Attribution Error Research Articles

The Fundamental Attribution Error in Human-Robot Interaction: An Experimental Investigation on Attributing Responsibility to a Social Robot for Its Pre-Programmed Behavior

Since social robots are rapidly advancing and thus increasingly entering people’s everyday environments, interactions with robots also progress. For these interactions to be designed and executed successfully, this study considers insights of attribution theory to explore the circumstances under which people attribute responsibility for the robot’s actions to the robot. In an experimental online study with a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design (N = 394), people read a vignette describing the social robot Pepper either as an assistant or a competitor and its feedback, which was either positive or negative during a subsequently executed quiz, to be generated autonomously by the robot or to be pre-programmed by programmers. Results showed that feedback believed to be autonomous leads to more attributed agency, responsibility, and competence to the robot than feedback believed to be pre-programmed. Moreover, the more agency is ascribed to the robot, the better the evaluation of its sociability and the interaction with it. However, only the valence of the feedback affects the evaluation of the robot’s sociability and the interaction with it directly, which points to the occurrence of a fundamental attribution error.

Does the Correspondence Bias Apply to Social Robots?: Dispositional and Situational Attributions of Human Versus Robot Behavior.

Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to over-emphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people’s behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, but do people make the same causal inferences when interpreting the actions of a robot? As compared to people, social robots are less autonomous and agentic because their behavior is wholly determined by humans in the loop, programming, and design choices. Nonetheless, people do assign robots agency, intentionality, personality, and blame. Results of an experiment showed that participants made correspondent inferences when evaluating both human and robot speakers, attributing their behavior to underlying attitudes even when it was clearly coerced. However, they committed a stronger correspondence bias in the case of the robot–an effect driven by the greater dispositional culpability assigned to robots committing unpopular behavior–and they were more confident in their attitudinal judgments of robots than humans. Results demonstrated some differences in the global impressions of humans and robots based on behavior valence and choice. Judges formed more generous impressions of the robot agent when its unpopular behavior was coerced versus chosen; a tendency not displayed when forming impressions of the human agent. Implications of attributing robot behavior to disposition, or conflating robot actors with their actions, are addressed.

Inclusive and fair assessment in foreign language education: The role of fundamental attribution error in the evaluation of students’ performance

The main goal of institutionalized foreign language (FL) education is the development of communicative competence (e.g. Council of Europe, 2001), a construct which is multifaceted enough to display considerable individual differences between learners. Substantial research efforts have gone into the investigation of profiles of ‘good language learners’, who experience higher levels of success at foreign language learning (e.g. Nunan, 1995) in comparison with learners classified as ‘low-achieving’ or ‘poor’ (e.g. Ganschow & Sparks, 1995). Yet, such categorization of learners stands in opposition to the principles of inclusion in general and in this context of inclusive education, which calls for educational systems that acknowledge and accommodate all learners and their diversity (Clough & Corbett, 2000). It carries the risk of over-attribution of observable ‘low-achieving’ behavior (e.g. ‘does not keep a conversation going’) to dispositional traits (e.g. ‘is a poor leaner’), rather than to external factors (e.g. ‘does not like the task’), which is one of the most commonly documented biases in social perception research, called the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977).In this paper we demonstrate that pre-service teachers of the subject English as well as of the subject inclusive pedagogy are prone to Fundamental Attribution Error in their evaluation of learners. Exhibiting such bias in the evaluation of learners is problematic as it questions the very fairness, objectiveness, and sustainability of inclusive assessment.

Strategic Empathy in World Politics: Is It Possible to Overcome the Rashomon Effect and the Fundamental Attribution Error?

Strategic Empathy in World Politics: Is It Possible to Overcome the Rashomon Effect and the Fundamental Attribution Error?

