Fundamental Attribution Error Research Articles

Fundamental Attribution Error in the Classroom: Why and How Bias Hurts?

The purpose of this article is to explore the fundamental attribution error (FAE) and its sociocultural implications in educational settings, examining its role in shaping teacher-student interactions and perceptions of accountability, particularly across diverse cultural contexts. Drawing on empirical research and theoretical analysis, including Garcia's work on the miseducation of Latina girls, the article discusses the emergence of FAE as a cognitive bias that influences educational trajectories and reinforces systemic inequalities. Findings suggest that a universal cognitive mechanism is at play, but its impact varies with cultural nuances, requiring culturally responsive pedagogical strategies. The article calls for an educational shift toward inclusivity and equity and urges further research and the development of interventions to mitigate the influence of biases such as the FAE in schools worldwide.

A viewpoint on the impact of fundamental attribution error in organizational learning

PurposeTo explore the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) bias as a potential impediment to organizational learning and to develop a conceptual model for practitioners and scholars to consider.Design/methodology/approachOur methodology includes a review and adoption of concepts from social cognition, organizational psychology, and learning theory to examine the role of FAE bias in organizational learning.FindingsFAE bias is characterized by providing implicit support for fostering employee cynicism and resistance behaviors and facilitates ongoing cognitive cycles that hinder collaborative learning and knowledge sharing.Practical implicationsBy understanding the role of FAE bias in organizational learning, leaders can develop strategies to mitigate the negative impact of FAE bias on organizational learning dynamics and enhance a social cycle that can improve the organization's learning culture.Social implicationsThis viewpoint highlights that FAE bias in the workplace can lead to a breakdown in how individuals process emotions (affect), actions (behavior) and thoughts (cognition) in social scenarios, exacerbating employee cynicism and resistance, which in turn undermines effective collaboration, communication and the overall social fabric essential for organizational learning.Originality/valueThis viewpoint presents a novel perspective by linking FAE bias directly to cognitive cycles that can impede organizational learning processes through cynicism and resistance behavior, which we propose should be proactively considered by organizations leveraging learning as a key management strategy.

Role, Values, Person and Context: A Story of ‘Bent’repreneurship

We prove a fundamental attribution error connecting rule-breaking behavior to entrepreneurs. We do so in the research context of the US, where we recently sampled from medium-sized venture entrepreneurs and their corporate executive peers (as an applicable reference point). We chose the US not only for its high entrepreneurial activity, but also because of the not uncommon relationship between business leaders and religion. By including various measures of religiosity in the study, we could control for factors that would likely influence rule-breaking, which standard models like the fraud triangle do not explicitly consider. In fact, we add contingency theory ideas to the fraud triangle to determine whether it is the decision conditions that determine rule-breaking rather than the role of the person (i.e., as an entrepreneur). We find that once demographic, religious, firm and industry contingencies are controlled for, any statistically significant influence of being an entrepreneur (relative to being a corporate executive with similar opportunity, motivation, capability and rationalization) disappears when it comes to self-admitted value-bending behaviors at work. Our contribution consists of a novel analysis, results and discussion of the ‘bent’repreneur—adding to conversations on the under-researched nexus of entrepreneurship with religiosity and ethical decision-making.

Perspective taking reduces the correspondence bias: A systematically replication of Hooper et al. (2015)

Correspondence bias has been extensively described in the scientific literature, along with its harmful consequences to relationships, decision-making, etc. Interventions aiming to reduce correspondence bias or its negative impact have been also offered. In this regard, the present study systematically replicated Hooper et al. (2015) to observe the effect of a brief perspective-taking training based on Relational Frame Theory (RFT-PT) on correspondence bias. Eighty-one participants were randomized into four groups, two experimental groups that underwent training and two control groups that answered a general knowledge questionnaire. To observe the extent of correspondence bias and the effect of training on this phenomenon, all participants were exposed to an experimental condition involving the Attitude Attribution Paradigm consisting of essays in favor of or against meritocracy. This condition demanded that the participant read an essay about meritocracy, supposedly written by a candidate in a selection process, and attribute to the declarant a position in favor or against meritocracy. Attenuation of correspondence bias was observed in the groups that underwent the RFT-PT compared to the control groups, supporting the hypothesis that the opportunity to vary perspectives may decrease correspondence bias. An analysis of correspondence bias in light of the RFT is suggested.

A View from Behind the Microphone During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned.

Based on experience as a physician providing audio, video, and print media in the Catholic sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic, the author discusses patterns of behavior observed in the media that contributed to polarization among people of good will. Such patterns included the practice of biases such as the fundamental attribution error, the white hat bias, and motivated cognition. Polarized beliefs also developed from individual and secular cultural over-reliance on the left brain's discomfort with uncertainty to find certainty where it did not exist. Reliance on the right brain's expertise of seeing the big picture and fostering relationships while incorporating information from the left brain would lead to better understanding and action. Counterfeit versions of individual human dignity and the common good led to media reporting battles between proponents of individual rights versus the common good, while a Catholic understanding of human dignity and the common good harmonizes them instead of seeing them in opposition. Finally, the article examines some practical advice to put relationships above being right. These include active forgiveness, examination of conscience around our biases, and the CAKE acronym among other bits of wisdom from medical literature, modern psychology, and the Catholic tradition for how we can each be better versions of ourselves when discussing polarizing medical topics.

