Identify and describe three attribution biases. Provide illustrative examples.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Students' examples may vary.

The answer should contain the following information:

The halo effect: The phenomenon in which an initial understanding that an individual has positive traits is used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics. The opposite would also hold true. For example, if one learns that a worker is intelligent, one may assume that he is conscientious and agreeable as well. Because few people have either uniformly positive or uniformly negative traits, the halo effect leads to misperceptions of others.

Assumed-similarity bias: How similar to one-in terms of attitudes, opinions, likes, and dislikes-are one's friends and acquaintances? Most people believe that their friends and acquaintances are fairly similar to themselves. But this feeling goes beyond just people one knows to a general tendency-known as the assumed-similarity bias-to think of people as being similar to oneself, even when meeting them for the first time. Given the range of people in the world, this assumption often reduces the accuracy of one's judgments.

Self-serving bias: When their teams win, coaches usually feel that the success is due to their coaching. But when teams lose, coaches may think it is due to their players' poor skills. Similarly, if one gets an A on a test, one may think it is due to one's hard work, but if one gets a poor grade, it is due to the professor's inadequacies. The reason is the self-serving bias, the tendency to attribute success to personal factors (skill, ability, or effort) and attribute failure to factors outside oneself.

Fundamental attribution error: One of the more common attribution biases is the tendency to overattribute others' behavior to dispositional causes and the corresponding failure to recognize the importance of situational causes. Known as the fundamental attribution error, this tendency is prevalent in Western cultures. One tends to exaggerate the importance of personality characteristics (dispositional causes) in producing others' behavior, minimizing the influence of the environment (situational factors). For example, one is more likely to jump to the conclusion that someone who is often late to work is lazy or a routinely tardy person (dispositional cause) than to assume that, perhaps, the subway they take to work frequently runs behind schedule, causing them to be late (a situational cause).