Fundamental Attribution Error Research Articles

Abnormal Causal Attribution Leads to Advantageous Economic Decision-making: A Neuropsychological Approach

People tend to assume that outcomes are caused by dispositional factors, for example, a person's constitution or personality, even when the actual cause is due to situational factors, for example, luck or coincidence. This is known as the "correspondence bias." This tendency can lead normal, intelligent persons to make suboptimal decisions. Here, we used a neuropsychological approach to investigate the neural basis of the correspondence bias, by studying economic decision-making in patients with damage to the ventromedial pFC (vmPFC). Given the role of the vmPFC in social cognition, we predicted that vmPFC is necessary for the normal correspondence bias. In our experiment, consistent with expectations, healthy (n = 46) and brain-damaged (n = 30) comparison participants displayed the correspondence bias during economic decision-making and invested no differently when given dispositional or situational information. By contrast, vmPFC patients (n = 17) displayed a lack of correspondence bias and invested more when given dispositional than situational information. The results support the conclusion that vmPFC is critical for normal social inference and the correspondence bias. The findings help clarify the important (and sometimes disadvantageous) role of social inference in economic decision-making.

Inflated Applicants: Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation by Professionals

When explaining others' behaviors, achievements, and failures, it is common for people to attribute too much influence to disposition and too little influence to structural and situational factors. We examine whether this tendency leads even experienced professionals to make systematic mistakes in their selection decisions, favoring alumni from academic institutions with high grade distributions and employees from forgiving business environments. We find that candidates benefiting from favorable situations are more likely to be admitted and promoted than their equivalently skilled peers. The results suggest that decision-makers take high nominal performance as evidence of high ability and do not discount it by the ease with which it was achieved. These results clarify our understanding of the correspondence bias using evidence from both archival studies and experiments with experienced professionals. We discuss implications for both admissions and personnel selection practices.

Challenge and Contribution of Cultural Psychology to Empirical Legal Studies

Empirical legal studies can benefit from the research findings of cultural psychology to understand the fundamental principles of law. Research findings in cultural psychology have shown that Eastern Asian cultures and North American cultures differ significantly in value orientations, moral judgments and cognitive styles. East Asian values emphasize collectivism and North American values emphasize individualism. East Asians moral reasons are centered on the principles of duties and responsibilities whereas North American moral reasons are centered on the principles of autonomy and justice. East Asian cognitive styles tend to be more holistic, focusing on context, backgrounds and relations and the North American cognitive styles tend to be more analytic, focusing on objects, categories and dispositions. Such cultural differences have profound implications in legal understanding and legal practices, as laws are human machinery and are subject to the influence of human values, moralities and cognition. Mounting evidence in cross-cultural legal studies has shown East and West differences in causation inquiry, responsibility judgments, contract formation and mediation practices. Research indicates that East Asian causal reasoning is less likely to make the fundamental attribution error as North Americans do. East Asians’ responsibility judgments, compared with North Americans’, involve more contextual information (such as moral judgments) than the law actually warrants. East Asians’ contract formation may be more based on relational obligations than the North Americans’, which are rule based. The compensation judgments by East Asians appear to be based on the consequence whereas judgments made by North Americans seem to be based on intention judgments. East Asians also prefer mediation in conflict resolutions while North Americans prefer litigation in conflict resolutions. We argue that these differences could influence people’s understanding, construction and use of laws in fundamental ways. As the law attempts to further understand people, and as theorists continue to evaluate how human life and law influence each others, scholars in both psychology and law must challenge themselves to reflect on the law’s substantive and procedural standards being applied in different cultural groups.. We hope our paper can generate enough interests among Chinese psychologists and legal scholars to start the journey towards finding solutions that both considers cultural psychology’s empirical findings and effectuates our legal ideals. The cross-culture empirical legal studies hence not only provide a new paradigm for legal scholarship but also provide theoretical guidance for advancing Chinese legal studies in global stages as well as in resolving international legal disputes between people from China and other countries.