Investigating mechanisms of political polarization: Perceivers spontaneously infer ideological categories from other people's behavior

AbstractWhen observing others' behavior, people routinely infer personality traits from it. Research on the correspondence bias has shown that they draw these inferences even from behavior that is situationally constrained. Moreover, these inferences often happen spontaneously, that is, when people have no intention of forming an impression. The current research investigated whether the same applies for inferences of ideological categories, such as conservative, feminist, or climate change denier. We present a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 1012) employing both direct and indirect measures from the impression formation literature. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that people deliberately, as well as spontaneously, inferred ideological categories from ideology‐implying behavioral descriptions. In Experiments 3, 4, and 5, we found these inferences to be very robust, in that they persist even when alternative reasons for the ideology‐implying behaviors are presented, suggesting that they are subject to the correspondence bias. We argue that to the extent that people attribute negative valence (affective polarization) or extreme attitudes (perceived issue polarization) to ideological categories, spontaneous inferences of these categories can serve as a precondition for a range of negative interpersonal outcomes related to political polarization.

Exploring bias in incident investigations: An empirical examination using construction case studies

Introduction: Incident investigation is a foundational tool of safety management. Determining the causal factors of any incident underpins organizational learning and subsequent positive change to processes and practices. Research of incident investigation has largely focused on what information to collect, how to analyze it, and how to optimize resultant conclusions and organizational learning. However, much less attention has been paid to the process of information collection, and specifically that of subjective information obtained through interviews. Yet, as all humans are biased and can’t help being so, the information collection process is inevitably vulnerable to bias. Method: Simulated investigation interviews with 34 experienced investigators were conducted within the construction industry. Results: Common biases were revealed including confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and fundamental attribution error. Analysis was also able to unpack when and how these biases most often emerged in the interview process, and the potential consequences for organizational learning. Conclusions: Being biased to a certain degree will remain inevitable for any individual, and therefore, efforts to mitigate the effects of biases is necessary. Practical Applications: Increased awareness and insights can support the development of processes and training for investigators to mitigate its effects and thus enhance learning from incidents in the field prevent reoccurrence.

Moral elevation affects the causal attributions about others’ behavior

ABSTRACT Moral elevation refers to the positive emotional response resulting from witnessing acts of virtue or moral beauty. While the evidence demonstrates that experiencing elevation has a positive effect on people’s prosocial behavior, an intriguing question is whether this emotion also affects social-cognitive processes involved in the perception of others’ behavior. The present research aims to study whether this elevation affects the causal attributions people make about the behavior of others. The results of three studies (total N = 267 adults from Spain; 79.03% women) show that a) elevation trait correlates with internal causal attributions about others’ behavior, b) experimental manipulation of elevation affects causal attributions about others’ behavior, and c) experimental manipulation of elevation can reduce correspondence bias (fundamental attributional error). The results are discussed within the framework of the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

Judging a book by its cover: Cultural differences in inference of the inner state based on the outward appearance.

The world can be represented by two layers of information: How it appears on the outside (outward appearance) and what it is on the inside (inner state). To what extent an outward appearance is assumed to reflect the inner state is fundamental to social inference and judgments. Conceptualizing inference in terms of the relationship between the outward appearance and the inner state generates an integrative interpretation for a wide range of phenomena. We showed that Chinese were more likely than Euro-Canadians to make inference of inner state that deviated from outward appearance, whereas Euro-Canadians were more likely than Chinese to infer a convergence between outward appearance and inner state (Studies 1-5). We observed these cross-cultural patterns in various contexts involving people or physical structures. Individual differences in correspondence bias or response bias did not explain these patterns. The lay belief that outward appearance can be misleading mediated the cultural effects (Study 4). To probe the underlying process, two additional experiments showed that highlighting the misleading nature of appearance, but not highlighting the power of the situation, reduced Americans' beliefs (Study 6) and inference (Study 7) that the outward appearance reflects the inner state. By focusing on the assumed relationship between the outward appearance and inner state, these findings provide a unique angle for understanding cross-cultural phenomena and have practical implications in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Check yourself before you wreck yourself: qualitative inquiry into risky behaviors and substance use during early-mid-adolescence