VICTIM BLAIMING AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

The article characterizes victim blaming as a social phenomenon and a social problem. Victimblaming is an act of devaluation that occurs when the victim of a crime is liable – in whole or in part – for the crime committed against him/her. This guilt can manifest itself in the form of a negative social reaction from professionals (lawyers, doctors, social workers, psychologists), the media, relatives, acquaintances. The evolution of victim blaming research in different branches of science is traced. The main causes of victim blaming are characterized (patriarchal customs, tolerance of certain types of violence, belief in a fair world, imperfection of the justice system, attribution errors, invulnerability theory, formed social stereotypes about the image of the victim). The main definitions that correlate with victim blaming are characterized. It is noted that victim blaming can occur in all spheres of public life and take the form of domestic, unconscious, or mass and purposeful behavior. Victimblaming as a form of violence can take various forms – both psychological and physical, although usually victims of crime are subjected to psychological pressure in the form of humiliation, insult or devaluation. Gender is a social characteristic that increases the risk of being accused, so several categories of female victims are most often victimized: rape victims, victims of sexual harassment, and sex workers. The social consequences of victimization are outlined for victims who are less likely to report future violence in an attempt to avoid secondary victimization due to a lack of social support and social empathy. It is noted that victim blaming as a social problem causes a whole range of social problems: it destroys the security atmosphere, contributes to the normalization of violence in the mass consciousness and complicates the process of providing social and psychological assistance to its victims.

Dziewiętnastowieczne wydania polskich przekładów pism Świętej Teresy z Ávili

From the 1840’s to the end of the 19th century more than twenty editions of Polish translations of texts by Saint Teresa of Ávila, as well as the ones attributed to her, were released. It was attempted to popularise her works, information about her life and thought, as well as the cult of her, knowledge about Christian mysticism and the revival of religious life. Two important bibliographies presenting the reception of Teresa in Poland: one by Stefania Ciesielska-Borkowska (1939) and the other one by Benignus Wanat (1972) require complementing and corrections, which should find reflection in contemporary editions and catalogues. The paper presents all the editions of works by Teresa (fragments, all works, collections of works, as well as paraphrases), released in Polish in the 19th-century books and periodicals. It corrects the mistakes in bibliographical descriptions, which result from mistakes in the publications themselves, as well as errors in attribution. It refers to the authorship of anonymous translations and their undetermined bases, it characterises briefly the environments in which Saint Teresa’s works were translated and published. It presents the religious, literary, social and scientific purposes accompanying the texts by Teresa, as well as translation, editorial and ideological assumptions. It shows the editions of Saint Teresa’s texts in translations or paraphrases by: Sebastian Nucerin, Ignacy Hołowiński, Nina Łuszczewska, Eleonora Ziemięcka, Michał Bohusz Szyszko, Eleonora z Paprockich Szemiothowa, Zygmunt Krasiński, Lucjan Siemieński, Ignacy Domeyko, Karmela Wiktima od Jezusa (Amalia Zenopolska), Tadeusz Miciński, Henryk Piotr Kossowski, as well as anonymous translators.

A robot’s sense-making of fallacies and rhetorical tropes. Creating ontologies of what humans try to say

In the design of user-friendly robots, human communication should be understood by the system beyond mere logics and literal meaning. Robot communication-design has long ignored the importance of communication and politeness rules that are ‘forgiving’ and ‘suspending disbelief’ and cannot handle the basically metaphorical way humans design their utterances. Through analysis of the psychological causes of illogical and non-literal statements, signal detection, fundamental attribution errors, and anthropomorphism, we developed a fail-safe protocol for fallacies and tropes that makes use of Frege’s distinction between reference and sense, Beth’s tableau analytics, Grice’s maxim of quality, and epistemic considerations to have the robot politely make sense of a user’s sometimes unintelligible demands.

Kinship assignment with the ForenSeq™ DNA Signature Prep Kit: Sources of error in simulated and real cases

Kinship recognition between anonymous DNA samples is becoming a relevant issue in forensics, more so with the increasing number of DNA profiles in databanks. Also, NGS-based genotyping is being increasingly used in routine personal identification, to simultaneously type large numbers of markers of different kind. In the present work, we explored computationally and experimentally the performance of the ForenSeq™ DNA Signature Prep Kit in identifying the true relationship between two anonymous samples, distinguishing it from other possible relationships. We analyzed with Familias R series of 10,000 pairs with 9 different simulated relationships, corresponding to different degrees of autosomal sharing. For each pair we obtained likelihood ratios for five kinship hypotheses vs. unrelatedness, and used their ranking to identify the preferred relationship. We also typed 21 subjects from two pedigrees, representing from parent-child to 4th cousins relationships. As expected, the power for identifying the true relationship decays in the order of autosomal sharing. Parent-child and full siblings can be robustly identified against other relationships. For half-siblings the chance of reaching a significant conclusion is already small. For more distant relationships the proportion of cases correctly and significantly identified is 10% or less. Bidirectional errors in kinship attribution include the suggestion of relatedness when this does not exist (10–50%), and the suggestion of independence in pairs of individuals more than 4 generations apart (25–60%). The real cases revealed a relevant effect of genotype miscalling at some loci, which could only be partly avoided by modulating the analysis parameters. In conclusion, with the exception of first degree relatives, the kit can be useful to inform additional investigations, but does not usually provide probatory results.

