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Swimming upstream against the fundamental attribution error: Subjects' weak generalizations from the Darley and Batson study
Abstract
Subjects read about the Darley and Batson findings that (a) the degree to which people were in a hurry strongly influenced the likelihood that they would help a person in need of aid, while (b) several personality variables studied failed to influence helping. In predicting helping rates for other, similar situations, informed subjects (a) estimated only somewhat less helping when the target individual was in a hurry than when he was not, and (b) continued to emphasize personality variables in their predictions about helping.
... A common finding in this paradigm is that perceivers generally attribute immoral dispositions to immorally behaving targets even when they have learned that situational factors have a strong impact on the tendency to engage in immoral behaviour (e.g., Bierbrauer, 1979;A. G. Miller, Gillen, Schenker, & Radlove, 1974;Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982;Sabini & Silver, 1983;Safer, 1980). Results from the moral attribution paradigm are generally consistent with the assumption that perceivers assess the diagnostic value of situationally constrained behaviour by implicational schemata before they engage in a process of situational correction (Reeder, 1993). ...
... Because the correspondence bias seems to be independent of the often proposed underestimation of situational influences in terms of S-Theory, teaching lay perceivers about the causal impact of situational factors on human behaviour may be ineffective in reducing the correspondence bias (e.g., Bierbrauer, 1979;A. G. Miller et al., 1974;Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982). Moreover, the effectiveness of a given strategy may strongly depend on the particular cause of 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Review of Social Psychology is the property of Psychology Press (UK) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
... Knowing that being in a hurry or even late for an important commitment (a pilot being expected at the airport) prevents us from acknowledging the urgent needs of others should induce people who want to be sensitive to the needs of others to leave home earlier, so as not to ignore any requests for help. Some studies tell us that this awareness is indeed in place (Beaman et al., 1978;Pietromonaco and Nisbett, 1982). ...
Is epiphenomenalism virtually entailed by the current empirical knowledge about how the mind/brain causes human behavior? I'll address this question by highlighting that recent discoveries in empirical psychology and neuroscience actually do not strike the final blow to the notions of free will and intentional agency. Indeed, most of the experiments that purport to show that our behavior is unconscious and automatic do not prove that it is indeed the case and that therefore we do not have free will. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that those experiments focus on a specific range of our behavior, one that manifests a significant correlation between unconscious priming and decisions or reactions. However, this doesn't mean that the entire range of our relevant behavior works the same way. It can be argued that there are situations of higher relevance in which we are fully conscious of our decisions or, at least, there are decisions such that psychological experiments cannot prove them to always be unconscious and automatic. However, the epiphenomenalist challenge may suggest that we should abandon some of the suppositions implied by a traditional idea of free will.
... Due to the strong attributional bias and ethics, Western philosophy, or societal norms valuing individualism, the power of these forces to shape behavior is seldom appreciated. Individuals prefer disposition-based predictions, even when confronted with contrary evidence (Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982). Ironically, this bias may actually enhance the power of social control systems because observers are less aware of their operation. ...
... If dispositionist thinking about behaviour is indeed intuitive and universal under some conditions, the term 'contradiction' may be used to describe an actor's behaviour that seems to violate what is expected as result o f his or her dispositions, as investigated by Choi and Nisbett (2000) in their 'Bad Samaritan' study. Not surprisingly, a religious and helpful person not helping a person in need has been equated with a form o f counter-intuitiveness due to the incongruity between assumed disposition and actual behaviour (Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982 Choi's study. ...
Some cross-cultural psychologists have shown differences in cognition between Eastern and Western cultures, described as holistic versus analytic (H-A) systems of thought. It is widely assumed that Buddhism has contributed to holistic cognition. This thesis explores holistic thought among Western Buddhists by integrating methods and theories mainly from cross-cultural and social psychology, but also the cognitive anthropology of religion. H-A reasoning among Buddhists, Anglicans and Secular-Humanists in the UK is investigated in a main experiment, providing good backing for hypothesised H-A group differences. Moreover, it supports a hypothesis about the effect of meditation on the categorisation of visual stimuli and strength of holistic beliefs. However, only explicit H-A measures are subject to religious context effects, as evident in their association with religiosity, the religious self-concept and religious integration. Inducing a Buddhist context through religious priming does not result in a holism shift. A follow-up study (2) uses pictorial primes and shows an interaction effect between priming condition and strength of Buddhist self-concepts on holistic beliefs. Study 3 clarifies religious versus secular differences that were found for the grouping measure used in Study 1 in a correlational design with measures of independence- interdependence, religious identification as well as attraction to Buddhist and Secular- Humanist ideas. It indicates that both self-selection and learning effects may account for secular vs religious H-A differences. The last experiment (Study 4) further develops so-called 'tolerance of contradictions' (TC) as an aspect of H-A cognition and introduces the cognitive anthropological concept of counterintuitive (Cl) beliefs. As expected, results show that religious groups have a higher tolerance of Cl. Furthermore, compared to normal or bizarre concepts. Cl content reduces TC only among secular individuals, and to some degree Anglicans, but has no such effect on Buddhists. Implications for cross-cultural psychology, the psychology of religion as well as the interdisciplinary field of 'cognition and culture' are discussed.
