Mindfulness reduces the correspondence bias

The correspondence bias (CB) refers to the idea that people sometimes give undue weight to dispositional rather than situational factors when explaining behaviours and attitudes. Three experiments examined whether mindfulness, a non-judgmental focus on the present moment, could reduce the CB. Participants engaged in a brief mindfulness exercise (the raisin task), a control task, or an attention to detail task before completing a typical CB measure involving an attitude-attribution paradigm. The results indicated that participants in the mindfulness condition experienced a significant reduction in the CB compared to participants in the control or attention to detail conditions. These results suggest that mindfulness training can play a unique role in reducing social biases related to person perception.     

Suspicion of ulterior motivation and the correspondence bias

Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the first 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed.     

The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative utterances were to their fellow discussants. Studies 4 and 5 provide evidence supporting an anchoring-and-adjustment interpretation of the spotlight effect. In particular, people appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust--insufficiently--to take into account the perspective of others. The discussion focuses on the manifestations and implications of the spotlight effect across a host of everyday social phenomena.     

Disentangling perceptual and response bias in unilateral neglect: a methodological proposal

Bisiach and his colleagues have developed a new version of Milner's "landmark task" for the purpose of separating "perceptual" and "response" biases in neglect patients. Subjects are required to decide which is the longer (or the shorter) of the two portions of a pre-bisected horizontal line. The authors proposed two indices to measure perceptual and response bias respectively. However, these indices are not mathematically independent of one another. Moreover, they do not exploit all of the information available in the data, since they do not consider the effect of the different transection locations across trials. We now propose an alternative means of analyzing data from the revised Landmark task, which generates independent estimates of perceptual and response biases. The method and its theoretical foundation are summarized, and illustrative data obtained from brain damaged patients and control subjects are presented.     

Implicational schemata and the correspondence bias: on the diagnostic value of situationally constrained behavior

Drawing on G. D. Reeder's (1993) schematic model of dispositional inference, it is hypothesized that perceivers' tendency to draw correspondent dispositional inferences from situationally constrained behavior (i.e., the correspondence bias) can be due to the application of schematic assumptions about trait-behavior relations (i.e., implicational schemata) within the process of situational adjustment. Applied to attitude attribution, situational adjustment is hypothesized to follow an implicit theory of ability, implying that only authors with a corresponding attitude are able to write a persuasive essay toward a given position. Results from 6 experiments offer converging evidence for this hypothesis. Implications for a sufficient understanding of the processes that lead to the correspondence bias are discussed.     

Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead,long live the correspondence bias

Social psychological research has repeatedly shown that perceivers draw correspondent dispositional inferences from observed behaviour even when this behaviour was highly constrained by situational factors (i.e., the correspondence bias). Even though this phenomenon has been proposed to be multiply determined, the most common explanation is still that perceivers ubiquitously consider situational factors to have little impact on human behaviour (i.e., the fundamental attribution error). The present chapter offers a critical analysis of the available empirical evidence on the correspondence bias from the perspective of theory-based bias correction. It is concluded that the correspondence bias results from a number of different processes associated with the application of perceivers' causal theories about situational influences on human behaviour. However, there is no evidence for the assumption that the correspondence bias is due to causal theories implying that situational factors have little impact on human behaviour. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.     

The differential effects of mood on age differences in the correspondence bias

The present study found that age-related differences in the correspondence bias were differentially influenced by induced mood. Young and older adults completed an attitude-attribution task after having been induced to experience a positive, neutral, or negative mood. Although negative moods intensified age-related differences in the correspondence bias, young and older adults were equally susceptible to the correspondence bias when in a positive mood. In addition, induced mood differentially influenced the attributional confidence of young and older adults. Whereas negatively induced young adults were less confident than positively induced young adults in their attributions, negatively induced older adults were more confident than positively induced older adults in their attributions. Findings are discussed in terms of how positive and negative moods operate differently in motivating young and older adults' attributional judgments.     

Cultural variation in correspondence bias: the critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior

Upon observing another's socially constrained behavior, people often ascribe to the person an attitude that corresponds to the behavior (called the correspondence bias [CB]). The authors found that when a socially constrained behavior is still diagnostic of the actor's attitude, both Americans and Japanese show an equally strong CB. A major cultural difference occurred when the behavior was minimally diagnostic. Demonstrating their persistent bias toward dispositional attribution, Americans showed a strong CB. But Japanese did not show any CB (Study 1). Furthermore, a mediational analysis revealed that this cross-cultural difference was due in part to the nature of explicit inferences generated online during attitudinal judgment (Study 2). Implications for the cultural grounding of social perception are discussed.     

Empathy: Its effect on how counsellors are perceived

The importance of sex of counsellor, ethnicity, empathy and client-counsellor sex-pairings on clients' perceptions of the counsellor was investigated. 96 students were asked to rate black or white, male or female, and empathic or non-empathic counsellors, on attractiveness, expertness and trustworthiness. Contrary to previous research, sex of the counsellor, and sex of student-counsellor pairings, had no significant effect on counsellor ratings. Ethnicity of counsellor - which has been largely ignored in research until recently - was found to be a highly signifcant factor in students' ratings of the counsellor: black counsellors were rated significantly higher than white counsellors on attractiveness, expertness and trustworthiness. The importance of empathy as a requisite for the counselling process was supported: counsellors were rated higher on all three variables if they used an empathic approach. There were no interaction effects between the variables.     