ABSTRACT Aim Getting professional help in early-mid adolescence can reduce or eliminate harm related to substance use and risky situations. Research was conducted over eighty years ago that increased our understanding of cognitive development in the adolescent period (the concrete stage of development) of life. However, there is a need for a greater understanding of the Fundamental Attribution Error for substance use problems and risky behaviors. The current study identifies developmental and cultural factors that would facilitate or prevent adolescents from seeking support for problems. Method Eighty (80) eleven to thirteen-year-olds were recruited from a middle school in Washington State. A qualitative interpretative design using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used incorporating semi-structured, computer-generated interviews. Results Several overlapping themes that reflected barriers or enablers to seeking help were identified: approachability, confidentiality and trustworthiness, and perceived expertise. Help-seeking was facilitated when adolescents believed that the help source would be honest, would keep the information confidential; interpret the information accurately; were viewed as trustworthy; and possessed expertise in the field of substance use and risky behaviors. Conclusions These findings highlight perceptions that may influence help-seeking for substance use problems and risky behaviors. Mothers were reported to be the most significant supports in life, followed by fathers, then friends and siblings. These supports need further investigation. Further research is needed to determine if help-seeking can be facilitated by improving parent and peer knowledge of risky behaviors and promoting the expertise of health professionals. Additional research is needed into the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Explaining the Unexplained: Situational Differences in Fundamental Attribution Error

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) has been one of the most investigated aspects of human bias. This research seeks to distinguish between the two most common explanations: the cognitive stage theory and the motivational explanation. Participants were given three scenarios in which participants were asked to explain a described event where something happens to another group of people. Each scenario differed from the others in terms of proximity to and effect on the observer, but all three were described without explanation. Mixed-method analysis of the responses of 81 participants contributed to a better understanding of FAE by supporting a hierarchical predictive model based on motivational explanations as the strongest model for FAE. Furthermore, the findings support an interaction between self-serving bias and FAE, but do not support cultural effects on FAE.

Reconsidering the “bias” in “the correspondence bias”.

Reconsidering the “bias” in “the correspondence bias”.

Modeling “Remorse Bias” in probation narratives: Examining social cognition and judgments of implicit violence during sentencing

AbstractThis research, utilizing semi‐structured interviews with a sample of U.S. probation officers (N = 151) and grounded theory, provides the first‐known empirical study to examine ways in which implicit cognitive processes may influence how probation officers evaluate expressions of remorse by defendants during the sentencing of violent offenses. Particularly, I develop a model by which probation officers exhibit remorse bias toward defendants with characteristics that are stereotypically associated with violence and how such bias can negatively affect officers’ pre‐sentencing reports and sentencing recommendations for such defendants. Data showed that officers exhibit remorse bias by linking certain personal and background characteristics of defendants that “signal” the potential for violence to implicit assumptions that their remorse displays are insincere through two social cognitive processes: fundamental attribution error and issues with out‐group empathy. When probation officers exhibited remorse bias via these social cognitive processes, they described craftingnegative “remorse‐based narratives” in their pre‐sentencing reports that express doubt about the authenticity of defendants’ remorse displays and use such displays to make character assessments that portray defendants as being implicitly violent. Takeaways and implications of the developed model, as well as the need to provide trainings to probation officers on remorse bias, are discussed.

Confusing Context with Character: Correspondence Bias in Economic Interactions

When drawing inferences about a person’s personal characteristics from the person’s actions, “correspondence bias” is the tendency to overestimate the influence of those characteristics and underestimate the influence of situational factors, such as incentives the individual faces. We build a simple framework to formalize correspondence bias and test its predictions in an online experiment. Consistent with correspondence bias, subjects are, on average, willing to pay to receive the dictator-game givings of an individual with whom they are randomly assigned to play a game that encourages cooperation rather than one with whom they play a game that encourages selfish behavior. We show, further, that experiencing both games oneself, as opposed to playing one and observing the other, reduces the bias, and receiving information about how each of the players behaved in both games eliminates it. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Y. Liu acknowledges financial support from the Einstein Foundation [Grant EVF-2018-426]. Supplemental Material: Data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4384 .

Lee D. Ross (1942–2021).

Memorializes Lee D. Ross (1942-2021). Ross made many contributions to social psychology. He had a knack for seeing the broad and deep psychological processes underlying individual episodes of rich, everyday behavior. Ross then crafted experiments that explored those processes in a way that was engaging and unusually memorable. After completing his PhD degree in 1969, Ross joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he taught for 52 years. Ross first achieved prominence in 1977 when he coined the term "the fundamental attribution error" to describe the tendency to attribute behavior primarily to a person's traits, attitudes, and other characteristics even when it should be clear that the person's behavior was largely the result of situational influences or constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Generalizing across behavior settings can make attitudes toward social groups more extreme in the absence of new information

AbstractPrevious research has shown that attitudes can become more extreme through mere thought. The present studies tested whether one specific type of thought—generalizing about a group's traits across settings—makes attitudes toward the group more extreme. We gave participants in four experiments initial information about (fictitious) foreign groups who wanted to enter the United States. The initial information concerned traits the group displayed in a specific type of setting. Participants thought it highly likely the group's traits would generalize across settings. Compared to reviewing the information given, generalizing made both negative (Experiment 1) and positive (Experiment 2) attitudes and behavioral intentions more extreme, regardless of the initial or generalized setting (Experiment 3). Individual differences in correspondence bias moderated the effects of generalizing versus reviewing on attitudes and behavioral intentions (Experiment 4). The current findings offer novel insights into how a specific type of thought can make attitudes more extreme.

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?