The blog and the bountiful: Exploring the effects of disguised product placement on blogs that are revealed by a third party

This article investigates the effects of a revelation to blog readers that the blog has been sponsored by a company in exchange for favorable reviews of their products. We compare the responses of two groups of blog readers. One group was exposed to a revelation in a tabloid newspaper that the blogger has been sponsored without admitting it. The other group was not exposed to such a revelation. We find that the attitude toward the blog and the credibility of the blog will suffer after the revelation. The attitude toward the sponsoring brand and the purchase intention, however, will not suffer as a result of the revelation. We find that the effects on the blog can be partially explained by parasocial interaction, whereas the effects on the brand can be partially explained by correspondence bias. On the basis of our findings, we provide implications for both bloggers and brand managers.

The importance of surprising findings in psychology

The importance of surprising findings in psychology

Group status, perceptions of agency, and the correspondence bias: Attributional processes in the formation of stereotypes about high and low status groups

The Stereotype Content Model proposes that competence (or alternatively, agency) is a fundamental dimension of stereotypes. According to this model, beliefs about agency are partially due to the status relations between groups, such that high status groups are perceived to possess agency, whereas low status groups are perceived to lack agentic characteristics. Despite the considerable support for this model, the psychological processes that produce these stereotypes have not been fully explored. In the current studies, we examined whether the correspondence bias may be partially responsible for the stereotype that members of low status groups lack agentic characteristics, relative to those who belong to high status groups. Across both studies, a measure of the correspondence bias predicted such stereotypical beliefs, even after accounting for variables that are known to be associated with beliefs about high and low status groups. This effect was observed when beliefs about the status of groups were experimentally manipulated, and when we measured stereotypical beliefs about two sets of actual high and low status groups.

Streaming and Students’ Self-Esteem: A Qualitative Study on Teachers’ Correspondence Bias

This study was aimed to investigate the effect of students streaming practice in Malaysian secondary on students self-esteem through teachers expectancy. 17 teachers and 20 students from art and science streams of secondary schools in Penang, Malaysia were participated in this study. Unstructured interviews were used on teachers to collect the qualitative data of teachers expectancy. The participating students were from the fourth year of secondary school in Malaysian school system (between 16-17 years old, 10 from science stream and 10 from arts stream) were interviewed in order to collect the qualitative data of teachers perceived behavior and self-esteem. Result of this study shown that teachers expected science stream students to have good academic performance but expected arts stream students to be involved in disciplinary problems. Furthermore, science stream students perceived that their teachers were academically supportive but arts stream students perceived that their teachers were focusing on controlling their behavior. On the other hand, findings of this study also revealed that science stream students possed higher level of self-esteem than arts stream students. Accordingly, it was indicated that teachers perceived behavior and teachers expectancy are correlated to one another, and teachers perceived behavior predicts students self-esteem. It was discovered that teachers expected science stream students to be eager to improve their academic performance, and students from arts stream class were likely to be involved in disciplinary problems. Students were found to be aware of their teachers expectancy, and their perception of teachers expectancy affected their self-esteem. While self-esteem was referred to a discrepancy between a students ideal-self and actual-self, it was discovered that both groups of students pictured their ideal-self differently to each other. Science stream students pictured their ideal-selves as a character with overall success, while arts stream students pictured their ideal-selves as a socially well-functioned character. Nevertheless, arts stream students found to have lower self-esteem. It was concluded that streaming affected the students self-esteem through teachers expectancy and perceived behavior.

Situationism, Moral Responsibility and Blame

In Moral philosophy meets social psychology, Gilbert Harman argues that social psychology can educate folk morality to prevent us from committing the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ i.e. ‘the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent’s distinctive character traits’ (Harman, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331, 1999). An overview of the literature shows that while situationists unanimously agree with Harman on this point, they disagree on whether we also tend to commit a kind of fundamental attribution error with respect to moral responsibility and blame. Do we also tend to ignore situational factors and overconfidently assume that people are morally responsible and blameworthy for their distinctive patterns of wrongful behaviour? Very few scholars have addressed this issue, and none has ever given a comprehensive account of moral responsibility and blame from a situationist perspective. In this paper, I argue that situationist social psychology impugns subjective theories of responsibility and blame which focus on the agent’s inner states and supports an objective theory—namely, the standard of the reasonable person. I defend this standard as a tool for moral appraisal, and then I refute the common misperception that this approach lets most perpetrators off the hook and poses a threat to society.

