[1][2] It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.
Instead of being completely objective, people often make errors in perception that lead to skewed interpretations of social situations.
This theory focuses on identifying how an observer uses information in his/her social environment in order to create a causal explanation for events.
He noted that people tend to make distinctions between behaviors that are caused by personal disposition versus environmental or situational conditions.
In 1965, social psychologists Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis proposed an explanation for patterns of attribution termed correspondent inference theory.
[3][11] This model helped to explain how people choose to attribute a behavior to an internal disposition versus an environmental factor.
[6][12] Certain conditions can prompt people to exhibit attribution bias, or draw inaccurate conclusions about the cause of a given behavior or outcome.
On one hand, supporters of a "cognitive model" argued that biases were a product of human information processing constraints.
One major proponent of this view was Yale psychologist Michael Storms, who proposed this cognitive explanation following his 1973 study of social perception.
Similarly, social psychologist Anthony Greenwald described humans as possessing a totalitarian ego, meaning that people view the world through their own personal selves.
Kunda in particular argued that certain biases only appear when people are presented with motivational pressures; therefore, they cannot be exclusively explained by an objective cognitive process.
[16] Early researchers explained attribution biases as cognitively driven and a product of information processing errors.
In the early 1980s, studies demonstrated that there may also be a motivational component to attribution biases, such that their own desires and emotions affect how one interprets social information.
[7][21] Additionally, some psychologists have taken an applied approach and demonstrated how these biases can be understood in real-world contexts (e.g., the workplace or school).
For example, studies have implemented attributional retraining to help students have more positive perceptions of their own academic abilities (see below for more details).
[24] People who have mental illness tend to have a lower self-esteem, experience social avoidance, and do not commit to improving their overall quality of life, often as a result of lack of motivation.
There are many kinds of cognitive biases that affect people in different ways, but all may lead to irrational thinking, judgment, and decision-making.
[28] Research has also indicated that children can develop hostile attribution bias by engaging in aggression in the context of a video game.
[29] In a 1998 study, participants played either a violent or non-violent video game and were then asked to read several hypothetical stories where a peer's intent was ambiguous.
This finding provided evidence that exposure to violence and aggression could cause children to develop a short-term hostile attribution bias.
[31] The retraining process specifically targeted students who tended to attribute poor academic performance to external factors.
More recent research has extended these findings and examined the value of attributional retraining for helping students adjust to an unfamiliar and competitive setting.
For students who performed low or average on their first exam, attributional retraining resulted in higher in-class test grades and GPA in the second semester.
This reinforces the notion that individualistic and collectivistic cultures tend to focus on different aspects of a situation when making attributions.
This term was first proposed in the early 1970s by psychologist Lee Ross following an experiment he conducted with Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris in 1967.
These results demonstrated that participants did not take situational factors into account when evaluating a third party, thus providing evidence for the fundamental attribution error.
[37] Whereas Jones and Nisbett proposed that actors and observers explain behaviors as attributions to either dispositions or situational factors, examining past studies revealed that this assumption may be flawed.