Trait ascription bias

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Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations. [1] More specifically, it is a tendency to describe one's own behaviour in terms of situational factors while preferring to describe another's behaviour by ascribing fixed dispositions to their personality. This may occur because peoples' own internal states are more readily observable and available to them than those of others.

Contents

This attributional bias intuitively plays a role in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes and prejudice, combined with the negativity effect. However, trait ascription and trait-based models of personality remain contentious in modern psychology and social science research. Trait ascription bias refers to the situational and dispositional evaluation and description of personality traits on a personal level. A similar bias on the group level is called the outgroup homogeneity bias.

Overview

Trait ascription and the cognitive bias associated with it have been a topic of active research for more than three decades. [2] [3] Like many other cognitive biases, trait ascription bias is supported by a substantial body of experimental research and has been explained in terms of numerous theoretical frameworks originating in various disciplines. Among these frameworks are attribution theory (related to how people determine causes of observed events), theories of personality description such as the five factor model, [4] and work regarding the circumstances under which personality assessments are valid. [5] Seminal work includes Turner, [6] Jones, [7] Kammer, [1] and Funder. [8] Incorrectly ascribing traits to other persons based on limited information or observations intuitively plays a role in the formation and perpetuation of some social phenomena such as stereotypes and prejudice. As such, methods to mitigate the effect of trait ascription bias on personality assessments outside of the lab are also of interest to social scientists. Although trait-oriented theories of personality description, and indeed the very notion of universal, enduring traits themselves, have a natural appeal, [4] [9] some researchers are critical of their existence outside of the laboratory and present results which imply trait ascription, and consequently trait ascription bias, are simply residue of the methodologies historically used to "detect" them. [6] [10] Criticism is based either on the non-existence of personality traits (contrary to five factor descriptions), or suggest divergent interpretations of results and alternative mechanisms of ascription, limiting the scope of existing work.

Evidence

The empirical evidence supporting trait ascription and the psychological mechanisms underpinning it comes from a diverse body of research in psychology and the social sciences.

The actor and the observer

Jones and Nisbett [7] were among the first to argue that people are biased in how they tend to ascribe traits and dispositions to others that they would not ascribe to themselves. Motivated by the classic example of the student explaining poor performance to a supervisor (in which the supervisor might superficially believe the student's explanations but really thinks the performance is due to "enduring qualities": lack of ability, laziness, ineptitude, etc.) their actor–observer asymmetry argument forms the basis of discourse [1] [8] [11] on trait ascription bias.

Kammer et al.

In a 1982 study involving fifty-six undergraduate psychology students from the University of Bielefeld, Kammer et al. demonstrated that subjects rated their own variability on each of 20 trait terms to be considerably higher than their peers. [1] Building on the earlier work of Jones and Nisbett, [7] which suggests people describe the behaviour of others in terms of fixed dispositions while viewing their own behaviour as the dynamic product of complex situational factors, Kammer hypothesized that one's own behaviours are judged to be less consistent (i.e. not as predictable) but of higher intensities (with regard to particular traits) than the behaviour of others. The experiment had each student describe themselves as well as a same-sex friend using two identical lists of trait-descriptive terms. For example, for the trait of dominance the student was first asked "In general, how dominant are you?" and then "How much do you vary from one situation to another in how dominant you are?" [1] Kammer's results strongly supported his hypothesis.

The "trait" of ascribing traits

David C. Funder's work [8] on the "trait" of ascribing personality traits investigates the psychology of individuals who tend not to grant others the variability (i.e. lack of predictability) they grant themselves, instead preferring to ascribe traits and infer dispositional explanations of behaviour. It had been generally established [7] that people ascribe more traits to others than to themselves, known as the actor–observer asymmetry in attribution, [7] but Funder's hypothesis was that some individuals are more inclined to make dispositional trait attributions than others, regardless of who they are describing. [8] In the experiment, sixty-three undergraduates filled out a series of questionnaires which asked them to describe themselves, their best friend, and an acquaintance. For each of twenty pairs of polar opposite trait terms (e.g. "friendly—unfriendly") subjects either ranked the person on a discrete scale or chose "depends on the situation", allowing the subject to "not make a dispositional ascription." [8] Based on third-party Q-Sort personality descriptions of the subjects, certain negative personality traits were correlated with those subjects who tended to ascribe dispositions to others, while traits such as "charming", "interesting", and "sympathetic" were associated [12] with those who preferred not to ascribe traits. This result is consistent with the type of personality commonly associated with promoting stereotypes and prejudice.