The Entrepreneurs Random Walk

The issues of entrepreneurial ex-ante determination and managerial intent are discussed as applied to the ex-post organizational result. Possible errors in over-attribution of success to the celebrity-entrepreneur and the tendency to disregard the impact of endogenous market conditions, randomness on success due to creative destruction free-market mechanisms are discussed.Humans inherently look for correlation as correlations produce useful knowledge. Specifically, investors seek to create cause-effect knowledge in order to enhance returns. Students and researchers of business also attempt to tie causation to effects. Fundamental attribution error psychology posits a tendency to over-weight personality-based explanations and under-value situational factors when assessing what factors are responsible for the ex-post-facto outcome of an organization. In the field of entrepreneurship, this trait of human psychology may manifest in the tendency to credit the leader him/herself of a successful organization vis-a-vis more important external factors which contributed to success such as the temporal status of market demand conditions.The existence of fundamental attribution error may likewise lead to over-weight emphasis of a leaders input to organizational failure, however, the sample of entrepreneurs linked to successful organizations is self-selected as the unsuccessful entrepreneurs are usually not locatable. Therefore, stakeholders show strong tendencies to link the focus-entrepreneur with a resultant successful enterprise. This tendency is observable in the general culture as most students of entrepreneurship believe the knowledge and actions of Ray Kroc were a prime factor in the economic success of McDonalds. The question explored within the present study is to what extent is such ex-post-facto success attributable to the ex-ante entrepreneurial intent appropriate?Most people familiar with business strongly identify; Steve Jobs with Apple, Thomas Watson with IBM, Dave Thomas with Wendys, Bill Gates with Microsoft, Howard Schultz with Starbucks, Harland Sanders with KFC, and Fred Smith with FedEX. Instructors of entrepreneurship teach with these stories. More importantly, researchers of entrepreneurship use these leaders and their associated knowledge and behavior as independent variables when regressing these variables onto the ex-post dependent outcome of the organization. The investing and finance community also correlate these success story celebrity-entrepreneurs with the resulting rate of return on equity. This paper explores a series of archive-based recollections of the entrepreneurs ex-ante thoughts to demonstrate that many legendary-business entrepreneurs did not expect the organizations extraordinary rates of growth and the ex-post-facto market successes. Hence, cause-effect attribution questions arise.One important research question addressed within is; if the entrepreneur did not know of, or expect growth before the growth, then the resulting growth may not be fully attributed to the person as valid intent. More generally, then to what extent can the resulting organizational success be attributed to the identified behavior of entrepreneurship? Are the successes normally attributed to individual-entrepreneurs really organizational successes or even random-walk phenomenon? Are fundamental attribution errors over-weighing the construct of entrepreneurship and obscuring other, organizational-based, effective causes of economic success?The rise of the media-driven, celebrity-entrepreneur leads to a recent strengthening of attribution of organizational success to that leader. Conclusions within the current study lead to a more distinct focus on the time-limited tasks of entrepreneurship that are very limited in proportional impact to a firms total life-span and resulting economic value. We then can attribute much more of the resulting economic value to the impact of organizational dynamics and organizational development.

