Actor-observer bias
Encyclopedia
The actor-observer asymmetry touches on the fundamental questions of how people gain access to their own and other people's minds and whether those modes of access are distinct.
The term specifically refers to a difference in the way people explain their own behavior (when they are in the "actor" role) in contrast to the way they explain other people's behavior (when they are in the "observer" role). This asymmetry has been studied primarily within the field of social psychology and particularly in the area known as
"attribution
" or "attribution theory." Considerations of actor-observer differences can be found in other disciplines as well, such as philosophy (e.g., privileged access
, incorrigibility
), management studies, artificial intelligence, semiotics, anthropology, and political science (see Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2007, for relevant references).
The specific hypothesis of an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution (explanations of behavior) was originally proposed by Jones
and Nisbett
(1971), when they claimed that "actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (p. 93). Supported by initial evidence, the hypothesis was long held as firmly established, describing a robust and pervasive phenomenon of social cognition
.
However, a meta-analysis
of all the published tests of the hypothesis between 1971 and 2004 (Malle, 2006) yielded a stunning finding: there was no actor-observer asymmetry of the sort Jones and Nisbett (1971) had proposed. Malle (2006) interpreted this result not so much as proof that actors and observers explained behavior exactly the same way but as evidence that the original hypothesis was fundamentally flawed in the way it framed people's explanations of behavior—namely, as attributions to either stable dispositions or to the situation. Against the background of a different theory of explanation, Malle, Knobe, and Nelson (2007) tested an alternative set of three actor-observer asymmetries and found consistent support for all of them. Thus, the actor-observer asymmetry does not exist in one theoretical formulation (traditional attribution theory) but does exist in the new alternative theoretical formulation. Malle (2011) argues that this favors the alternative theoretical formulation, but current textbooks have not yet fully addressed this theoretical challenge.
mechanisms by which people make sense of their own and other people's behavior. This interest was instigated by Fritz Heider's
(1958) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and the research in its wake has become known as "attribution
research" or "attribution theory."
The specific hypothesis of an "actor–observer asymmetry" was first proposed by social psychologists
Jones
and Nisbett
in 1971. Jones and Nisbett hypothesized that these two roles produce asymmetric explanations. “Actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971, p. 93). According to this hypothesis, a student who studies hard for an exam is likely to explain her own (the "actor"'s) intensive studying by referring to the upcoming difficult exam whereas other people (the "observers") are likely to explain her studying by referring to her dispositions such as being hardworking or ambitious.
, which is a robust way of identifying consistent patterns of evidence regarding a given hypothesis across a broad set of studies. The result of this analysis was stunning: across 170 individual tests, the asymmetry practically did not exist. (The average effect sizes, computed in several accepted ways, ranged from d = -0.016 to d = 0.095; corrected for publication bias, the average effect size was 0.) Under circumscribed conditions, it could sometimes be found, but under other conditions, the opposite was found. The conclusion was that the widely held assumption of an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution was false.
Within this framework, the actor-observer asymmetry was then reformulated as in fact consisting of three asymmetries: that actors offer more reason explanations (relative to CHR explanations) than observers do; that actors offer more belief reasons (relative to desire reasons) than observers do; and that actors use fewer belief reason markers than observers do (Malle, 1999). Malle, Knobe, and Nelson (2007) tested these asymmetries across 9 studies and found consistent support for them. In the same studies they also tested the classic person/disposition vs. situation hypothesis and consistently found no support for it.
Thus, people do seem to explain their own actions differently from how they explain other people's actions. But these differences do not lie in a predominance of using "dispositional" vs. "situational" causes. Only when people's explanations are separated into theoretically meaningful distinctions (e.g., reasons vs. causal history of reason explanations) do the differences emerge.
