Puritanical bias

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Puritanical bias refers to the tendency to attribute cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing by an individual to a moral deficiency or lack of self control rather than taking into account the impact of broader societal determinants. [1] [2] An example might be, "These people sit around all day in their apartments on welfare watching TV, but won't take the time to get out and find a job!" In this case, a selection of persons might have existed for some time under dire economic and/or socially oppressive circumstances, but individuals from that selection have been cognitively dis-empowered by these circumstances to decide or act on decisions to obtain a given goal.

Contents

Relation to other biases

Puritanical bias is similar to correspondence bias - the tendency to infer dispositional characteristics from behaviours resulting entirely from situational factors [3] - in that it relates to the consequences of over-emphasising dispositional factors over situational factors. Puritanical bias also mirrors a broader social psychology phenomenon: fundamental attribution error; that is the tendency for observers to under-emphasise the importance of situational determinants of a behaviour and to over-emphasise the importance of dispositional determinants. [4] All above phenomena relate to the overweighting of dispositional rather than situational factors in explaining behaviour, and are thus related.

Where puritanical bias differentiates itself from the two is in specifically concerning only unpleasant and unwanted behaviours, by explaining them only through negative dispositional characteristics. [5] It is entirely possible for correspondence bias and fundamental attribution error to emerge in the explanation of prosocial and desired behaviours. For example, one may attribute an individual donating to charity to their own selflessness and good will, while the behaviour would be more suitably explained by the vigour and efficacy with which the charity requests donations. This would be an example of fundamental attribution error, as situational factors have been under-emphasised in comparison to dispositional qualities in explaining a seemingly altruistic act. Further, while the moral nature of the behaviours with which correspondence bias concerns itself is unspecified, it is unique in that it only explains behaviours which result entirely from situational determinants. Both puritanical bias and fundamental attribution error are more flexible in their definitions in that they do not specify the degree to which the behaviour in question is determined by environment or disposition, just that in the explanation of the behaviour the dispositional explanations will be overemphasised and situational explanations underemphasised. Therefore, puritanical bias can be thought of as a more specific form of fundamental attribution error pertaining singularly to undesirable behaviours and undesirable dispositional characteristics.

Explanations

Given its similarity to other cognitive biases, puritanical bias can be partially explained through existing explanations of fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias:

Criticisms

As the name implies, puritanical bias pertains to judgements about moralised and undesirable behaviours such as sexual promiscuity, obesity and alcoholism, [14] which puritan morality condemns. Uhlman et al. (2010) investigated the susceptibility of white Americans to primes of Puritan-Protestant values regarding work and sex, as compared to British, Canadian and Asian-American participants, finding that white Americans were more likely to be implicitly influenced by Puritan-Protestant values regarding work and sex. [15] This over-representation of Puritan moralistic value judgements in white American populations calls into question the universality of puritanical bias, as it is unclear whether the moral judgement of a behaviour precedes the explanation of an observed behaviour, or vice versa. Should the moral judgement occur first, then it is conceivable that puritanical bias emerges as a post-hoc rationalisation of our moral assessment of a behaviour, rather than the moral assessment arising from the factors which we assume to be causal of the observed behaviour. Should this be the case, then puritanical bias would occur with disproportionate frequency in white Americans who are implicitly more likely to make puritanical moral judgements of behaviours (see above). Therefore, puritanical bias would be an overwhelmingly American phenomenon.

Importance

Some scholars have addressed the potential existence of puritanical bias in the existing social psychology literature. [16] It is argued that by orienting paths of research around the assumption that self-control is always optimal, researchers imply that social issues such as obesity and under-saving for retirement are problems of individual-level low self-control, rather than contextual issues. George Loewenstein advises that the issue could potentially be remedied by more research into the perils of hyperopia, [17] that is the effects of self-control regret, in order to balance perspectives on the importance of individual-level self-control as a determinant of behaviour.

