Attribution Bias Research Articles

How Do Voters Hold Politicians Accountable for Personal Welfare? Evidence of a Self-Serving Bias

Examining a government’s record is difficult. This is a problem for voters who want to hold governments accountable. One solution is for voters to hold governments accountable for changes in their personal welfare. Yet, it is often unclear whether changes in personal welfare are caused by government policies or voters’ own actions. Since voters have a desire to protect their self-image, this ambiguity might fuel a self-serving bias in attribution. That is, voters might take personal responsibility for positive changes in personal welfare and hold the government responsible for negative changes. Using data from election surveys and survey experiments, this article shows that voters attribute responsibility for personal welfare in this self-serving way. This hurts democratic accountability because voters do not reward governments (enough) for improving their personal welfare.

It’s their fault: Partisan attribution bias and its association with voting intentions

This research examined how people explain major outcomes of political consequence (e.g., economic growth, rising inequality). We argue that people attribute positive outcomes more and negative outcomes less to their own political party than to an opposing party. We conducted two studies, one before the 2016 U.S. presidential election ( N = 244) and another before the 2020 election ( N = 249 registered voters), that examined attributions across a wide array of outcomes. As predicted, a robust partisan attribution bias emerged in both studies. Although the bias was largely equivalent among Democrats and Republicans, it was magnified among those with more extreme political ideology. Further, the bias predicted unique variance in voting intentions and significantly mediated the link between political ideology and voting. In sum, these data suggest that partisan allegiances systemically bias attributions in a group-favoring direction. We discuss implications of these findings for emerging research on political social cognition.

사회불안과 관계적 공격성의 관계 : 관계적 적대적 귀인편향과 충동성의 조절된 매개효과

사회불안이 관계적 공격성으로 이어지는 기제를 확인하기 위해 관계적 적대적 귀인편향과 충 동성을 포함하는 조절된 매개모형을 검증하였다. 전국 대학생 278명(남 96명, 여 182명)을 대 상으로 온라인 자기보고 질문지를 통해 사회불안, 적대적 귀인편향, 관계적 공격성, 충동성, 우울, 신체적 공격성을 측정하였다. 위계적 회귀분석과 Process Macro를 사용해 분석한 결과, 사회불안은 관계적 공격성을 정적으로 예측하였고, 사회불안과 관계적 공격성 간 관계에서 관계적 적대적 귀인편향의 매개효과와 관계적 적대적 귀인편향과 관계적 공격성 간 관계에서 충동성의 조절효과가 각각 유의하였다. 그러나 최종 조절된 매개모형은 유의하지 않았다. 본 연구는 사회불안이 높은 일부가 관계적 공격성을 보이게 되는 심리적 기제를 제안, 검증하였 다는 의의가 있다.

Narcissism and Anger: the Moderating Role of Social Exclusion and the Mediating Role of Hostile Attribution Bias Mechanism

The present research (N = 169) examined the relationship between narcissism and anger responses considering the moderating role of social exclusion and the mediating role of hostile attribution bias. For this, social exclusion scenario and inclusion scenarios were utilized, and a total 183 participants were recruited from the UK using the online platform Qualtrics. Fourteen responders were excluded for failing the attention check question and the remaining 169 participants were randomly assigned to either the social inclusion condition (n = 87) or the social exclusion condition (n = 82). The results demonstrated that participants with high narcissism reported a greater level of anger when socially excluded, yet not when they were socially accepted. Furthermore, we observed indirect (mediation) effects in which greater levels of anger were affected by higher narcissism via higher levels of hostile attribution bias in both social exclusion and inclusion conditions, but the indirect effect was stronger in the condition of social exclusion than in the condition of social inclusion. Thus, the strong direct and indirect relationship between narcissism and anger can be found in the social exclusion condition, while the weaker but significant indirect relationship between narcissism and anger via hostile attribution can be also observed in the social inclusion condition. We discuss the implications of these findings and future research directions.