... Typically, the participants attribute immoral dispositions to these peoplethey are bad peopleeven though they are in situations known to influence behaviour strongly. In the Milgram example, participants infer that Milgram's subjects were unusually cruel, or were hostile types, or had blindly obedient personalities (Miller et al., 1974;Pietromonaco and Nisbett, 1982). If reminded that his sample was large and diverse, they infer that everybody must be like that. ...
... A related way data might prove to be useful is simply by making us aware of how situational effects influence us. There is some evidence that knowledge of situational effects can, at least sometimes, help reduce or eliminate their deleterious effects (Pietromonaco and Nisbett 1992;Beaman et al. 1978). These are simple, but suggestive ways in which data and philosophical theory might work together to limit our irrationality. ...
Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility treat as central the ability of agents to respond to reasons. Call such theories Reasons accounts. In what follows, I consider the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by contemporary psychology. In the second half of the paper I consider whether such threats can be met, and at what cost. Ultimately, I argue that Reasons accounts can abandon some familiar assumptions, and that doing so permits us to build a more empirically plausible picture of our agency. 1. Preliminaries: free will and moral responsibility 'Free will' is a term of both ordinary and technical discourse. We might say that Ava chose to major in mathematics "of her own free will" or that Ruth lacks free will because of, say, brainwashing or mental illness. What is less clear is whether ordinary sorts of usages of free will reflect a unified or single concept of free will. Perhaps ordinary usage picks out distinct features of the world, masquerading under a single term. Referential fragmentation seems an especially appealing hypothesis when one considers that varied characterizations given to free will among scientists, philosophers, and theologians. So, for example, scientists have used the term 'free will' to refer to, among other things: the feeling of conscious control (Wegner 2002); "undetermined choices of action," (Bargh 2008, p. 130) and the idea that we choices "independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process" (Montague 2008, p. R584-85). Philosophical uses display variation, too. Among other things, free will has been characterized as: the ability to do otherwise; a kind of control required for moral responsibility; decision-making in accord with reason; and a capacity to act in the way we believe when we deliberate about what to do. The univocality of 'free will' is dubious (Vargas 2011).
... For example, Safer (1980) found that observers of a film of Milgram's (1963) experiment attributed the actions of obedient participants to sadistic personalities rather than to the situational pressure to comply with authority. Likewise, Pietromonaco and Nisbett (1982) found that participants who read about Darley and Batson's (1973) seminarians attributed the behavior of the hurried seminarians to their personalities rather than their situation. ...
Several experiments provided evidence that negotiators make systematic errors in personality-trait attributions for the bargaining behaviors of their counterparts. Although basic negotiation behavior is highly determined by bargaining positions, negotiators primarily interpret their counterpart's behavior in terms of the counterpart's personality, such as his or her level of cooperativeness or agreeableness. Data support a model of 4 processes that contribute to misperceptions: (a) the primacy of situations in determining bargaining behavior, (b) the primacy of personality traits in attributions, (c) the lack of sufficient information about the other's situation to discount personality attributions, and (d) the potentially self-confirming consequences of personality attributions for subsequent interactions. The authors discuss implications for research areas such as social cognition in negotiation, accuracy in social perception, and dynamics of belief confirmation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... The prediction biases revealed here were remarkable in their durability, even in the face of material incentives to do well, and despite relevant experience. Past research has shown that social perceivers are astonishingly insensitive to the powerful effects of situational constraints on the behavior of others (Jones & Harris, 1967;Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982), even when the perceiver is the one who has induced the constraint (Gilbert & Jones, 1986). Nevertheless, one context in which we might hope that people could understand and avoid this problem is negotiation. ...
