Understanding Attribution Errors: FAE and Self-Serving Bias

Understanding Attribution Errors

Attribution is defined by Correspondence Inference Theory as the tendency to interpret someone’s immediate behavior as a general statement about their personality, often mistaking situational factors for a person's disposition.

Common Attribution Errors

• Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): The tendency to overestimate internal, dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining behavior.
• Self-Serving Bias: Attributing personal successes to internal, dispositional factors while blaming external, situational factors for failures.
• Defensive Attribution: The tendency to blame victims for their own misfortunes.

Ross et al. and the Fundamental Attribution Error

Aim: To determine if participants would commit the FAE even when aware that actors were playing assigned roles.

Method: Participants were randomly assigned one of three roles:

• Game show host: Designed their own questions.
• Contestant: Attempted to answer questions.
• Audience member: Observed the game show.

After the show, audience members ranked the intelligence of the hosts and contestants.

Results: Participants consistently ranked the host as the most intelligent, despite knowing the role was randomly assigned and the host had written the questions.

Conclusion: Participants failed to attribute the host's behavior to the situational factors of their role, instead attributing performance to dispositional factors like intelligence.

Evaluation of Ross et al.

• Limitations: Participants were university students who may view professors (who ask questions) as authority figures. This could be a learned response rather than an attribution error.
• Sample: The small, non-representative sample makes it difficult to generalize findings to the wider population.

Kashima and Triandis: Cultural Factors in Attribution

Aim: To examine how cultural factors affect attribution, specifically the Self-Serving Bias and Modesty Bias.

Method: Students from Japan and America were asked to remember details from pictures of unfamiliar countries and perform a recall task.

Results:

• American students: Tended to attribute success to dispositional factors (Self-Serving Bias).
• Japanese students: Tended to attribute failure to dispositional factors (Modesty Bias).

Conclusion: Biases in attribution are significantly influenced by cultural background.

Evaluation of Kashima and Triandis

• Ecological Validity: High, due to the use of naturalistic observation.
• Cultural Bias: The study was limited by focusing on specific local groups.