Employee performance and abusive supervision: The role of supervisor over‐attributions

SummaryTo understand the relationship between employee performance and abusive reactions from supervisors, we examine the role of supervisors' attributions about employees' performance. Drawing on the fundamental attribution error, we argue that supervisors over‐attribute lower levels of performance to employees' internal factors (i.e., conscientiousness), which then triggers higher levels of abusive supervision. In Study 1, we collected data from 189 supervisor–employee dyads. The results indicated that lower levels of supervisor‐rated employee performance related to supervisor biased attributions to employee conscientiousness, which in turn resulted in employee‐rated abusive supervision. In Study 2, we combined a recall task with a vignette design to replicate and extend our findings. We demonstrated that after adjusting for the baseline level of employee conscientiousness, supervisors over‐attributed poor performance to employee conscientiousness and then engaged in higher levels of abusive behaviors. Further, consistent with premises of fundamental attribution error, we found that in the absence of information about who was at fault for poor performance, supervisors over‐attributed poor performance to internal factors (employee) as compared to external factors (software malfunction). Taken together, our findings demonstrate that biased attributions about employee conscientiousness help explain the relationship between employee performance and abusive supervision.

Netflix and Crime: Identification with the Characters of ‘La Casa de Papel’ Spanish Series

This study examines the Netflix Spanish series La Casa de Papel as a pragmatic example of a series that addresses questions of criminal justification. In this qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 Saudi participants. The findings suggest that the Saudi viewers justified the characters’ crimes influenced by fundamental attribution error. Viewers’ identification with the characters could be seen in their empathy with the robbery team and their desire for threatening characters to die. Viewers also stated that they did not want the criminals to be caught. In fact, viewers felt sad and emotional when the characters were shot or caught. Participants ranked the Professor, Tokyo, Berlin, and Nairobi as the most liked characters. Conversely, the least liked characters were Arturo Román and Sierra because they threatened the success of the robbery. Finally, participants accepted the banker joining the team, while they opposed detective Lisbon joining it.

Attribution Errors by People and Intelligent Machines.

To explore the ramifications of attribution errors (AEs), initially in the context of vehicle collisions and then to extend this understanding into the broader and diverse realms of all forms of human-machine interaction. This work focuses upon a particular topic that John Senders was examining at the time of his death. He was using the lens of attribution, and its associated errors, to seek to further understand and explore dyadic forms of driver collision. We evaluated the utility of the set of Senders' final observations on conjoint AE in two-vehicle collisions. We extended this evaluation to errors of attribution generally, as applicable to all human-human, human-technology, and prospectively technology-technology interactions. As with Senders and his many other contributions, we find evident value in this perspective on how humans react to each other and how they react to emerging forms of technology, such as autonomous systems. We illustrate this value through contemporary examples and prospective analyses. The comprehension and mitigation of AEs can help improve all interactions between people, between intelligent machines and between humans and the machines they work with.

Did i do that? Cognitive flexibility and self-agency in patients with obsessivecompulsive disorder

Self-agency can be understood as the ability to infer causal relationships between actions and sensory events. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients with checking compulsions often report lack of “action-completion” sensations, possibly due to an altered sense of agency in these patients. The present study aimed to investigate whether self-agency was related to cognitive flexibility in OCD checkers. In 18 adult OCD checkers and 18 age- and gender-matched healthy controls, cognitive flexibility was assessed with the Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift Task (IED). Self-agency attribution was evaluated in two tasks that targeted the novel construct of “gaze-agency”, the capability of an observer to identify his or her own eye movements as the cause of a concurrent event (here, an auditory beep). This technique allows sensitive measurement of agency under subtly varying investigator-controlled conditions. OCD checkers manifested significantly inferior performance correctly ascribing the beeps to their own ocular saccades than controls, even when after a hint was provided. Although cognitive inflexibility (errors on the IED) did not differ significantly between the two groups, within the OCD sample there were positive correlations between errors in self-agency attribution and total and extra-dimensional shift errors. These findings show that cognitive inflexibility is related to self-agency in OCD.