Two experiments explored actual and predicted outcomes in competitive dyadic negotiations under time pressure. Participants predicted that final deadlines would hurt their negotiation outcomes. Actually, moderate deadlines improved outcomes for negotiators who were eager to get a deal quickly because the passage of time was costly to them. Participants’ erroneous predictions may be due to oversimplified and egocentric prediction processes that focus on the effects of situational constraints (deadlines) on the self and oversimplify or ignore their effects on others. The results clarify the psychological processes by which people predict the outcomes of negotiation and select negotiation strategies.
... Exactly how much more knowledgeable does the average quiz-master seem than the average quiz-taker (Ross et al., 1977)? Exactly how much does being late influence seminarians' willingness to stop to help someone in need (Darley & Batson, 1973; Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982)? The present research, by contrast, informed participants exactly how strong the situation was, thereby making it transparently clear exactly how much performance ought to be discounted. ...
Performance (such as a course grade) is a joint function of an individual's ability (such as intelligence) and the situation (such as the instructor's grading leniency). Prior research has documented a human bias toward dispositional inference, which ascribes performance to individual ability, even when it is better explained through situational influences on performance. It is hypothesized here that this tendency leads admissions decisions to favor students coming from institutions with lenient grading because those students have their high grades mistaken for evidence of high ability. Three experiments show that those who obtain high scores simply because of lenient grading are favored in selection. These results have implications for research on attribution because they provide a more stringent test of the correspondence bias and allow for a more precise measure of its size. Implications for university admissions and personnel selection decisions are also discussed.
... The prediction biases revealed here were remarkable in their durability, even in the face of material incentives to do well, and despite relevant experience. Past research has shown that social perceivers are astonishingly insensitive to the powerful effects of situational constraints on the behavior of others (Jones & Harris, 1967;Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982), even when the perceiver is the one who has induced the constraint (Gilbert & Jones, 1986). Nevertheless, one context in which we might hope that people could understand and avoid this problem is negotiation. ...
Four experiments explore how situational constraints influence predictions and outcomes in negotiation. The results show a disconnect between predictions and actual outcomes. Evidence from Experiment 2 demonstrates that tight final deadlines can be strategically advantageous for the party with the heavier time costs. Both naive (Experiment 1) and experienced (Experiment 2) negotiators, however, erroneously predicted that deadlines would be a strategic liability in negotiation. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that these prediction errors may be rooted in self-focused social prediction processes that oversimplify others and ignore the mutual influence inherent in social interaction. Consistent with this egocentric prediction process, Experiment 4 found this same divergence of predictions from actual outcomes occurred for knowledge about final deadlines. In Experiment 4, negotiators obtained better outcomes when their opponents knew about their deadlines. Again, however, negotiators predicted that it would be a strategic liability for one's opponent to know about one's own final deadline. These results have both practical and theoretical implications. Practically, this research suggests ways in which negotiators can use time pressure strategically. Theoretically, it offers insight into the process of social prediction on which people rely to select strategies in competitive interaction. In addition, it underscores the importance of differentiating varieties of time pressure. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-06, Section: B, page: 3323. Adviser: Max Bazerman. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Northwestern University, 2000.
... A few subsequent investigators examined whether laypeople underestimate the power of the particular situational manipulations involved in these classic studies and accordingly make unwarranted dispositional inferences. Safer (1980) and Bierbrauer (1979) provided such evidence with respect to the Milgram situation and Pietromonaco and Nisbett (1982) did so with respect to the Darley and Batson manipulation. ...
Two experiments, one conducted with American college students and one with Israeli pilots and their instructors, 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. The results of these studies showed that the relevant labeling manipulations exerted far greater impact on the players' choice to cooperate versus defect--both in the first round and overall--than anticipated by the individuals who had predicted their behavior. Reputation-based prediction, by contrast, failed to discriminate cooperators from defectors. A supplementary questionnaire study showed the generality of the relevant short-coming in naïve psychology. The implications of these findings, and the potential contribution of the present methodology to the classic pedagogical strategy of the demonstration experiment, are discussed.
... This actor-observer difference describes the tendency for people to disregard the power of situational influences on others' behavior. The actor-observer difference has been demonstrated in many contexts, including attributions of belief (Jones & Harris, 1967), attributions of intelligence (Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977), and predictions of behavior (Darley & Batson, 1973; Griffin, Dunning, & Ross, 1990; Pietromonaco & Nisbett, 1982; Safer, 1980; Van Boven et al., 2000). In the context of negotiation, research has found that negotiators often fail to appreciate the situational constraints and incentives of their opponents, with a resulting difficulty selecting optimal strategies (Ball, Bazerman, & Carroll, 1991; Bazerman & Carroll, 1987; Bazerman, Magliozzi, & Neale, 1985; Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Thompson & Hastie, 1990; Thompson & Hrebec, 1996). ...