Understanding communicative intentions in schizophrenia using an error analysis approach

Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) have a core impairment in the communicative-pragmatic domain, characterized by severe difficulties in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intentions. While several studies have investigated pragmatic performance of patients with SCZ, little research has analyzed the errors committed in the comprehension of different communicative acts. The present research investigated error patterns in 24 patients with SCZ and 24 healthy controls (HC) during a task assessing the comprehension of different communicative acts, i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic, and their relationship with the clinical features of SCZ. We used signal detection analysis to quantify participants’ ability to correctly detect the speakers’ communicative intention, i.e., sensitivity, and their tendency to wrongly perceive a communicative intention when not present, i.e., response bias. Further, we investigated the relationship between sensitivity and response bias, and the clinical features of the disorder, namely symptom severity, pharmacotherapy, and personal and social functioning. The results showed that the ability to infer the speaker’s communicative intention is impaired in SCZ, as patients exhibited lower sensitivity, compared to HC, for all the pragmatic phenomena evaluated, i.e., sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. Further, we found that the sensitivity measure for irony was related to disorganized/concrete symptoms. Moreover, patients with SCZ showed a stronger response bias for deceitful communicative acts compared to HC: when committing errors, they tended to misattribute deceitful intentions more often than sincere and ironic ones. This tendency to misattribute deceitful communicative intentions may be related to the attributional bias characterizing the disorder.

Longitudinal relationships among interpersonal openness trait, hostile attribution bias, and displaced aggressive behaviour: Big Five treated as covariates

Displaced aggressive behaviour is associated with many negative outcomes. Although certain personality traits predict displaced aggressive behaviour, the uniquely longitudinal effect of indigenous interpersonal traits on displaced aggressive behaviour is ignored. To address this gap, we explored the longitudinal relationship among an indigenously interpersonal trait of China (interpersonal openness), hostile attribution bias, and self-reported displaced aggressive behaviour. Additionally, we tested whether hostile attribution bias mediated the relationship between interpersonal openness and self-reported displaced aggressive behaviour. The Interpersonal Self-Support Scale for Undergraduate Students, Word Sentence Association Paradigm for Hostility, Displaced Aggression Questionnaire, and the NEO Personality Inventory-3 were administered to 942 undergraduates on two occasions, 6months apart. A cross-lagged model showed that, after controlling for the Big Five personality traits, interpersonal openness predicted subsequent hostile attribution bias, and hostile attribution bias predicted self-reported displaced aggressive behaviour 6months later. Hostile attribution bias at time 2 mediated the relationship between interpersonal openness at time 1 and self-reported displaced aggressive behaviour at time 2. These results were consistent with the interpersonal self-support theory's appraisals of interpersonal openness, and they extended the social information processing and general aggression models to explain displaced aggressive behaviour.

Effect of Robot Tutor’s Feedback Valence and Attributional Style on Learners

This study investigated the effect of a robot tutor’s feedback valence (positive feedback and negative feedback) and attributional style (internal-attribution and external-attribution) on learners. A Nao robot was designed to be a dance tutor that taught participants dance movements and gave performance feedback. Thirty-six graduate and undergraduate students participated in the experiments and were divided into two groups: an internal-attribution group and an external-attribution group. Participants in each group received both positive and negative feedback. The results indicated that the participants were more likely to accept positive feedback than negative feedback. In addition, they perceived greater influence by positive feedback than negative feedback. Moreover, participants did not the demonstrate self-serving attributional bias. They attributed more blame to themselves than to the robot for negative performance, whereas no difference was observed in the attribution of credit between the robot and the participants. Furthermore, the internal-attribution robot tutor was more likely to be regarded as a training coach instead of a training tool than the external-attribution robot tutor. Finally, participants reported a higher relationship closeness with the internal-attribution robot tutor than the external-attribution robot tutor.

受欺负与青少年外化问题关系的“健康环境悖论”：敌意性归因的中介作用

受欺负与青少年外化问题关系的“健康环境悖论”：敌意性归因的中介作用

Socioeconomic status and mental illness stigma: the impact of mental illness controllability attributions and personal responsibility judgments

Background Prior research has suggested that higher levels of socioeconomic status (SES) may be linked with heightened mental illness stigma (MIS). It has been posited that this link is due to the resource-rich environment high-SES individuals live in, which predisposes them to seeing the certain phenomena as being more controllable in nature than low-SES individuals. Aims The current study intended to address the attributional mechanisms behind the SES-MIS link. Methods In a sample of 932 participants, we collected self-reported SES along with the controllability attributions and personal responsibility judgments participants make for individuals with mental illnesses. Results Analyses indicated that SES was significantly associated with greater MIS levels, and that this link was significantly mediated by controllability attributions and personal responsibility judgments. Conclusions Findings suggest that high-SES individuals are more likely to see mental illness as due to internal, controllable factors, which leads to blaming the individual for mental illness onset and, ultimately, greater mental illness stigma. These results provide support for more socioeconomically diverse committees and panels where mental health funding decisions are made due to inherent attributional biases which may be present along the SES spectrum.

