Page 185 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 167

often affect our attributions and explanations: the fundamental attri-
bution error, the actor-observer bias, and self-biases.

The Fundamental Attribution Error The term fundamen-
tal attribution error refers to a general human tendency to overesti-
mate the importance of personality or dispositional factors relative to
situational or environmental influences when describing and explain-
84
ing the causes of social behavior. We have already seen one exam-
ple of this tendency—correspondent inference. That is, when
explaining why a colleague took a specific political position or per-
formed a specific behavior, we tend to favor personality explanations
over situational ones. This may lead us to believe that there is more
consistency of motive and behavior in the world than actually exists.
Another example of the fundamental attribution error is provided
by an experiment conducted by Gunter Bierbrauer. In this experi-
85
ment, subjects witnessed a reenactment of a person’s performance in
Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority (de-
scribed in Chapter 2). Recall that in this experiment, Milgram con-
structed a situation that elicited high rates of obedience; in this case,
the behavior involved administering severe electric shocks to a
“learner.” Like most subjects in the original Milgram experiment, the
person in Bierbrauer’s reenactment showed a high level of obedience,
administering the maximum level of electric shock. After showing the
reenactment, Bierbrauer then asked his subjects to estimate how
many of Milgram’s subjects in general would be obedient in this sit-
uation. The results showed that subjects consistently underestimated
the actual degree of obedience. Specifically, Bierbrauer’s subjects esti-
mated that only 10 to 20 percent of the people in this setting would
give the maximum shock of 450 volts. In actuality, as you will recall,
Milgram found that 65 percent of the subjects administered this level
of shock. In other words, Bierbrauer’s subjects assumed that this per-
son was an aberration—that his behavior reflected distinguishing per-
sonal dispositions (i.e., that he was particularly aggressive or
obedient). They failed to attribute his behavior to the power of the
situation to produce this behavior in most people.
As observers, we frequently lose sight of the fact that each indi-
vidual plays many social roles and that we might be observing only
one of them. Thus, the importance of social roles can be easily over-
looked in explaining a person’s behavior. For example, I know a psy-
chology professor whom I will call Dr. Mensch. The students adore