L'apport de la psychologie sociale à l'analyse économique

Dans cet article, nous proposons une revue de la littérature identifiant l’apport central de la psychologie sociale à l’analyse économique. Nous précisons tout d’abord le champ recouvert par la psychologie, ses centres d’intérêt, ses méthodes et ses outils d’analyse. Nous montrons ensuite comment l’introduction des processus interpersonnels décrits par les psychologues – dissonance cognitive, heuristiques mentales, erreur fondamentale d’attribution, diffusion de la responsabilité, pensée magique, biais de faux consensus, croyance en un monde juste – permet de mieux cerner les environnements dans lesquels la rationalité de la décision économique s’opère et ceux dans lesquels les autorités publiques peuvent intervenir pour rendre la décision plus efficace. Nous nous centrons ensuite sur le rôle majeur de l’influence sociale (conformisme, leadership), de la formation des groupes (identité, discrimination) ou encore des liens sociaux (famille, amis), dans la prise de décision économique individuelle et collective. Notre revue montre que la collaboration entre économistes et psychologues, la mise en commun de leur pratique et de leur expérience, peut déboucher sur des outils plus performants de politique publique.

Leisure education research and the fundamental attribution error

The purpose of this paper is to summarise and integrate two history-based content analysis studies related to leisure education in order to highlight the pervasive existence of the fundamental attribution error in leisure education research and to outline its problematic consequences. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overestimate dispositional or internal attributions of a person when explaining or modifying behaviour, and to underestimate the influence of environmental factors. In a span of approximately 30 years, there have been 159 leisure education learning components developed from 27 research studies in which leisure education was treated as an independent research variable. Of these 159 leisure learning components, only six components – or just under 4% – focused attention on changing environmental factors outside of the leisure education participants. Recommendations regarding future leisure education practice and research are provided.

A Role for Social Psychology Instruction in Reducing Bias and Conflict

Two studies investigated the potential for social psychology instruction to improve interpersonal understanding and to reduce conflict among American undergraduates. In Study 1, in comparison with general-education social science students who received fewer lectures and exercises on the fundamental attribution error (FAE), social psychology students showed: (a) greater openness to their own FAE; (b) less FAE in explaining anti-American terrorism; and (c) less negative feeling and judgment in response to negative behaviour in general. Self-reported understanding of the FAE concept predicted all three of these outcome measures across courses. In Study 2, from pre- to post-instruction periods, social psychology students showed: (a) an increase in openness to their own biases; (b) a decrease in the FAE in judging three of five targets (driver, employee, terrorist); (c) a decrease in negative feelings toward one of four targets (driver); but (d) a slight increase in a self-serving bias. All but one result in Study 2 remained after covarying for social desirability.

Fundamental(ist) attribution error: Protestants are dispositionally focused.

Attribution theory has long enjoyed a prominent role in social psychological research, yet religious influences on attribution have not been well studied. We theorized and tested the hypothesis that Protestants would endorse internal attributions to a greater extent than would Catholics, because Protestantism focuses on the inward condition of the soul. In Study 1, Protestants made more internal, but not external, attributions than did Catholics. This effect survived controlling for Protestant work ethic, need for structure, and intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. Study 2 showed that the Protestant-Catholic difference in internal attributions was significantly mediated by Protestants' greater belief in a soul. In Study 3, priming religion increased belief in a soul for Protestants but not for Catholics. Finally, Study 4 found that experimentally strengthening belief in a soul increased dispositional attributions among Protestants but did not change situational attributions. These studies expand the understanding of cultural differences in attributions by demonstrating a distinct effect of religion on dispositional attributions.

Broadening Our Understanding of Clinical Quality: From Attribution Error to Situated Cognition

The tendency to overestimate the influence of personal characteristics on outcomes, and to underestimate the influence of situational factors, is known as the fundamental attribution error. We argue that medical-education researchers and policy makers may be guilty of this error in their quest to understand clinical quality. We suggest that to truly understand clinical quality, they must examine situational factors, which often have a strong influence on the quality of clinical encounters.

