Lee Ross

The Intuitive Psychologist And His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process1

Publisher Summary Attribution theory is concerned with the attempts of ordinary people to understand the causes and implications of the events they witness. It deals with the “naive psychology” of the “man in the street” as he interprets his own behaviors and the actions of others. For man—in the perspective of attribution theory—is an intuitive psychologist who seeks to explain behavior and draw inferences about actors and their environments. To better understand the perceptions and actions of this intuitive scientist, his methods must be explored. The sources of oversight, error, or bias in his assumptions and procedures may have serious consequences, both for the lay psychologist himself and for the society that he builds and perpetuates. These shortcomings, explored from the vantage point of contemporary attribution theory, are the focus of the chapter. The logical or rational schemata employed by intuitive psychologists and the sources of bias in their attempts at understanding, predicting, and controlling the events that unfold around them are considered. Attributional biases in the psychology of prediction, perseverance of social inferences and social theories, and the intuitive psychologists illusions and insights are described.

The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre.

After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated these programs, and those responsible for them, as being biased against their side. This hostile media phenomenon appears to involve the operation of two separate mechanisms. First, partisans evaluated the fairness of the medias sample of facts and arguments differently: in light of their own divergent views about the objective merits of each sides case and their corresponding views about the nature of unbiased coverage. Second, partisans reported different perceptions and recollections about the program content itself; that is, each group reported more negative references to their side than positive ones, and each predicted that the coverage would sway nonpartisans in a hostile direction. Within both partisan groups, furthermore, greater knowledge of the crisis was associated with stronger perceptions of media bias. Charges of media bias, we concluded, may reflect more than self-serving attempts to secure preferential treatment. They may result from the operation of basic cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, mechanisms that should prove relevant to perceptions of fairness or objectivity in a wide range of mediation and negotiation contexts.

Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others.

Important asymmetries between self-perception and social perception arise from the simple fact that other peoples actions, judgments, and priorities sometimes differ from ones own. This leads people not only to make more dispositional inferences about others than about themselves (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1972) but also to see others as more susceptible to a host of cognitive and motivational biases. Although this blind spot regarding ones own biases may serve familiar self-enhancement motives, it is also a product of the phenomenological stance of naive realism. It is exacerbated, furthermore, by peoples tendency to attach greater credence to their own introspections about potential influences on judgment and behavior than they attach to similar introspections by others. The authors review evidence, new and old, of this asymmetry and its underlying causes and discuss its relation to other psychological phenomena and to interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others:

Three studies suggest that individuals see the existence and operation of cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves. Study 1 provides evidence from three surveys that people rate themselves as less subject to various biases than the “average American,” classmates in a seminar, and fellow airport travelers. Data from the third survey further suggest that such claims arise from the interplay among availability biases and self-enhancement motives. Participants in one follow-up study who showed the better-than-average bias insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective even after reading a description of how they could have been affected by the relevant bias. Participants in a final study reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias. The relevance of these phenomena to naïve realism and to conflict, misunderstanding, and dispute resolution is discussed.

The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves:

Two experiments, one conducted with American college students and one with Israeli pilots and their instructors, explored the predictive power of reputation-based assessments versus the stated “name of the game” (Wall Street Game vs. Community Game) in determining players’ responses in an N-move Prisoner’s Dilemma. The results of these studies showed that the relevant labeling manipulations exerted far greater impact on the players’ choice to cooperate versus defect—both in the first round and overall—than anticipated by the individuals who had predicted their behavior. Reputation-based prediction, by contrast, failed to discriminate cooperators from defectors. A supplementary questionnaire study showed the generality of the relevant short-coming in naïve psychology. The implications of these findings, and the potential contribution of the present methodology to the classic pedagogical strategy of the demonstration experiment, are discussed.

The Mentor’s Dilemma: Providing Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide

Two studies examined the response of Black and White students to critical feedback presented either alone or buffered with additional information to ameliorate its negative effects. Black students who received unbuffered critical feedback responded less favorably than White students both in ratings of the evaluator’s bias and in measures of task motivation. By contrast, when the feedback was accompanied both by an invocation of high standards and by an assurance of the student’s capacity to reach those standards, Black students responded as positively as White students and both groups reported enhanced identification with relevant skills and careers. This “wise,” two-faceted intervention proved more effective than buffering criticism either with performance praise (Study 1) or with an invocation of high standards alone (Study 2). The role of stigma in mediating responses to critical feedback, and the implications of our results for mentoring and other teacher-student interactions, are explored.