(1977) hypothesis of a fundamental attribution error
suggests that observers are incorrect, because they show a general tendency to overemphasize dispositional explanations and underemphasize situational ones. On the other hand, Nisbett and Wilson (1975) argued that actors don't really know the true causes of their actions and often merely invent plausible explanations. Jones and Nisbett (1971) themselves did not commit to calling the hypothesized actor-observer asymmetry a bias or an error. Similarly, recent theoretical positions consider asymmetries not a bias but rather the result of multiple cognitive and motivational differences that fundamentally exist between actors and observers (Malle et al., 2007; Robins et al., 1996).
in attribution — the claim that people choose explanations in a strategic way so as to make themselves appear in a more positive light. The important difference between the two hypotheses is that the assumed actor-observer asymmetry is expected to hold for all events and behaviors (whether they are positive or negative) and require a specific comparison between actor explanations and observer explanations. The self-serving bias is often formulated as a complete reversal in actors' and observers' explanation tendencies as a function of positive vs. negative events. In traditional attribution terms, this means that for positive events (e.g., getting an A on an exam), actors will select explanations that refer to their own dispositions (e.g., "I am smart") whereas observers will select explanations that refer to the actor's situation (e.g., "The test was easy"); however, for negative events (e.g., receiving an F on the exam), actors will select explanations that refer to the situation (e.g., "The test was impossibly hard") whereas observers will select explanations that refer to the actor's dispositions (e.g., "She is not smart enough").
The term specifically refers to a difference in the way people explain their own behavior (when they are in the "actor" role) in contrast to the way they explain other people's behavior (when they are in the "observer" role). This asymmetry has been studied primarily within the field of social psychology and particularly in the area known as
"attribution
Attribution (psychology)
Attribution is a concept in social psychology referring to how individuals explain causes of behavior and events. Attribution theory is an umbrella term for various theories that attempt to explain these processes. Fritz Heider first proposed a theory of attribution The Psychology of Interpersonal...
" or "attribution theory." Considerations of actor-observer differences can be found in other disciplines as well, such as philosophy (e.g., privileged access
Privileged access
In the fields of epistemology and philosophy of mind it is said the first person has privileged access to his own thoughts. This implies the subject has access to his own thoughts in such a way that the third person do not...
, incorrigibility
Incorrigibility
In philosophy, incorrigibility is a property of a philosophical proposition, which implies that it is necessarily true simply by virtue of being believed...
), management studies, artificial intelligence, semiotics, anthropology, and political science (see Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2007, for relevant references).
The specific hypothesis of an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution (explanations of behavior) was originally proposed by Jones
Edward E. Jones
Edward Ellsworth Jones , also known as "Ned" Jones, was an influential social psychologist who worked at Duke University for most of his career. He moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1977.-Biography:He earned his Ph.D...
and Nisbett
Richard E. Nisbett
Richard Nisbett is 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...
(1971), when they claimed that "actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (p. 93). Supported by initial evidence, the hypothesis was long held as firmly established, describing a robust and pervasive phenomenon of social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
.
However, a meta-analysis
Meta-analysis
In statistics, a meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses. In its simplest form, this is normally by identification of a common measure of effect size, for which a weighted average might be the output of a meta-analyses. Here the...
of all the published tests of the hypothesis between 1971 and 2004 (Malle, 2006) yielded a stunning finding: there was no actor-observer asymmetry of the sort Jones and Nisbett (1971) had proposed. Malle (2006) interpreted this result not so much as proof that actors and observers explained behavior exactly the same way but as evidence that the original hypothesis was fundamentally flawed in the way it framed people's explanations of behavior—namely, as attributions to either stable dispositions or to the situation. Against the background of a different theory of explanation, Malle, Knobe, and Nelson (2007) tested an alternative set of three actor-observer asymmetries and found consistent support for all of them. Thus, the actor-observer asymmetry does not exist in one theoretical formulation (traditional attribution theory) but does exist in the new alternative theoretical formulation. Malle (2011) argues that this favors the alternative theoretical formulation, but current textbooks have not yet fully addressed this theoretical challenge.
Background and initial formulation
The background to this hypothesis was social psychology's increasing interest in the 1960s in the cognitiveCognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
mechanisms by which people make sense of their own and other people's behavior. This interest was instigated by Fritz Heider's
Fritz Heider
Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creation of balance theory and marked the starting point of attribution theory...