Unknowing, indifferent, or committed: Relations between age and assessments of the German population’s involvement and inaction during the time of National Socialism

We examine German participants’ assessment of the time of National Socialism. Especially for younger generations, shifts in the culture of remembrance may change their assessments of historical events. We argue that factors such as increased formal education about the topic and decreased personal contact with contemporary witnesses can weaken attributional biases (e.g., ingroup favouritism) in the assessment of the role of the German population during the time of National Socialism. We use data from a German representative sample (N = 1,000) and focus on the links between participants’ age and the estimated involvement of the German population under National Socialism as perpetrators, victims, helpers, and “bystanders,” as well as the agreement with explanations why the general population did not act against National Socialist crimes. Younger participants estimated the proportions of perpetrators and bystanders within the German population as higher and were less likely to agree that Germans did not know about the systematic killings. Older participants were more likely to agree with situational explanations for the population’s inaction (i.e., that Germans did not know or did not have an opportunity to act against the crimes). We find a positive relation between a more critical perspective on the involvement of the population in the past and participants’ feelings of responsibility in the present.

Facial Emotion Perceptual Tendency in Violent and Non-violent Offenders.

All three authors share equal authorship in this paper.Emotion perception has a vital influence on social interaction. Previous studies discussed mainly the relationship between facial emotion perception and aggressive behavior from the perspective of hostile attributional bias and the impaired violence inhibition mechanism. The present study aims to provide new evidence of different emotion perception patterns between the violent and non-violent criminal samples through a new indicator of the facial emotion recognition test, Facial Emotion Perception Tendency (FEPT), calculated by counting the times a participant recognizes a set of emotional stimuli as a particular specific emotion, and to further examine the association between aggressive behaviors and FEPT. 101 violent and 171 non-violent offenders, as well as 81 non-offending control participants, were recruited to complete the emotion recognition task with morphed stimuli (Study 1). We further recruited 62 non-offending healthy male participants to finish the Buss -Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) after the emotion recognition task in Study 2. Both non-violent and violent offenders were significantly lower in overall accuracy of emotion recognition and disgust FEPT, but higher in happy FEPT, than non-offending healthy controls. Non-violent offenders had significantly lower fear FEPT than violent offenders, and had higher anger FEPT than non-offending controls. The results also revealed that the level of physical aggression was positively correlated with fear FEPT, while negatively correlated with anger FEPT. The current study demonstrated that FEPT was associated with aggressive behavior and implies the importance of improving the emotion decoding ability of offenders. Also, the concept "FEPT" proposed in this study is of significance for further exploration of how individuals' tendency to perceiving a particular emotion can be correlated with social behaviors.

Blurring Lines of Responsibility: How Institutional Context Affects Citizen Biases Regarding Policy Problems

Existing research suggests that individuals assign responsibility for policy problems based on prior biases like partisanship. However, what remains speculation is whether institutions that blur lines of responsibility elicit more biased responsibility-assignment when compared to institutions with clearer lines of responsibility. European Union enlargement provides an opportunity to examine responsibility-assignment for policy problems within multiple countries, where the EU triggers biases (pro- and anti-EU membership) when it works to export the policies required for membership. In surveys of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, we examine responsibility-assignment to governments for inequality in pay between women and men, which the EU asks prospective members to address. We find that biased attributions of blame for pay inequality are strongest in the Bosnian regions where multilevel governance is the most pronounced, while the unitary governments of Albania, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, and Kosovo do not yield biased responsibility-assignment. Our results are consequential for multilevel governance.

Men have ability, women are lucky: A pre-registered experiment examining gender bias in knowledge attribution.