Theoretical basis

While trait ascription bias has been described by empirical results from various disciplines, most notably psychology and social psychology, explaining the mechanism of the bias remains a contentious issue in the theory of personality description literature. [4] [13]

The availability heuristic

Tversky and Kahneman describe a cognitive heuristic that suggests people make judgments (including about other people's personalities [14] ) on the basis of how easily examples of their (other people's) behaviour come to mind. [15] [16] This would appear to be consistent[ vague ] with the arguments of Jones and Nisbett [7] and the results observed by others [1] [8] which found that people ascribe fewer traits to friends than to acquaintances, and fewer still traits to themselves than to friends, implying ease of recall might be a factor.

Attribution theory

Attribution plays a role in how people understand and judge the causes of the behaviour of others, [2] which in turn affects how they ascribe traits to others. Attributional theory [17] is concerned with how people subsequently judge behavioural causes, which also bears relevance to trait ascription and related biases. In particular, attribution (and attributional) theory can help explain the mechanism by which individuals defer to ascribing dispositional traits vs. situational variability to observers. [18]

Big Five personality traits

The big five personality traits (or five factor model) arguably [4] [13] provides a robust set of traits by which personalities can be accurately described. It supports the notion that there are cross-cultural, enduring traits which manifest in behaviour and can, if correctly ascribed to individuals, provide an actor with predictive power over an observer.

Mitigation

Trait ascription bias, regardless of the theoretical mechanisms underpinning it, intuitively plays a role in various social phenomenon observed in the wild. Stereotyping, attitudes of prejudice and the negativity effect, among others, involve ascribing dispositions (traits) to other people on the basis of little information, no information or simply "gut instincts", which amounts to trait ascription bias. As such, some researchers [19] are interested in mitigating cognitive biases to reduce their effects on society.

Criticism

Trait ascription bias has received criticism on a number of fronts. [6] [13] In particular, some have argued that trait ascription, and the notion of traits, are merely artefacts of methodology and that results contrary to conventional wisdom can be achieved with simple changes to the experimental designs used. [1] [8] [13] Furthermore, the theoretical bases for trait ascription bias are criticized [13] for failing to recognize constraints and "questionable conceptual" assumptions.

See also

Related Research Articles

Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

In social psychology, fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias where observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality and underattribute them to the situation or context. Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.

In psychology, trait theory is an approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of traits, which can be defined as habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. According to this perspective, traits are aspects of personality that are relatively stable over time, differ across individuals, are relatively consistent over situations, and influence behaviour. Traits are in contrast to states, which are more transitory dispositions.

Actor–observer asymmetry is a bias one makes when forming attributions about the behavior of others or themselves. When people judge their own behavior, they are more likely to attribute their actions to the particular situation than to their personality. However, when an observer is explaining the behavior of another person, they are more likely to attribute this behavior to the actors' personality rather than to situational factors.

In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. 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.

A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more credit for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions might be exhibiting a self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Ross</span> American academic (1942–2021)

Lee David Ross was a Canadian-American professor. He held the title of the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and was an influential social psychologist who studied attributional biases, shortcomings in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross was known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media. His interests included ongoing societal problems, in particular protracted inter-group conflicts, the individual and collective rationalization of evil, and the psychological processes that make it difficult to confront societal challenges. Ross went beyond the laboratory to involve himself in conflict resolution and public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other areas of the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard E. Nisbett</span> American psychologist (born 1941)

Richard Eugene Nisbett is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.

Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Heider first introduced the concept of perceived 'locus of causality' to define the perception of one's environment. For instance, an experience may be perceived as being caused by factors outside the person's control (external) or it may be perceived as the person's own doing (internal). These initial perceptions are called attributions. Psychologists use these attributions to better understand an individual's motivation and competence. The theory is of particular interest to employers who use it to increase worker motivation, goal orientation, and productivity.

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.

Social perception is the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people as sovereign personalities. Social perception refers to identifying and utilizing social cues to make judgments about social roles, rules, relationships, context, or the characteristics of others. This domain also includes social knowledge, which refers to one's knowledge of social roles, norms, and schemas surrounding social situations and interactions. People learn about others' feelings and emotions by picking up information they gather from physical appearance, verbal, and nonverbal communication. Facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, and body position or movement are a few examples of ways people communicate without words. A real-world example of social perception is understanding that others disagree with what one said when one sees them roll their eyes. There are four main components of social perception: observation, attribution, integration, and confirmation.

Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.

Impression formation in social psychology refers to the processes by which different pieces of knowledge about another are combined into a global or summary impression. Social psychologist Solomon Asch is credited with the seminal research on impression formation and conducted research on how individuals integrate information about personality traits. Two major theories have been proposed to explain how this process of integration takes place. The Gestalt approach views the formation of a general impression as the sum of several interrelated impressions. As an individual seeks to form a coherent and meaningful impression of another individual, previous impressions significantly influence the interpretation of subsequent information. In contrast to the Gestalt approach, the cognitive algebra approach asserts that individuals' experiences are combined with previous evaluations to form a constantly changing impression of a person. A related area to impression formation is the study of person perception, making dispositional attributions, and then adjusting those inferences based on the information available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Introspection illusion</span> Cognitive bias of people thinking they understand their own mental states but others are inaccurate

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optimism</span> Positive mental attitude

Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled with water to the halfway point: an optimist is said to see the glass as half full, while a pessimist sees the glass as half empty.