(1958) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and the research in its wake has become known as "attribution
Attribution (psychology)
Attribution is a concept in social psychology referring to how individuals explain causes of behavior and events. Attribution theory is an umbrella term for various theories that attempt to explain these processes. Fritz Heider first proposed a theory of attribution The Psychology of Interpersonal...
research" or "attribution theory."
The specific hypothesis of an "actor–observer asymmetry" was first proposed by social psychologists
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
Jones
Edward E. Jones
Edward Ellsworth Jones , also known as "Ned" Jones, was an influential social psychologist who worked at Duke University for most of his career. He moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1977.-Biography:He earned his Ph.D...
and Nisbett
Richard E. Nisbett
Richard Nisbett is 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...
in 1971. Jones and Nisbett hypothesized that these two roles produce asymmetric explanations. “Actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971, p. 93). According to this hypothesis, a student who studies hard for an exam is likely to explain her own (the "actor"'s) intensive studying by referring to the upcoming difficult exam whereas other people (the "observers") are likely to explain her studying by referring to her dispositions such as being hardworking or ambitious.
Early evidence and reception
Soon after the publication of the actor-observer hypothesis, numerous research studies tested its validity, most notably the first such test by Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, and Marecek (1973). The authors found initial evidence for the hypothesis, and so did Storms (1973), who also examined one possible explanation of the hypothesis: that actors explain their behaviors by reference to the situation because they attend to the situation (not to their own behaviors) whereas observers explain the actor's behavior by reference to the actor's dispositions because they attend to the actor's behavior (not to the situation). Based largely on this initial supporting evidence, the confidence in the hypothesis became uniformly high. The asymmetry was described as “robust and quite general” (Jones, 1976, p. 304), “firmly established” (Watson, 1982, p. 698), and “an entrenched part of scientific psychology” (Robins, Spranca, & Mendelsohn, 1996, p. 376). Likewise, evidence for the asymmetry was considered to be "plentiful” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, p. 73) and “pervasive” (Aronson, 2002, p. 168).Recent evidence
Over 100 studies have been published since 1971 in which the hypothesis was put to further tests (often in the context of testing another hypothesis about causal attributions). Malle (2006) examined this entire literature in a meta-analysisMeta-analysis
In statistics, a meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses. In its simplest form, this is normally by identification of a common measure of effect size, for which a weighted average might be the output of a meta-analyses. Here the...
, which is a robust way of identifying consistent patterns of evidence regarding a given hypothesis across a broad set of studies. The result of this analysis was stunning: across 170 individual tests, the asymmetry practically did not exist. (The average effect sizes, computed in several accepted ways, ranged from d = -0.016 to d = 0.095; corrected for publication bias, the average effect size was 0.) Under circumscribed conditions, it could sometimes be found, but under other conditions, the opposite was found. The conclusion was that the widely held assumption of an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution was false.
Theoretical reformulation
The result of the meta-analysis implied that, across the board, actors and observers explain behaviors the same way. But all the tests of the classic hypothesis presupposed that people explain behavior by referring to "dispositional" vs. "situational" causes. This assumption turned out to be incorrect for the class of behavioral events that people explain most frequently in real life (Malle & Knobe, 1997): intentional behaviors (e.g., buying a new car, making a mean comment). People explain unintentional behaviors in ways that the traditional disposition-situation framework can capture, but they explain intentional behaviors by using very different concepts (Buss, 1989; Heider, 1958). A recent empirical theory of how people explain behavior was proposed and tested by Malle (1999, 2004), centering on the postulate that intentional behaviors are typically explained by reasons—the mental states (typically beliefs and desires) in light of which and on the grounds of which the agent decided to act (a postulate long discussed in the philosophy of action). But people who explain intentional behavior have several choices to make, and the theory identifies the psychological antecedents and consequences of these choices: (a) giving either reason explanations or "causal history of reason (CHR) explanations" (which refer to background factors such as culture, personality, or context—causal factors that brought about the agent's reasons but were not themselves reasons to act); (b) giving either desire reasons or belief reasons; and (c) linguistically marking a belief reason with its mental state verb (e.g., "She thought that..."; "He assumes that..."). Empirical studies have so far supported this theoretical framework (for a review see Malle, 2011).Within this framework, the actor-observer asymmetry was then reformulated as in fact consisting of three asymmetries: that actors offer more reason explanations (relative to CHR explanations) than observers do; that actors offer more belief reasons (relative to desire reasons) than observers do; and that actors use fewer belief reason markers than observers do (Malle, 1999). Malle, Knobe, and Nelson (2007) tested these asymmetries across 9 studies and found consistent support for them. In the same studies they also tested the classic person/disposition vs. situation hypothesis and consistently found no support for it.
