Bias in Attribution

-Attributions may not be the correct explanations of events, which leaves the event subject to people’s point of view and bias.

– Attributions ultimately represent guesswork about the causes of events, and people might even guess that the cause of their own behavior incorrectly.

LET US LOOK AT SOME EXAMPLES OF BIASES IN ATTRIBUTION

Actor-Observer Bias

Your view of your own behavior can be different from the view of someone else’s who’s looking at you

• Fundamental Attribution Error: refers to observers’ bias in favor of internal attributions in explaining others’ behavior.
• Example: If you get angry because money on your bank account is gone and look like your raging, someone who is observing you will probably think their are internal attributions that cause you to do that, like an easy temper. In reality, you could be a calm and caring person who’s having a bad day.
• Actors favor external attributions for their behavior, whereas observers favor the same behavior internally.

Defensive Attribution

A tendency to blame victims for their misfortune, so that one feels less likely to be victimized in a similar way.

• Hindsight bias contributes to this tendency, but blaming victims also helps people maintain their belief that they live in a just world, where they are unlikely to experience the same troubles.
• Defensive attributions can lead to unwarranted derogation of victims of misfortune.
• Examples: Burglary victims can be blamed for their carelessness of protecting their house; poor people may be viewed as lazy.

Self-Serving Bias

• The self-serving bias in attribution comes into play when people attempt to explain success and failure.
• The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal factors and one’s failures to situational errors
• In explaining failure , the usual actor-observer biases become apparent because actors tend to make external attributions, blaming their failures on unfavorable situational factors, while observers attribute the same failures to the actor’s personal shortcomings.
• In the end each person makes their own personal agenda which makes them feel better (they are “self-serving” themselves.)