Barriers to Conflict Resolution

Drawing on such diverse but related disciplines as economics, cognitive psychology, statistics, and game and decision-making theory, the book considers the barriers to successful negotiation in such areas as civil litigation, family law, arms control, labor management disputes, environmental treaty making, and politics. When does it pay for parties to a dispute to cooperate, and when to compete? How can third-party negotiators further resolutions and avoid the pitfalls that deepen the division between antagonists? Offering answers to these and related questions, this book is a comprehensive guide to the latest understanding of ways to resolve human conflict.

Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding

Publisher Summary This chapter examines social psychological implications of human subjectivity—implications of the fact, and perhaps more importantly the insight, that people are governed not by the passive reception and recognition of some invariant objective reality, but by their own subjective representations and constructions of the events that unfold around them. The history of the subjective-objective distinction, first in some traditional theoretical and methodological concerns of social psychology, and then human motivation are discussed in this chapter. Social cognition, a research area that has held center stage in the field for most of the past two decades is expalined. The particular focus will be the problem of situational construal and its contribution to the difficulties of predicting social actions and making inferences or attributions about social actors. Construal processes are variable and uncertain, and they contribute heavily to the variability and unpredictability of a wide range of social responses. The second and less familiar thesis, social perceivers, fail to recognize, or at least fail to make adequate inferential allowance for, these “vagaries” of construal. People characteristically make attributions and other social judgments, and decisions predicated on a kind of naive realism. The process of subjective construal is fundamental to psychological inquiry at all levels of analysis.

Public Opinion and Capital Punishment: A Close Examination of the Views of Abolitionists and Retentionists

A survey designed to examine the attitudinal and informational bases of peoples opinions about the death penalty was administered to 500 Northern California residents (response rate = 96 percent). Of these, 58.8 percent were proponents of capital punishment, 30.8 percent were opponents, and 10.4 percent were undecided. When asked whether they favored mandatory, discretionary, or no death penalty for various crimes, respondents tended to treat these options as points on a scale of strength of belief, with mandatory penalties favored for the most serious crimes, rather than considering the questions of objectivity and fairness that have influenced the United States Supreme Courts considerations of these options. For no crime did a majority favor execution of all those convicted, even when a mandatory penalty was endorsed. Respondents were generally ignorant on factual issues related to the death penalty, and indicated that if their factual beliefs (in deterrence) were incorrect, their attitude would not be influenced. When asked about their reasons for favoring or opposing the death penalty, respondents tended to endorse all reasons consistent with their attitudes, indicating that the attitude does not stem from a set of reasoned beliefs, but may be an undifferenti ated, emotional reflection of ones ideological self-image. Opponents favored due process guarantees more than did Proponents. A majority of respondents said they would need more evidence to convict if a case was capital. Theoretical and legal implications of the results are discussed.

Psychological Barriers to Dispute Resolution

Publisher Summary The barriers of special concern in this chapter are psychological. The chapter explores cognitive and motivational processes that impede mutually beneficial exchanges of concessions and render seemingly tractable conflicts refractory to negotiated resolution. In such cases, the failure to achieve significant progress represents a kind of “market inefficiency,” in much the same sense that there is a failure or inefficiency when a motivated buyer and seller are unable to consummate a deal under conditions where the buyers maximum purchase price exceeds the sellers minimum selling price. The chapter distinguishes psychological barriers from two other kinds of impediments—those that are essentially products of strategic calculation and those that arise from “impersonal” organizational, institutional, or structural factors having little to do either with calculation or with the psychological biases exhibited by individual actors. The chapter presents a detailed examination of five particular psychological barriers—namely, dissonance arising from the past, optimistic overconfidence, loss aversion, divergent construal and reactive devaluation. The chapter examines three broader theoretical perspectives that speak to sources of resentment, misunderstanding, misattribution, and distrust in the negotiation process.