Outside of academia, however, the issue of puritanical bias remains pertinent in shaping narratives surrounding social issues such as obesity, saving for retirement and violence against women. [18] [19] In disproportionately attributing individual-level explanations to undesirable outcomes, policy-makers absolve themselves of blame by displacing social issues onto those who suffer most from them.

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References

  1. ↑ Kokkoris, Michail (2020-01-16). "The Dark Side of Self-Control". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 17 January 2020.
  2. ↑ Loewenstein, George (2020-02-13). "Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 19 (3): 95–101. doi:10.1177/1529100619828401. PMID   30760174. S2CID   73454605 . Retrieved 3 April 2020.
  3. ↑ Gilbert, Daniel (1995). "The Correspondence Bias" (PDF). Psychological Bulletin. 117 (1): 21–38. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.1.21. PMID   7870861 – via UCLA Anderson School of Management.
  4. ↑ Jones, Edward E; Harris, Victor A (1967-01-01). "The attribution of attitudes". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 3 (1): 1–24. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(67)90034-0. ISSN   0022-1031.
  5. ↑ Loewenstein, George (2020). "Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman and Liabson". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 19 (3): 95–101. doi:10.1177/1529100619828401. PMID   30760174. S2CID   73454605 – via SAGE journals.
  6. ↑ McEwen, Bruce S. (2000-02-01). "Allostasis and Allostatic Load: Implications for Neuropsychopharmacology". Neuropsychopharmacology. 22 (2): 108–124. doi: 10.1016/S0893-133X(99)00129-3 . ISSN   0893-133X. PMID   10649824. S2CID   206088437.
  7. ↑ Lecic-Tosevski, D. (2011). "Stress and Personality". Psychiatriki. 115 (28): 20–27 – via researchgate.net.
  8. ↑ Miller, J.G. (1984). "Culture and the development of everyday social explanation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 46 (5): 961–978. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.46.5.961. PMID   6737211 – via APA PsycNet.
  9. ↑ Markus, H.R. (1991). "Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation". Psychological Review. 98 (2): 224–253. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224 – via APA PsycNet.
  10. ↑ Masuda, T. (2008). "Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 94 (3): 365–381. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.3.365. PMID   18284287 – via APA PsycNet.
  11. ↑ Masuda, T. (2001). "Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81 (5): 922–934. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.5.922. PMID   11708567 – via APA PsycNet.
  12. ↑ Gilbert, D.T (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process (1st ed.). University of Texas at Austin: The Guildford Press. pp. 189–211.
  13. ↑ Skowronski, J.J (1994). "Savings in the relearning of trait information as evidence for spontaneous inference generation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 66 (5): 840–880. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.66.5.840 – via APA PsycNet.
  14. ↑ Loewenstein, George (December 2018). "Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 19 (3): 95–101. doi:10.1177/1529100619828401. ISSN   1529-1006. PMID   30760174. S2CID   73454605.
  15. ↑ Uhlmann, Eric Luis; Poehlman, T. Andrew; Tannenbaum, David; Bargh, John A. (March 2011). "Implicit Puritanism in American moral cognition". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 47 (2): 312–320. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.10.013. ISSN   0022-1031.
  16. ↑ Loewenstein, George (December 2018). "Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 19 (3): 95–101. doi:10.1177/1529100619828401. ISSN   1529-1006. PMID   30760174. S2CID   73454605.
  17. ↑ Keinan, Anat; Kivetz, Ran (December 2008). "Remedying Hyperopia: The Effects of Self-Control Regret on Consumer Behavior". Journal of Marketing Research. 45 (6): 676–689. doi:10.1509/jmkr.45.6.676. ISSN   0022-2437. S2CID   145365173.
  18. ↑ Loewenstein, George (2020). "Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman and Liabson". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 19 (3): 95–101. doi:10.1177/1529100619828401. PMID   30760174. S2CID   73454605 – via SAGE Journals.
  19. ↑ Hooper, Anna (2018). "Just-World Bias in the Handmaid's Tale". Engquiringminds.wordpress.com. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
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