictive disorders, participants rated the presence of a diagnosis as less genetically caused than its absence; for addictive disorders, the presence of a diagnosis was rated as more genetically caused than its absence. Participants consistently rated the presence of a health problem as less natural than its absence. Conclusion Even within a single domain of health, people ascribe differing degrees of ‘naturalness’ and genetic causation to positive versus negative health outcomes, which could impact their preferences for treatment and prevention strategies.

Exceptionality Effect in Agency Attributions: Exceptional Behaviors are Perceived as Higher Free will than Routine Behaviors

People experience stronger regret regarding negative outcomes resulting from more exceptional circumstances compared to routine. We hypothesized that the exceptionality-routine attribution asymmetry would extend to attributions of agency and moral responsibility. In Experiment 1 (<em>N</em> = 337), we found that people attributed more free will to exceptional behavior compared to routine when the exception was due to self-choice rather than external circumstances. In Experiment 2 (N= 561), we replicated and generalized this effect to other scenarios, with support for the classic exceptionality effect regarding regret, and an extension to moral responsibility. In Experiment 3 (<em>N</em> = 128), we replicated these effects in a within-subject design. When using a classic experimental philosophy paradigm contrasting a deterministic and an indeterministic universe, we found that the results were robust across both contexts. We conclude that there is consistent support for a link between exceptionality and free will attributions. All materials, data, and code are available here:<em> <a href="https://osf.io/f2pck/%20">https://osf.io/f2pck/</a> </em>

Blame Attribution Asymmetry in Human-Automation Cooperation.

Human-automation cooperation has become ubiquitous. In this concept, automation refers to autonomous machines, robots, artificial intelligence, and other autonomous nonhuman agents. A human driver will share control of semiautonomous vehicles (semi-AVs) with an automated system and thus share responsibility for crashes caused by semi-AVs. Research has not clarified whether and why people would attribute different levels of blame and responsibility to automation (and its creators) and its human counterpart when each causes an equivalent crash. We conducted four experiments in two studies (total N = 1,045) to measure different responses (e.g., severity and acceptability judgment, blame and responsibility attribution, compensation judgment) to hypothetical crashes that are caused by the human or the automation in semi-AVs. The results provided previously unidentified evidence of a bias, which we called the "blame attribution asymmetry," a tendency that people will judge the automation-caused crash more harshly, ascribe more blame and responsibility to automation and its creators, and think the victim in this crash should be compensated more. This asymmetry arises in part because of the higher negative affect triggered by the automation-caused crash. This bias has a direct policy implication: a policy allowing "not-safe enough" semi-AVs on roads could backfire, because these AVs will lead to many traffic crashes, which might in turn produce greater psychological costs and deter more people from adopting them. Other theoretical and policy implications of our findings were also discussed.

Private Contracting and Citizen Attitudes Toward Local Government

Lawmakers use privatized service delivery to simultaneously maintain low taxes while also satisfying citizen demands for high-quality public goods and services. However, what effect does private contracting have on people’s attitudes toward local government? I design a survey experiment that tests how public–private collaborations alter how people attribute responsibility to government for the successes and failures of the delivery of goods and services. I show that private contracting makes it less likely that people will connect public services to government, which erodes their evaluations of government performance and the feeling that local government represents their interests. Moreover, I show that citizens are also more likely to blame local government for private service delivery failures than they are to praise it for private service delivery successes. This asymmetry in responsibility attribution makes it difficult for local governments to build support among its citizens when it relies on private contracting.

A Peculiar and Perpetual Tendency: An Asymmetry in Knowledge Attributions for Affirmations and Negations

From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations (i.e. claims about what is not) than to know affirmations (i.e. claims about what is). This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants (N = 1132) read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed affirmatively than when framed negatively. Participants did this even though the affirmative and negative framings were logically equivalent. The asymmetry was unique to knowledge attributions: it did not occur when participants rated truth, probability, or belief. These findings show new consequences of negation on people’s judgments and reasoning and can inform philosophical theorizing about the ordinary concept of knowledge.

Not Fake News: Toxic Consequences of the Trump Stress Effect

Soon after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, Sisti and Baum-Baicker predicted that researchers “have an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment and examine the health effects of toxic stress.” In this article, the stressors related to the Trump presidency are delineated and understood as fertile ground for toxic stress reactions. The physical, behavioral, emotional, and interpersonal effects of this kind of unrelenting stress are detailed. Data presented were gathered from a variety of large-scale sources (e.g., American Psychological Association, Pew Research Center, Gallup) and research journals. Data strongly support the validity of the “Trump stress effect” and are viewed through the lenses of terror management theory, motive attribution asymmetry, and the Freudian and Kleinian unconscious.