Thus, people do seem to explain their own actions differently from how they explain other people's actions. But these differences do not lie in a predominance of using "dispositional" vs. "situational" causes. Only when people's explanations are separated into theoretically meaningful distinctions (e.g., reasons vs. causal history of reason explanations) do the differences emerge.
Implications
The choices of different explanations for intentional behavior (reasons, belief reasons, etc.) indicate particular psychological functions. Reasons, for example, appear to reflect (among other things) psychological closeness. People increase reason explanations (relative to CHR explanations) when they explain their own rather than another person's behavior (Malle et al., 2007), when they portray another person in a positive light (Malle et al., 2007), and when they explain behaviors of nonhuman agents for whom they have ownership and affection (e.g., a pet fish; Kiesler, Lee, & Kramer, 2006). Conversely, people use fewer reasons and more CHR explanations when explaining behaviors of collectives or aggregate groups (O'Laughlin & Malle, 2002). Actor-observer asymmetries can therefore be seen as part of a broader continuum of psychological distance people have to various kinds of minds (their own, others', groups', animals' etc.).Actor-observer "bias"
Instead of speaking of a hypothesis of an actor-observer asymmetry, some textbooks and research articles speak of an "actor-observer bias" (within the framework of dispositional vs. situation causes). The term "bias" is typically used to imply that one of the explainers—either the actor or the observer—is biased or incorrect in their explanations. But which one—the actor or the observer—is supposed to be incorrect is not clear from the literature. On the one hand, Ross'sLee Ross
Lee D. Ross is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and an influential social psychologist who has studied attribution theory, attributional biases, decision making and conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper...
(1977) hypothesis of a fundamental attribution error
Fundamental attribution error
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
suggests that observers are incorrect, because they show a general tendency to overemphasize dispositional explanations and underemphasize situational ones. On the other hand, Nisbett and Wilson (1975) argued that actors don't really know the true causes of their actions and often merely invent plausible explanations. Jones and Nisbett (1971) themselves did not commit to calling the hypothesized actor-observer asymmetry a bias or an error. Similarly, recent theoretical positions consider asymmetries not a bias but rather the result of multiple cognitive and motivational differences that fundamentally exist between actors and observers (Malle et al., 2007; Robins et al., 1996).
Self-serving bias
The actor-observer asymmetry is often confused with the hypothesis of a self-serving biasSelf-serving bias
A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure...
in attribution — the claim that people choose explanations in a strategic way so as to make themselves appear in a more positive light. The important difference between the two hypotheses is that the assumed actor-observer asymmetry is expected to hold for all events and behaviors (whether they are positive or negative) and require a specific comparison between actor explanations and observer explanations. The self-serving bias is often formulated as a complete reversal in actors' and observers' explanation tendencies as a function of positive vs. negative events. In traditional attribution terms, this means that for positive events (e.g., getting an A on an exam), actors will select explanations that refer to their own dispositions (e.g., "I am smart") whereas observers will select explanations that refer to the actor's situation (e.g., "The test was easy"); however, for negative events (e.g., receiving an F on the exam), actors will select explanations that refer to the situation (e.g., "The test was impossibly hard") whereas observers will select explanations that refer to the actor's dispositions (e.g., "She is not smart enough").
See also
- Attribution (psychology)Attribution (psychology)Attribution is a concept in social psychology referring to how individuals explain causes of behavior and events. Attribution theory is an umbrella term for various theories that attempt to explain these processes. Fritz Heider first proposed a theory of attribution The Psychology of Interpersonal...
- Fundamental attribution errorFundamental attribution errorIn social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
- List of cognitive biases
- Self-serving biasSelf-serving biasA self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure...