Attribution Bias

In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional bias is a cognitive bias that affects the way we determine who or what was responsible for an event or action (attribution). It is a cognitive set that may interfere with social interaction.

Attributional biases typically take the form of actor/observer differences: people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). These discrepancies are often caused by asymmetries in availability (frequently called "salience" in this context). For example, the behavior of an actor is easier to remember (and therefore more available for later consideration) than the setting in which he found himself; and a person's own inner turmoil is more available to himself than it is to someone else. As a result, our judgments of attribution are often distorted along those lines. It is also unclear as to how this bias begins to manifest in children.

In some experiments, for example, subjects were shown only one side of a conversation or were able to see the face of only one of the conversational participants. Whomever the subjects had a better view of were judged by them as being more important and more influential, and as having had a greater role in the conversation.

Perhaps the best known attribution bias is the fundamental attribution error, which describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. There are two explanations for this bias. First, we tend to overlook the effect of social roles on the behaviors. For example, we might see salespeople as extroverted and persistent people because we ignore the fact that their jobs require them to behave in this way to boost sales. Second, we tend to generalize the behaviors we observe when people are in constrained and constant situations to other different situations and conclude that it is due to dispositional cause rather than situational cause.

Another famous type of attribution bias is self-serving bias, which describes the tendency of people to blame their failures on situational components and attribute their successes on internal factors. There are two ways to explain this kind of phenomenon. The "self-esteem" explanation favors the idea that people tend to increase their self-esteem naturally. Therefore, success is being attributed as self-related and failure is situation-related. The "expectancy-confirmation" explanation mentions that people depend on their success-expectancy level to make attributions. Thus, people attribute success to themselves when they expect it and take actions to achieve it, while finding external causes for the failure.