Neoliberal etiology and educational failure: A critical exploration

Blaming teachers and schools for perceived or actual educational failures are popular tropes for justifying educational reforms in the United States. Critical educational research implicates neoliberalism in the normalized positioning of teachers and schools as the key suspects in educational failures. This article critiques the etiology of neoliberalism through a critical analysis of the nature of causal relata, causal relations, and the assumed populations in causal claims that attribute educational failure to teachers and schools. It makes the case that though the neoliberal etiology may work well for the neoliberal purposes of accountability and governance of public education and the teaching profession, it does not offer valid causal explanations for the instructional dynamic that contributes to educational failures and successes in the school settings. The article argues that the attribution error of blaming teachers and schools can be avoided by adopting complex causality frameworks for understanding educational failure.

Attribution and reputation estimation errors among mobile phone users regarding neglecting messages in computer-mediated communications

Previous studies have shown that prolonged use of mobile phones can have negative effects such as lower academic performance. In the current study, we examined the factors leading to prolonged use of mobile phones from an interpersonal perspective. A scenario experiment comparing the perspectives of those who neglected others' messages with those whose messages were neglected indicated the following. First, those who neglected others’ messages overestimated the possibility that neglecting messages damaged their reputation among their peers. Second, those whose messages were neglected attributed this behavior to individual factors such as being disliked by the person who neglected them. We discuss the possibility that these misestimations could lead to longer mobile phone use.

Why some leaders qualify for hate: an empirical examination through the lens of followers’ perspective

PurposeThe leaders’ perception about self and the opinion of the subordinates about them is crucial to understand why some leaders qualify for hate. Much has been discussed on the positive and ethical side of leadership. However, the research on the darker side of leadership needs more attention. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the factors along with their impact responsible for hate-for-leaders, a relatively scant area of leadership. This study may facilitate understanding why some leaders become subject to hate despite many efforts by the organization.Design/methodology/approachFor exploring the different factors responsible for hate-for-leaders, a survey was conducted by developing a scale using the focus group, Delphi technique, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The results were analysed using structural equation modelling.FindingsThe factors responsible for qualifying the leaders for hate were identified. Moreover, the results indicated that the subordinate hate the leaders for his/her unacceptable behaviour/actions which they assume the leader has control over it and exhibited otherwise intentionally on targeted employees. Moreover, some undesirable behaviour of leaders is attributed to fundamental attribution errors i.e. situational factors.Practical implicationsA fully developed scale for assessing the hate-quotient for leaders is proposed. This research will facilitate the managers/leaders as to why some of the followers/employees hate them. This scale provides an opportunity for managers and leaders to introspect themselves for improved workplace relationships and not to encourage sunflower management that seeks to get submissive and aligned-thought employees around the leader.Originality/valueThe fact that the decisions taken by managers/leaders adversely affecting the employees are not always because of malice or wrong intentions but sometimes due to situational factors i.e. fundamental attribution error. Moreover, the scale act as a reference to evaluate the hate-for-leaders in the organizational context.

Influence of the Fundamental Attribution Error on Perceptions of Blame and Negligence.

Automobile accidents are a frequent occurrence in the United States and commonly result in legal ramifications. Through a fundamental attribution error (FAE) framework (Ross, 1977), the current research examined how individuals perceive blame and negligence in these cases. In Study 1 (N = 360), we manipulated the driver (you vs. stranger) of a hypothetical accident scenario and the situational circumstances surrounding the accident (favorable vs. unfavorable). Supporting the FAE, individuals' situational blame attributions only varied as a function of situational circumstances when they themselves were hypothetically driving. However, neither the driver nor the situation significantly predicted dispositional blame attributions. Yet, Study 1 provided initial support for the importance of an individual's trait tendency to neglect situational constraints when making dispositional blame attributions. In Study 2 (N = 212), we again manipulated situational circumstances surrounding the hypothetical accident, but within the context of a mock civil trial. Results provided additional support for the importance of this trait tendency and expanded our findings of dispositional blame attributions to perceptions of negligence. Implications include the importance of considering trait individual differences in the likelihood to ignore situational demands when individuals are making legally relevant judgments about automobile accidents.