Naive Explanations of Road Accidents: Self-Serving Bias and Defensive Attribution

The aim of this article is to take into account the explanations given by people involved in road accident (drivers, passengers and witnesses) so as to consider preconisation susceptible to improve road safety. Testimonies from 205 reports of the French "Gendarmerie Nationale" were analysed. The results show the existence of actor (driver)/observer (passenger and witness) asymmetry in attribution. In fact, observers give as many internal explanations as external explanations, when actors give more external explanations than internal explanations. This result can be interpreted in term of self-serving bias (in so far as we note an effect of the severity of the outcomes on the drivers' explanations) and also can be interpreted according to the theory of defensive attribution (even if we fail to show that observers' explanations can be influenced by accident severity). Actors and observers explain events with different categories (actor/observer asymmetry bias), but use the same motivational strategies of protection: drivers would try to protect their self-esteem in order to avoid being held responsible for the accident (self-serving bias), while observers would try to protect themselves (defensive attribution) from the idea that they could find themselves in the same situation. Finally, we examine some preconisations likely to enhance the road safety.

Pointing fingers at others: The neural correlates of actor-observer asymmetry in blame attribution

People tend to describe others' immoral behaviors as intentional and dispositional, and their own as unintentional events. The actor-observer asymmetry might reflect at least true attitudes potentially free from intentional faking. Implicit attitudes — i.e., automatic evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of actions — play a central role in guiding moral decision-making. Yet, little research has investigated how value computations are associated with actor-observer asymmetry of moral decision-making. In this fMRI study, we developed the morally-laden implicit association test (mIAT) to examine the extent to which implicit attitudes are predictive of online neural response when participants mentally simulate or passively observe morally-laden behaviors such as helping or harming others. Results showed that the scores on the mIAT were predictive of actor-observer asymmetry when attributing blame for immoral behavior, associated with neural responses in the orbitofrontal cortex and temporal pole. The asymmetry between first-hand experiencing and passive viewing moral behavior recruited the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction. These findings indicate that implicit moral attitudes can predict moral evaluation and neural responses to asymmetry between experiencing and observing injustice. They provide important knowledge regarding the individual differences involved in the computational mechanisms underlying how implicit attitudes guide moral decision-making.

Nauczycielskie atrybucje zdolności do matematyki uczniów i uczennic

The present study tested the hypothesis that gender differentiates teachers’ attributions of students’ ability to learn mathematics. Mathematics teachers in secondary schools (n = 120) completed the Polish versions of Ability Attribution Scale (AAS) and Gender Stereotypes Scale (GSS), by J. Tiedemann (2002). AAS concerned the assessment of students (n = 720), both boys and girls with low, average and high scores in mathematics. GSS assessed the degree of teacher’s acceptance of the stereotypical belief that mathematics is the domain of men. There has been an empirically attained relationship between the teachers’ belief that mathematics is a male domain and the attribution asymmetry, detrimental for the female students.

Bad is freer than good: Positive-negative asymmetry in attributions of free will.

Recent findings support the idea that the belief in free will serves as the basis for moral responsibility, thus promoting the punishment of immoral agents. We theorized that free will extends beyond morality to serve as the basis for accountability and the capacity for change more broadly, not only for others but also for the self. Five experiments showed that people attributed higher freedom of will to negative than to positive valence, regardless of morality or intent, for both self and others. In recalling everyday life situations and in classical decision making paradigms, negative actions, negatives outcomes, and negative framing were attributed higher free will than positive ones. Free will attributions were mainly driven by action or outcome valence, but not intent. These findings show consistent support for the idea that free will underlies laypersons' sense-making for accountability and change under negative circumstances.

The Omissions Account of the Knobe Effect and the Asymmetry Challenge

AbstractThe characteristic asymmetry in intentionality attributions that is known as the Knobe effect can be explained by conjoining an orthodox theory of intentional action with a normative account of intentional omission. On the latter view: (a) omissions presuppose some normative context; (b) there are good reasons why the intentionality of omissions requires agents' knowledge rather than intention. The asymmetry in intentionality attributions in Knobe's cases can be seen to be derivative from an asymmetry in intentional omissions. The omissions account further explains the Butler problem and some related puzzles. It also safeguards the simple view of intentional action from the asymmetry challenge.

Moral asymmetries in judgments of agency withstand ludicrous causal deviance.

Americans have been shown to attribute greater intentionality to immoral than to amoral actions in cases of causal deviance, that is, cases where a goal is satisfied in a way that deviates from initially planned means (e.g., a gunman wants to hit a target and his hand slips, but the bullet ricochets off a rock into the target). However, past research has yet to assess whether this asymmetry persists in cases of extreme causal deviance. Here, we manipulated the level of mild to extreme causal deviance of an immoral versus amoral act. The asymmetry in attributions of intentionality was observed at all but the most extreme level of causal deviance, and, as we hypothesized, was mediated by attributions of blame/credit and judgments of action performance. These findings are discussed as they support a multiple-concepts interpretation of the asymmetry, wherein blame renders a naïve concept of intentional action (the outcome matches the intention) more salient than a composite concept (the outcome matches the intention and was brought about by planned means), and in terms of their implications for cross-cultural research on judgments of agency.