“They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am”: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives

Facebook, as one of the most popular social networking sites among college students, provides a platform for people to manage others' impressions of them. People tend to present themselves in a favorable way on their Facebook profile. This research examines the impact of using Facebook on people's perceptions of others' lives. It is argued that those with deeper involvement with Facebook will have different perceptions of others than those less involved due to two reasons. First, Facebook users tend to base judgment on examples easily recalled (the availability heuristic). Second, Facebook users tend to attribute the positive content presented on Facebook to others' personality, rather than situational factors (correspondence bias), especially for those they do not know personally. Questionnaires, including items measuring years of using Facebook, time spent on Facebook each week, number of people listed as their Facebook "friends," and perceptions about others' lives, were completed by 425 undergraduate students taking classes across various academic disciplines at a state university in Utah. Surveys were collected during regular class period, except for two online classes where surveys were submitted online. The multivariate analysis indicated that those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook "friends" agreed more that others had better lives.

Attempted Criminal Offences in Egyptian Criminal Law 'Study and Analysis on How to Apply the General Legal Principles of Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ) in Criminal Law Particularly to Attempted Criminal Crimes'

Therapeutic jurisprudence is an interdisciplinary perspective that can provide a grounding for the new judicial movement. Generally, therapeutic jurisprudence asks which legal arrangements specifically work and why. Therapeutic jurisprudence began in the area of mental health law, criticizing various aspects of mental health law that seemed, curiously, to produce antitherapeutic consequences for the people that the law was designed to help.Despite its origins in the field of mental health law, therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) soon found easy application to other areas of law, such as criminal law, juvenile law, family law, personal injury law and has now emerged as a therapeutic approach to the law generally. So, we can say that (TJ) is the study of the role of law as a healing agent, and its offers fresh insights into the role of law in society and those who practice it.From the definition given above, we can say that (TJ) focuses on the traditionally unappreciated area of law’s considerable impact on the emotional life and physiological well-being of those affected by it. As a law is a social force that can produce therapeutic and anti therapeutic results because it consists of legal rules, legal procedures, and the roles and behaviors of legal actors, like lawyers and judges, (TJ) proposes that we use the tool of the behavioral sciences to study the therapeutic and antitherapeutic impact of the law and how to improve the therapeutic functioning of the law without violating other important values, such as due process concerns. In fact, there is a considerable body of empirical evidence indicating that people tend to over-estimate the degree of personal control that others have over their behavior and tend to underestimate the importance of situational influences; “a phenomenon referred to in the behavioral science literature as the “fundamental attribution error.””Thus, (TJ) can be regarded as a theoretical foundation for problem-solving courts, especially criminal courts, juvenile, drug-treatment, teen and youth courts…etc. As an approach, as it has much to offer judges concerning how they treat the people before them, and provides insights with respect to how the courts might be structured so as to maximize their therapeutic potential. The people appearing in problem-solving courts particularly in criminal and family courts are there because they have problems that they have not recognized or had the ability to deal with effectively. They may have alcoholism, or other substance-abuse problems and they may contribute to repetitive criminality, domestic violence, or child abuse and neglect. They may be repetitive perpetrators of domestic violence or child abuse as a result of cognitive distortions concerning their relationships with their spouses or children or because they lack the social skills to manage their anger or resolve problems other than through violence. In that respect, it is should be noted that “Winick” has also used the therapeutic value of choice idea in articles arguing for reform of the criminal justice system, especially in the connection with procedures for evaluating and adjudicating competency to stand trial within that system. This approach then, seeks to transform the judiciary, to create new judicial structures and also to focus the work and behavior of the individual judge, so as to treat and prevent serious problems. As these problems are views from a public health-type perspective, the importance of using therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) principles to help people solve problems that otherwise would likely produce repeated court involvement is recognized.Accordingly, In this research paper, I expound in detail the Criminal Attempted Offences in Egyptian Criminal Law as it represents one of the most common examples of crimes in Egyptian Penal Law, hoping at the end of the research to apply the general legal principles of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) to the accused who has been convicted of committing this kind of crime not only with respect to punish the offender and impose criminal sanctions on him or her, irrespective to the sort of penalty from the legal perspective, but also focusing on rehabilitation, reform and retribution of the offender from moral and treatment perspectives. Early writers and philosophers advocated that the study of crime should emphasize individual, scientific treatment of the criminal, not the post conviction punishment. Therefore, adherents believed that the punishment should fit the criminal, not the crime. (The Positive School of Criminology, Cesare Lombroso, Leader of this School and the Father of Modern Criminology).

