Project Background

This project was designed to illustrate a phenomenon characteristic of our judgments of others and ourselves called CORRESPONDENCE BIAS. One of the researchers whose work contributed to the recognition of correspondence bias (also known by others as "the Fundamental Attribution Error") was Ned Jones, and in 1990, writing about the phenomenon, Jones stated the following:

"I have a candidate for the most robust and repeatable finding
in social psychology: the tendency to see behavior as caused by the
stable personal disposition of the actor when it can be just as easily
explained as a natural response to more than adequate situational pressures."

Ned Jones (1990), Interpersonal Perception.

What does this tendency mean?

That perceivers trying to explain behavior, their own or others', see that behavior as reflecting the preferences, likes, values, habits, personality, or other characteristics of the person behaving rather than the conditions and influences that constitute the social situation of that person.

For example, if someone greets you in a cursory manner, is that because he or she is an unfriendly person or doesn't like you (both dispositional judgments of sorts) or because that person is in a hurry to get to somewhere important (a more situational attribution). If someone is a victim of crime or injured in an accident or suffers from some affliction, to what extent do we (either as observers or as that victim) blame that individual for the outcome and/or attribute it to factors outside his or her control, or character?

Obviously, the attributions we make in these instances and others in everyday social life and social judgment may have important effects on our future behavior (e.g., toward that "unfriendly" person).

You will remember that we discussed this tendency in passing when we discussed social behavior earlier in the term. For example, although we noted that observers might tend strongly to attribute the behavior of subjects in the Milgram, Asch, and Darley and Latane studies to underlying characteristics of the individuals acting (e.g., their callousness toward others), close scrutiny of those studies suggests that external social influences may account for the subjects' behavior.

Did the class show this tendency in its judgments in this study?

You just completed a test of correspondence bias. Although it makes sense to attribute the position taken in the essay to the essay writer's own beliefs if the pro or con position were freely chosen, why should we assume the essay is revealing of the essay writer's personal beliefs when the position was assigned by the professor? Is this what the class did?

To assess this, lets compare the answers to the second through fifth questions posed to all of you. Please add up the ratings you gave to these four questions.

Note that the "heads" subjects all read assigned essays opposing vouchers and that the "tails" subjects all read assigned essays in favor of vouchers. If the assigned essay had little impact on judgments of the essay writer's actual attitude, then the judgments of the "heads" and "tails" subjects ought not to have differed. What did we find?

Of course, our demonstration may raise more questions than it answers. (In fact, it is intended to do so!) Lets take a look at the method and results of a more systematic study of correspondence bias using the same approach we did above. To do so, click here now.