Harmful situations, impure people: An attribution asymmetry across moral domains

People make inferences about the actions of others, assessing whether an act is best explained by person-based versus situation-based accounts. Here we examine people’s explanations for norm violations in different domains: harmful acts (e.g., assault) and impure acts (e.g., incest). Across four studies, we find evidence for an attribution asymmetry: people endorse more person-based attributions for impure versus harmful acts. This attribution asymmetry is partly explained by the abnormality of impure versus harmful acts, but not by differences in the moral wrongness or the statistical frequency of these acts. Finally, this asymmetry persists even when the situational factors that lead an agent to act impurely are stipulated. These results suggest that, relative to harmful acts, impure acts are linked to person-based attributions.

Side effects and asymmetry in act-type attribution

Joshua Knobe's work has marshaled considerable support for the hypothesis that everyday judgments of whether an action is intentional are systematically influenced by evaluations of the action or agent. The main source of evidence for this hypothesis is a series of surveys that involve an agent either helping or harming something as a side effect. Respondents are much more likely to judge the side effect intentional if harm is involved. It is a remarkable feature of the discussion so far that it assumes without scrutiny that the substitution of one act-type for another could not, taken alone, explain the difference in responses that the two scenarios yield. This paper presents evidence, both experimental and conceptual, that it is precisely this difference that explains the asymmetry in responses. Briefly, agents who token the act-type help must fulfill certain psychological conditions that they don't have to fulfill if they are to token the act-type harm. Harming, unlike helping, does not require the fulfillment of such conditions. Consequently, it can be freely attributed to the well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, the knowing and the naive, just as long as they cause damage. The hypothesis also has important methodological implications: The widely held assumption that Knobe's CEO scenario is a good way to test for intentionality judgments is challenged.

Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict.

Five studies across cultures involving 661 American Democrats and Republicans, 995 Israelis, and 1,266 Palestinians provide previously unidentified evidence of a fundamental bias, what we term the "motive attribution asymmetry," driving seemingly intractable human conflict. These studies show that in political and ethnoreligious intergroup conflict, adversaries tend to attribute their own group's aggression to ingroup love more than outgroup hate and to attribute their outgroup's aggression to outgroup hate more than ingroup love. Study 1 demonstrates that American Democrats and Republicans attribute their own party's involvement in conflict to ingroup love more than outgroup hate but attribute the opposing party's involvement to outgroup hate more than ingroup love. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate this biased attributional pattern for Israelis and Palestinians evaluating their own group and the opposing group's involvement in the current regional conflict. Study 4 demonstrates in an Israeli population that this bias increases beliefs and intentions associated with conflict intractability toward Palestinians. Finally, study 5 demonstrates, in the context of American political conflict, that offering Democrats and Republicans financial incentives for accuracy in evaluating the opposing party can mitigate this bias and its consequences. Although people find it difficult to explain their adversaries' actions in terms of love and affiliation, we suggest that recognizing this attributional bias and how to reduce it can contribute to reducing human conflict on a global scale.

Virtue and Vice Attributions in the Business Context: An Experimental Investigation

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side-effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we present new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side-effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous.

The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis.

The actor-observer hypothesis (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1971) states that people tend to explain their own behavior with situation causes and other people's behavior with person causes. Widely known in psychology, this asymmetry has been described as robust, firmly established, and pervasive. However, a meta-analysis on 173 published studies revealed average effect sizes from d = -0.016 to d = 0.095. A moderator analysis showed that the asymmetry held only when the actor was portrayed as highly idiosyncratic, when hypothetical events were explained, when actor and observer were intimates, or when free-response explanations were coded. In addition, the asymmetry held for negative events, but a reverse asymmetry held for positive events. This valence effect may indicate a self-serving pattern in attribution, but across valence, no actor-observer asymmetry exists.

Under-Reliance on the Decision Aid: A Difference in Calibration and Attribution between Self and Aid

It is often assumed that two heads are better than one, but reliance on decision aids is often inappropriate. Decisions to rely on an aid are thought to be based on a comparison between the perceived reliability of own performance and that of the decision aid. Unfortunately, perceived reliabilities are unlikely to be perfectly calibrated. This may result in inappropriate decisions to rely on advice. In a laboratory experiment with 40 participants, we studied whether calibration improves after practice, whether calibration of own reliability differs from calibration of the aid's reliability and whether unreliability of the aid is attributed differently. Under-trust in own reliability disappears after practice but under-trust in the aid's reliability persists. Unreliability of the decision aid is less likely to be attributed to temporary, external and uncontrollable factors. This asymmetry in attribution and calibration may explain under-reliance on decision aids.

Supplemental Material for The Actor–Observer Asymmetry in Attribution: A (Surprising) Meta-Analysis

Supplemental Material for The Actor–Observer Asymmetry in Attribution: A (Surprising) Meta-Analysis

Attribution in Groups

Group members'estimations oftheircontributions to a collective endeavorwere investigated by assessing perceptions of responsibility following completion of an additive group task. As an information-processing approach to attributions in groups suggests, only those who performed well at the individual level internalized success and externalized failure. Those who failed tended to take more responsibility for their group s failure rather than success. Group members also displayed a group-serving tendency; they gave more responsibility to others after success rather than failure. The results suggest that attributional asymmetries following group performance may result from group members' exaggeratedly positive appraisals of their personal competencies.