The purpose of this experiment was to test the effect of gender on knowledge attribution using a Justified True Belief (JTB) framework. A 2 (gender: male, female)×3 (knowledge case: knowledge control, Gettier, ignorance control) experimental design was used with a sample of 420 U.S. adults. Contrary to hypotheses, participants attributed similar levels of knowledge to male and female agents across all knowledge conditions; participants also rated males and females as equally likely to have the 'right' answer across knowledge conditions. However, knowledge was more likely to be attributed to luck (as opposed to ability) for female agents than it was for male agents across knowledge conditions and scenarios. This result suggests that while overt forms of gender bias may be fading, more covert forms still exist. Secondary analyses also showed that the JTB methodology was not robust to scenario type or knowledge condition. Comprehension was affected by both knowledge condition (knowledge vs. Gettier/ignorance) and the specific content of the hypothetical scenario presented (e.g., squirrel vs. jewelery). These confounds should be addressed in future JTB studies as it is possible that differences between knowledge and Gettier cases are due to misunderstanding the scenarios rather than beliefs about knowledge. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

From Help to Harm: Increases in Status, Perceived Under-Reciprocation, and the Consequences for Access to Strategic Help and Social Undermining Among Female, Racial Minority, and White Male Top Managers

This paper explores how social psychological biases impede the social exchange relations of executives who ascend to high-status corporate leadership positions. We theorize that a combination of self-serving attribution biases among executives who gain status and egocentric biases of their prior benefactors cause a systematic difference in perceptions about the relative importance of that help to the beneficiary’s success. This leads to the perception among prior benefactors that the high-status executives have not adequately reciprocated their help. We then extend this argument to explain why perceptions of under-reciprocation are heightened when the high-status executive is a racial minority or a woman but reduced when the prior benefactor is a racial minority or a woman. The final element of our theoretical framework examines the social consequences of perceived under-reciprocation for corporate leaders. We suggest that the high-status leaders’ access to strategic help is reduced, and they may become the target of social undermining that can damage their broader reputation. The findings support our social psychological perspective on social exchange in corporate leadership, revealing how and why executives who have ascended to high-status positions not only may encounter difficulty obtaining assistance from fellow leaders but also may experience adverse reversals in their social exchange ties such that managers who previously aided them engage in socially harmful behavior toward them.

Do my feelings fit the diagnosis? Avoiding misdiagnoses in psychosomatic consultation services.

Misdiagnoses are a major concern with far-reaching consequences, which have rarely been studied systematically. Therefore, the present study evaluated factors causing misdiagnoses identified by psychosomatic consultation services. Over a period of 5 years, all patients referred to the psychosomatic consultation services of a large university hospital were analyzed consecutively for misdiagnoses. We analyzed the reasons for suspecting a misdiagnosis through systematic introspection during peer supervision and evaluated the causes during semistructured interviews with the referring physician. In 165 psychosomatic consultations, 24 disorders were misdiagnosed (15%). The reasons for questioning the initial diagnoses were the consulting physician's feelings and thoughts resulting from the patients' inappropriate behavior during the consultation and unusual clinical features. In eight cases, the misdiagnosis resulted from availability bias, and in three cases each it resulted from confirmation bias, search satisfaction bias, and framing effect and attribution bias. However, lack of medical knowledge played only a minor role. This study highlights the nonrational elements of the diagnostic process. In the context of psychosomatic consultation services, introspection and intuitive thought processes are helpful in identifying misdiagnoses. Self-satisfaction (availability bias) and overconfidence (confirmation bias) are most likely to result in misdiagnoses.

Pathological prediction: a top-down cause of organic disease

Though predictive processing (PP) approaches to the mind were originally applied to exteroceptive perception, i.e., vision and action, recent work has started to explore the role of interoceptive perception, i.e., emotion and affect (Barrett, 2017; Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Miller and Clark, 2018; Seth, 2013; Van de Cruys, 2017; Wilkinson et al., 2019). This article builds on this work by extending PP beyond emotion to the construction of emotional dispositions. I employ principles from dynamical systems theory and PP to provide a model of how dispositional anger (also known as ‘hostile attribution bias’ or HAB) can develop in response to early experiences of psychosocial stress. The model is then deployed to explain the established link between psychosocial stress in early life and the appearance of certain organic disease phenotypes (such as cardiovascular disease) in later life. This phenomenon can appear mysterious when viewed through the standard biomedical explanatory lens, which has difficulty accounting for the causal influence of subjective perceptions and evaluations of the social and material environment on the development of organic disease processes. The model provided presents such cases as instances of developmental mismatch. They occur when an organism develops an emotional disposition that leads them to make habitually-biased appraisals of what the social environment affords. The model provides a novel explanation of certain organic disease phenotypes with top-down and developmental causes, and demystifies one class of cases involving apparently spooky ‘mind-to-matter’ causation.