The false-uniqueness effect is an attributional type of cognitive bias in social psychology that describes how people tend to view their qualities, traits, and personal attributes as unique when in reality they are not. This bias is often measured by looking at the difference between estimates that people make about how many of their peers share a certain trait or behaviour and the actual number of peers who report these traits and behaviours.

Spontaneous trait inference is the term utilised in social psychology to describe the mechanism that causes individuals to form impressions of people, based on behaviours they witness them exhibiting. The inferences being made are described as being extrapolated from the behaviour, as the link between the inferred trait and the perceived behaviour is not substantiated, only vaguely implied. The inferences that are made are spontaneous and implicitly formed, with the cognitive mechanism acting almost reflexively.

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. 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.

The proportionality bias, also known as major event/major cause heuristic, is the tendency to assume that big events have big causes. It is a type of cognitive bias and plays an important role in people's tendency to accept conspiracy theories. Academic psychologist Rob Brotherton summarises it as “When something big happens, we tend to assume that something big must have caused it”.

References

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  3. ↑ Pronin, E; Ross, L (2006). "Temporal Differences in Trait Self-Ascription: When the Self Is Seen as an Other". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 90 (2): 197–209. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.2.197. PMID   16536646.
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  5. ↑ Bem, Daryl J.; Allen, Andrea (1974). "On Predicting Some of the People Some of the Time". Psychological Review. 81 (6): 506–520. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.335.3640 . doi:10.1037/h0037130.
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  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jones, Edward Ellsworth; Nisbett, Richard E. (1971). The actor and the observer: divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior (PDF). pp. 79–94. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-10-26. Retrieved 2016-05-29. In Jones, Edward E.; Kanouse, David E.; Kelley, Harold H.; Nisbett, Richard E.; Valins, Stuart; Weiner, Bernard (1971). "Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior". American Political Science Review. 70 (2): 617–618. doi:10.2307/1959677. JSTOR   1959677. S2CID   146150858.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Funder, David C. (1980). "The "Trait" of Ascribing Traits: Individual Differences in the Tendency to Trait Ascription". Journal of Research in Personality. 14 (3): 376–385. doi:10.1016/0092-6566(80)90020-3.
  9. ↑ Hirschberg, Nancy; Jennings, Susan J (1980). "Beliefs, Personality, Personal Perception: A Theory of Individual Differences". Journal of Research in Personality. 14 (2): 235–249. doi:10.1016/0092-6566(80)90031-8.
  10. ↑ Vonk, Roos (1993). "The Negativity Effect in Trait Ratings and in Open-Ended Descriptions of Persons". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 19 (3): 269–278. doi:10.1177/0146167293193003. S2CID   143976518.
  11. ↑ Hampson, Sarah E (1983). "Trait Ascription and Depth of Acquaintance: The Preference for Traits in Personality Descriptions and Its Relation to Target Familiarity". Journal of Research in Personality. 17 (4): 398–411. doi:10.1016/0092-6566(83)90068-5.
  12. ↑ Gaertner, Samuel L.; McLaughlin, John P. (1983). "Associations and Ascriptions of Positive and Negative Characteristics". Social Psychology Quarterly. 46 (1): 23–30. doi:10.2307/3033657. JSTOR   3033657.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Block, Jack (1995). "A Contrarian View of the Five-Factor Approach to Personality Description". Psychological Bulletin. 117 (2): 187–215. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.2.187. PMID   7724687.
  14. ↑ Schwarz, Norbert; Bless, Herbert; Strack, Fritz; Klumpp, Gisela; Rittenauer-Schatka, Helga; Simons, Annette (1991). "Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 61 (2): 195–202. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.61.2.195.
  15. ↑ Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1973). "Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability". Cognitive Psychology. 5 (1): 207–233. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9.
  16. ↑ Kahneman, Daniel; Tversky, Amos (January 1982). "The psychology of preferences". Scientific American. 246 (1): 160–173. Bibcode:1982SciAm.246a.160K. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0182-160.
  17. ↑ Kelley, Harold H.; Michela, John L. (1980). "Attribution Theory and Research". Annual Review of Psychology . 31: 457–501. doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.31.020180.002325. PMID   20809783.
  18. ↑ Kenrick, Douglas T.; Funder, David C. (1988). "Profiting From Controversy: Lessons From the Person-Situation Debate". American Psychologist. 43 (1): 23–34. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.43.1.23. PMID   3279875.
  19. ↑ Ariely, Dan (2009). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions . HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN   9780007319923.

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