Page 189 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 171

and failure on an intelligence test, college students are likely to explain
others’ poor performance in terms of their ability, whereas they ex-
plain their own poor performance in terms of the difficulty of the test
items; (2) college students who volunteered to participate in psycho-
logical research attributed their participation to the importance of the
research, whereas observers viewed their participation as reflecting a
personal inclination to participate in any and all research; (3) when
observing a peer’s behavior, college students leap to the conclusion
that this person will continue to act in a similar manner in the future
(thus implying an underlying disposition to behave in a particular
way), whereas the “actors” indicated that they personally would prob-
ably act differently in the future; (4) students described their best
friend’s choice of girlfriends and a college major in terms of the qual-
ities of their best friend but explained their own choices in terms of
the qualities of their girlfriend or major; and (5) people ascribe more
personality traits to others than they do to themselves 89
What causes the actor-observer bias? An experiment by Michael
Storms indicates that it is a function of where a person’s attention is
90
focused. The actor’s attention is usually focused on the environ-
ment and on past history; he or she may have special knowledge
about the factors that led up to the behavior and how he or she felt
about the behavior. On the other hand, the observer’s attention is al-
most always focused on the actor; therefore, the observer may be un-
aware of historical or environmental reasons for why the actor did
what he or she did.
In the Storms experiment, two subjects engaged in a conversa-
tion while two observers watched; each observer was instructed to
monitor one of the conversationalists. After the conversation, the ac-
tors and the observers indicated to what extent behaviors such as
friendliness, talkativeness, nervousness, and dominance were due ei-
ther to personal characteristics or to the situation. As you might ex-
pect, the actors were more likely to explain their behavior in terms of
the situation, whereas the observers explained the behavior in terms
of the actor’s personality dispositions. This was not surprising; it is
consistent with what we know about the actor-observer bias. How-
ever, the study had an interesting twist. Some subjects viewed a
videotape of the conversation that was played back either from the
same angle at which they originally saw it (i.e., the actors saw a
videotape of the other person, and the observers saw the person they