Does What We Know About Actors’ Real Lives

Abstract. The current study examines the effect of the valence of information provided about an actor on viewers’ identification with the character played by that actor and enjoyment of watching the film. The results from an experiment we conducted demonstrate that the valence of information about an actor influences identification with the character through the mediation of perceptions about the character’s traits and through transportation into the narrative. Information about the actor also indirectly affects the enjoyment of watching the film. We discuss these effects using the concepts of mental models, priming, and the fundamental attribution error as well as transportation theory.

Effects of Integrated Violence Intervention on Alexithymia, Cognitive, and Neurocognitive Features of Violence in Schizophrenia: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Patients with schizophrenia and repetitive violence express core impairments that encompass multiple domains. To date, there have been few interventions integrating neurocognition, social cognition, alexithymia, and emotion regulation together as an approach to manage repetitive violence. The aim of this open-label randomized controlled trial was to examine more comprehensively the effectiveness of a novel Integrated Cognitive Based Violence Intervention Program on management of repetitive violence in patients with schizophrenia (vSZ). Sixty recruited patients were aged ≥20 years, diagnosed with schizophrenia for >2 years, had repetitive violent behavior within one year, and were psychiatrically hospitalized. The vSZ patients were randomly allocated to two groups and received either the intervention or treatment as usual. The intervention module, consisting of all defined 11 cognitive and social cognitive domains as well as emotion regulation, which were grouped into four modules. The intervention placed emphasis on the patients’ behavioral problems or intrinsic conflicts in relation to repetitive violence. The results indicate a statistically significant trend toward reducing impulsivity, anger with resentment, physical aggression, suspicion, and hostility (p < 0.05). The intervention significantly alleviated the intensity of cognitive failure, improved the management of alexithymic features and attribution styles and errors, and fostered adequate decision-making styles and emotion regulation capacity (p < 0.05). The intervention, when applied in conjunction with psychiatric standard care, could exert synergistic effects on alexithymia and cognitive, clinical, and neurocognitive features of repetitive violence in schizophrenia. This intervention provided patients a more active role to manage their violent behavior with the involvement of alexithymia.

Attribution and Ideology in American Politics: Causal Reasoning, Political Cognition, and Partisan Polarization in the Age of Trump

This research reports two Q-studies addressing the possibility that the partisan political divide defining contemporary American politics derives from differences in the way the Right and Left reason causally in addition to the more obvious content-specific contrasts in policy positions and the like. Attribution theory, the study of lay explanatory styles emphasizing either internal considerations — dispositional predilections of actors or external factors — broader environmental/contextual considerations — is employed in concourse compilation for two political controversies (economic inequality and electoral success in the 2016 presidential election), and two studies are reported. Results from the first demonstrate sharp differences between ideological and partisan opponents: Republican respondents display clear tendencies to employ dispositional attributions in accounting for economic inequality, praising the well-to-do as diligent and deserving for their success while denigrating the poor for their failure to compete in free-market capitalism. The second study amplifies and extends these findings by comparing Republican and Democratic accounts of the 2016 election results. Again, those on the Right are found to overdo dispositional attributions in a manner consistent with the “fundamental attribution error” first identified by Fritz Heider and extended by Thomas Pettigrew to inter-group prejudice as “the ultimate attribution error.” A concluding discussion seeks to contextualize these partisan-based differences with reference to the divisive nature of President Trump’s leadership while identifying a way forward for further research.

Reinventing Performance Management

Performance appraisals have traditionally been conducted annually or semi-annually. Recently, many companies are transitioning to ongoing feedback and coaching, either in addition to periodic appraisals, or lieu of them. There have also been calls for completely reinventing performance management systems, as the result of an abundance of research that indicates performance processes are over-engineered and time-consuming, and they tend to demotivate employees while hindering candid and honest conversations. This paper examines the common problems with attribution error and rater bias in traditional performance appraisal systems. Five mini-case studies are then presented by exploring how five large companies (Netflix, Adobe, Deloitte, IBM, GE), have reinvented the way in which performance management is implemented. The paper examines why these companies moved away from traditional performance appraisal and what processes replaced it. The paper also identifies emerging trends that will impact the future of performance management and offers suggestions for the road ahead.