Children explain in‐ and out‐group behavior differently

AbstractAdults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in‐ versus out‐group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany (N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of in‐ and out‐group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when explaining an out‐group as compared to an in‐group member’s behavior; and more often to individual factors when explaining an in‐group as compared to an out‐group member’s behavior. These findings are consistent with the early emergence of fundamental differences in the conceptualizations of in‐ and out‐group members.

Hope Hurts: Attribution Bias in Yelp Reviews

This paper incorporates applied econometrics, causal machine learning and theories of reference-dependent preferences to test whether consuming in a restaurant on special occasions, such as one's birthday, anniversary, graduation, etc., would raise one's expectations of the restaurant and would increase consumers' tendency to rate their consumption experiences lower. Furthermore, our study is closely linked to the emerging literature of attribution bias in economics and psychology and provides a scenario in which we can empirically test two leading theories of attribution bias. In our paper, we analyzed reviews from Yelp and combined the text analyses with regressions, matching techniques and causal machine learning. Through a series of models, we found evidence that consumers' ratings for restaurants are indeed lower when they go to restaurants on special occasions. This result can be explained by one theory of attribution bias according to which people have higher expectations about restaurants on special occasions and then misattribute their disappointment to the quality of the restaurants. From the connection between our empirical analysis and theories of attribution bias, this paper provides evidence of how attribution bias influences people's perceptions and behaviors.

Experience of social mobility and support for redistribution: Beating the odds or blaming the system?

How does the experience of social mobility affect people's distributive preferences? Using cross-country survey data and a survey experiment, I examine the effects of experienced social mobility on support for redistribution. The results indicate an asymmetric relationship - experiencing downward mobility increases support for redistribution while experiencing upward mobility does not affect distributive preferences. In line with a common attribution bias, the self-serving bias, those with negative mobility experiences 'blame the system' and extrapolate from their negative experience onto society at large, which increases their demand for redistribution. Conversely, those who experienced positive mobility believe they `beat the odds' and do not extrapolate from their experience onto perceptions of societal mobility, leading to no less support for redistribution. This finding suggests significant implications at the aggregate and a potential demand-side explanation for the Great Gatsby Curve: As overall absolute mobility decreases (increases), ceteris paribus, demand for redistribution also decreases (increases).

СВОБОДА: ОТВЕТСТВЕННОСТЬ, НЕГАТИВИЗМ, ЗАБОТА

Relevance and purpose. In the context of modern social life and its reflection by science, the phenomenon of freedom is one of the fundamental theoretical and practical problems. Understanding the true causes of the formation of an asocial personality, far from extreme science paradigms, is one of the pressing problems of modern psychology. The purpose of this article is to analyze and consider the issues of freedom and aggressive behavior of adolescents in the modes of responsibility, negativism and care. Research methods. Theoretical analysis and synthesis of relevant literature. Research results. Aspects of freedom in connection with external and internal restrictions are considered, constructive and destructive types of freedom are distinguished. The problem of differentiating the desire for freedom and the risks of negativism are noted, active negativity and passive negativity are described. Aspects of hostile attribution bias as structural-motivational element of deviant and delinquent behavior are revealed. Egalitarian and traditional concepts of parenting and their connection with the development of autonomous, independent personality are considered. The conditions in association with the values of freedom, independence and care act as predictors of the subjective feeling of happiness in adolescents are noted. Conclusions. Freedom is a prerequisite condition for the development of responsibility, personality with an internal locus of control. Freedom should be coupled аwith responsibility, parental supervision and providing of freedom for a teen to make a significant contribution to the socialization of freedom and responsibility. The phenomenon of emancipation in adolescence can be associated with the risks of negativism as a form of aggression. High partial self esteem (leadership ability and self esteem of one’s “physical self”) correlate with negativism. One of the essential mechanisms for the formation and functioning of negativism is the hostile attribution bias, the tendency to which is associated with high risks of delinquent behavior. Children from families with freedom parenting style are characterized by deprivation of care, they are more often less satisfied with “family” childhood. At the same time, controlling parents can also play a negative role, increasing the risks of aggression.