Perceiver-induced constraint and attitude attribution in Japan and the US: A case for the cultural dependence of the correspondence bias

After observing someone’s behavior, individuals often infer a corresponding attitude in the person even when the behavior is socially constrained. Convincing evidence for this phenomenon (called the correspondence bias) has been obtained in the perceiver-induced constraint paradigm, where participants ask a target person to read a pre-written attitudinal statement, and after observing the target comply, estimate the target’s real attitude. This paradigm maximally highlights the causal role of the participants in producing the target’s behavior. In Experiment 1, Americans exhibited a reliable correspondence bias under these conditions, but Japanese did not show any such bias. In Experiment 2, both Japanese and Americans inferred strong essay-consistent attitudes in a standard no-choice condition, where the target allegedly argued for a position that had been assigned to her. Implications for the cultural dependence of social cognition are discussed.     

Adjusting for the correspondence bias: Effects of causal uncertainty, cognitive busyness, and causal strength of situational information

This research examined the conditions under which people who have more chronic doubt about their ability to make sense of social behavior (i.e., are causally uncertain; [Weary and Edwards, 1994] and [Weary and Edwards, 1996]) are more likely to adjust their dispositional inferences for a target’s behaviors. Using a cognitive busyness manipulation within the attitude attribution paradigm, we found in Study 1 that higher causal uncertainty predicted increased correction of dispositional inferences, but only when participants had sufficient attentional resources to devote to the task. In Study 2, we found that higher-causal uncertainty predicted greater inferential correction, but only when the additional information provided a more compelling alternative explanation for the observed behavior. Results of this research are discussed in terms of their relevance to the Causal Uncertainty (Weary & Edwards, 1994) and dispositional inference models.     

Unilateral neglect: the effect of competing stimuli on estimated line length

Normal subjects and patients with right hemisphere lesions with or without signs of left unilateral neglect judged the length of a horizontal line presented on the left or on the right side of space. In half of the trials, the line was presented with a centrally located square or diamond, and subjects had to identify the central stimulus before performing the judgment of length. The presence of the central stimulus improved accuracy of performance in controls and in patients without neglect; neglect patients, however, produced more overestimations of left-sided lines when these was presented with a central stimulus than when the lines occurred in isolation. This finding underlines the importance of attentional factors in length estimates performed by neglect patients in their neglected space.     

Processing temporary syntactic ambiguity: the effect of contextual bias

This paper reports two experiments using sentences with a temporary ambiguity between a direct object and a sentence complement analysis that is resolved toward the normally preferred direct object analysis. Postverbal noun phrases in these sentences could be ambiguously attached as either a direct object or the subject of a sentence complement, whereas in unambiguous versions of the sentences the subcategorization of the verb forced the direct object interpretation. Participants read these sentences in relatively long paragraph contexts, where the context supported the direct object analysis ("preferred"), supported the sentence complement analysis ("unpreferred"), or provided conflicting evidence about both analyses ("conflicting"). Self-paced reading times for ambiguous postverbal noun phrases were almost equivalent to the reading times of their unambiguous counterparts, even in unpreferred and conflicted context conditions. However, time to read a following region, which forced the direct object interpretation, was affected by the interaction of verb subcategorization ambiguity and contextual support. The full pattern of results do not fit well with either an unelaborated single-analysis ("garden path") model or a competitive constraint-satisfaction model, but are consistent with a race model in which multiple factors affect the speed of constructing a single initial analysis.     

Mechanism underlying the self-enhancement effect of voice attractiveness evaluation: self-positivity bias and familiarity effect

The aim of the present study was to determine whether the self-enhancement effect of voice attractiveness evaluation is due to general self-positivity bias and/or the familiarity effect. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of their own voice, a friend's voice and strangers' voices. In addition, a self-reference valence (SR-valence) task was adopted in the experiment. Significant self-enhancement effects in voice attractiveness ratings were demonstrated, regardless of whether the participants recognized their self-voice or not. However, the friend-enhancement effect was found in only those participants who successfully recognized their friend's voice. Moreover, a significant correlation was found between self-positivity bias in the SR-valence task and the self-enhancement effect (but not the friend-enhancement effect). Our findings suggest that both the familiarity effect and self-positivity bias account for the vocal self-enhancement effect, and the influence of self-positivity bias could be implicit. The present study thus provides empirical evidence to clarify the potential explanations for the self-enhancement of voice attractiveness assessment.     

Empathy, theory of mind, and individual differences in the appropriation bias among 4- and 5-year-olds

Evidence that young children often claim ownership of their partner’s contributions to an earlier collaborative activity, the appropriation bias, has been attributed to shared intentionality (Cognitive Development (1998) 13, 91–108). The current investigation explored this notion by examining individual differences in the bias among 4- and 5-year-olds as a function of empathy and theory of mind. On two occasions, children joined an adult and two dolls (with each doll being operated by one of the humans) in a picture matching board game before being asked to remember who placed each picture. Children showed a robust appropriation bias despite excellent recognition memory for the studied pictures (Study 1) and particularly in relation to the human sources (Study 2). Whereas higher levels of self-reported empathy were associated with a greater frequency of appropriation errors and fewer correct attributions for pictures placed by the adult and her doll partner, the opposite pattern emerged for theory of mind. Moreover, the positive relations between theory of mind and source monitoring accuracy remained robust after controlling for general ability and inhibitory skills. We consider the implications of these findings for understanding the processes driving the appropriation bias.