Journal ArticleDOI
Why did he do it? attribution of obedience and the phenomenon of dispositional bias
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This paper showed that passage of time can lead observers to assume more situational control when they were required to think and write about the witnessed re-enactment of the Milgram situation compared with observers who had no time to contemplate or who were prevented from doing so.Abstract:
Two studies are reported which demonstrate the influence of perceptual or ‘perspective’ variables in mediating attribution processes. In both studies subjects first observed a re-enactment of Milgram's (1963) experiment of obedience in which a ‘teacher’ obeys an experimenter's request to deliver dangerously high levels of shock. They were then asked to make judgements concerning the magnitude of situational forces acting upon the teacher and also to make inferences about his personality dispositions. Study I showed that passage of time can lead observers to assume more situational control when they were required to think and write about the witnessed re-enactment of the Milgram situation compared with observers who had no time to contemplate or who were prevented from doing so. Study II did not support the notion that focus of attribution is a simple function of what one pays attention to, or a function of the differing perspectives which actors and observers employ. Both of these results seriously challenge Jones and Nisbett's (1972) contention that the differences in attribution tendencies between actors and observers arise from the difference in perspective, Moreover, considerable evidence suggests that changes in situational and dispositional attributions may not follow a simple ‘zero-sum’ model, and that subjects seem to be unwilling to treat the two sources of control as if they were inversely correlated.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Correspondence Bias
TL;DR: An intellectual history of the correspondence bias is sketched, 4 mechanisms (lack of awareness, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations, and incomplete corrections) that produce distinct forms of correspondence bias are described, and how the consequences of correspondence-biased inferences may perpetuate such inferences are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Accountability: A social check on the fundamental attribution error.
TL;DR: This article explored whether accountability-pressures to justify one's causal interpretations of behavior to others-reduces or eliminates the overattribution effect and found that accountability eliminated the over-attribution by affecting how subjects initially encoded and analyzed stimulus information.
Journal ArticleDOI
Feeling "holier than thou": are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction?
Nicholas Epley,David Dunning +1 more
TL;DR: Two final studies suggest this divergence in accuracy arises, in part, because people are unwilling to consult population base rates when predicting their own behavior but use this diagnostic information more readily when predicting others'.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves
TL;DR: Two experiments 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 and showed that the relevant labeling manipulations exerted far greater impact on the players' choice to cooperate versus defect than anticipated by the individuals who had predicted their behavior.
Book ChapterDOI
Reflexion and reflection: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference
TL;DR: Lieberman et al. as mentioned in this paper presented a paper on "Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh." Lord Chesterfield, Letters, May 8, 1750.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Behavioral Study of obedience.
TL;DR: This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory, ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment, which created extreme levels of nervous tension in some Ss.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Attribution of Attitudes
Edward E. Jones,Victor A. Harris +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, three experiments were conducted within the framework of correspondent inference theory, where the subjects were instructed to estimate the "true" attitude of a target person after having either read or listened to a speech by him expressing opinions on a controversial topic.
Journal ArticleDOI
Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm.
TL;DR: The authors showed that self-perceptions and social perceptions may persevere after the initial basis for such perceptions has been completely discredited, even after false feedback has been given to the subjects, indicating that they either succeeded or failed on a novel discrimination task.
Journal ArticleDOI
Assignment of responsibility for an accident.
TL;DR: Control over all environmental events is impossible both because techniques for preventing some accidents are unknown and because precautionary steps may be impractical considering the rarity of the occurrence and the number of variables involved.