Demonstrating the Correspondence Bias

The authors describe a classroom-based demonstration of the correspondence bias—the tendency for observers to make dispositional attributions for an actor’s behavior. The demonstration is memorable, effective, takes roughly 5 minutes, and produced improvement in understanding of the bias.

Suspicion: Its sources, means of control, and effect on interorganizational relationships

Suspicion in the interorganizational relationship literature has been associated with relationship decay but this literature fails to capture the value of suspicion in maintaining relationships. The authors offer an inventory of propositions, suggesting that the level of suspicion determines whether it has beneficial or harmful effects on channel relationships. Support for many of these propositions is based on a unique attribute of suspicion: Suspicion serves as an antidote to the fundamental attribution error, or the tendency to take behavior at face value without allowing for situational influences. Such an attribute suggests suspicion should have an important influence on interorganizational relationships. Specifically, the authors propose that suspicion can be beneficial at moderate levels, but harmful at very low or high levels. Of particular interest to practitioners, we propose some methods for controlling suspicion.

TETLOCK AND COUNTERFACTUALS: SAVING METHODOLOGICAL AMBITION FROM EMPIRICAL FINDINGS

In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barriers facing experts. This shift was brought on by an awareness that experts are not rational Bayesians who continually update their theories to keep up with new information; but instead are affected by political, cognitive, and psychological heuristics, including hindsight bias, cognitive conservatism, and the fundamental attribution error. But techniques of computational simulation-involving the rigorous production of large numbers of counterfactual worlds-make it possible to mitigate both problems that Tetlock identifies: that history, produced only once, is a lousy teacher; and that humans, with their collection of non-Bayesian heuristics, are lousy pupils. Tetlock was wrong to reject this approach as theoretically promising but rhetorically and practically impractical.

Investigating the Human Dimension of Weed Management: New Tools of the Trade

The human dimension of weed management is most evident when farmers make decisions contrary to science-based recommendations. Why do farmers resist adopting practices that will delay herbicide resistance, or seem to ignore new weed species or biotypes until it is too late? Weed scientists for the most part have ignored such questions or considered them beyond their domain and expertise, continuing to focus instead on fundamental weed science and technology. Recent pressing concerns about widespread failure of herbicide-based weed management and acceptability of emerging technologies necessitates a closer look at farmer decision making and the role of weed scientists in that process. Here we present a circular risk-analysis framework characterized by regular interaction with and input from farmers to inform both research and on-farm risk-management decisions. The framework utilizes mental models to probe the deeply held beliefs of farmers regarding weeds and weed management. A mental model is a complex, often hidden web of perceptions and attitudes that govern how we understand and respond to the world. One's mental model may limit ability to develop new insights and adopt new ways of management, and is best assessed through structured, open-ended interviews that enable the investigator to exhaust the subjects inherent to a particular risk. Our assessment of farmer mental models demonstrated the fundamental attribution error whereby farmers attributed problems with weed management primarily to factors outside of their control, such as uncontrolled weed growth on neighboring properties and environmental factors. Farmers also identified specific processes that contribute to weed problems that were not identified by experts; specifically, the importance of floods and faulty herbicide applications in the spread of weeds. Conventional farmers expressed an overwhelming preference for controlling weeds with herbicides, a preference that was reinforced by their extreme dislike for weeds. These preferences reflect a typical inverse relationship between perceived risk and benefit, where an activity or entity we perceive as beneficial is by default perceived as low risk. This preference diminishes the ability of farmers to appreciate the risks associated with overreliance on herbicides. Likewise, conventional farmers saw great risk and little benefit in preventive measures for weed control. We expect that thorough two-way communication and a deeper understanding of farmer belief systems will facilitate the development of audience-specific outreach programs with an enhanced probability of affecting better weed management decisions.