Five experiments document biases in the way people predict the outcomes of interdependent social situations. Participants predicted that situational constraints would restrain their own behavior more than it would the behavior of others, even in situations where everyone faced identical constraints. When anticipating the effects of deadlines on outcomes of negotiations, participants predicted that deadlines would hinder their performance more than it would hinder the performance of others. The results shed light on the psychological processes by which people predict the outcomes of and select strategies in strategic social interaction. They extend prior findings, such as people believing themselves to be below average on difficult tasks, to highly interdependent situations. Furthermore, the article shows both how focusing can account for these effects and also how perspective taking can reduce their biasing influence.
Sono esaminati vari problemi relativi alla previsione in psichiatria. I dati disponibili mostrano, in modo simile alle scienze sociali, ampi limiti nella capacità previsionale, specie per quanto riguarda il suicidio, la violenza e altri aspetti comportamentali. Vengono esaminate le difficoltà che nascono dal cercare di derivare il futuro della persona dal suo passato, la mancata coerenza fra aspetti di personalità e possibili comportamenti e il privilegio dato a strumenti psicopatologici incentrati sul singolo caso, rispetto a quelli attuariali con valutazioni testistiche e statistiche. Vengono anche evidenziati i numerosi bias cognitivi che distorcono le previsioni, in particolare l'errore fondamentale di attribuzione, che privilegia aspetti personologici rispetto a quelli situazionali. Ma altri bias hanno una importante azione distorsiva, da quelli della rappresentatività a quelli della disponibilità, da quelli statistici, al framing o al priming. Emerge una psichiatria molto legata nelle pratiche ancora al senso comune e alla folk psychology, con la ricchezza ma anche i molti errori che la caratterizzano. Di fatto esiste una modesta capacità previsionale riconosciuta alla psicologia popolare e alla psichiatria, ma è legata più a vincoli situazionali che a modelli personologici e psicopatologici e in ogni caso scarsamente affidabile per la previsione clinica in psichiatria.
Viene mostrato come l'ostacolo a taluni strumenti suicidari non porti necessariamente a spostarsi su altre modalità letali, esaminando in particolare il caso dell'intossicazione da gas domestico in Gran Bretagna e gli ostacoli per prevenire il salto dal Golden Gate Bridge di San Francisco. Il mancato spostamento sembra caratterizzare anche altri aspetti patologici, quali il gioco d'azzardo, le dipendenze o la criminalità. L'ipotesi dello spostamento è in realtà legata all'errore fondamentale di attribuzione, che privilegia gli aspetti disposizionali rispetto a quelli situazionali. Vengono esaminati bias collegati a questo errore di attribuzione, come la mancata stabilità e coerenza nel tempo e nelle diverse situazioni degli aspetti disposizionali, la mancata coerenza tra atteggiamenti e comportamenti, e gli errori che gli approcci disposizionali inducono nella previsione di compor-tamenti con il variare delle situazioni. Questi bias mettono in discussione il concetto tradizionale di personalità e il suo ruolo nella genesi dei sintomi o nella predizione dei comportamenti, e anche i modelli psicologici tradizionali che prevedono che i comportamenti siano sempre conseguenza degli atteggiamenti della persona. Il ruolo degli aspetti situazionali, specialmente dei cosiddetti "fattori canale", appare importante nella modifica di comportamenti in ambito preventivo e tera-peutico.
Gilbert Harman argues that the warrant for the lay attribution of character traits is completely undermined by the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE). He takes it to have been established by social psychologists, that the FAE pervades ordinary instances of lay person perception. However, examination of recent work in psychology reveals that there are good reasons to doubt that the effects observed in experimental settings, which ground the case for the FAE, pervade ordinary instances of person perception. Furthermore, it is possible to make sense of these experimental results without invoking the FAE. Harman's argument against lay character trait attribution is unsubstantiated.
The author discusses the Situationist Thesis, according to which human actions correlate more strongly with features of the immediate situation than with stable personality traits. He argues that whether we accept the original Situationist Thesis or the alternative related theses, the implications for free will are negative. That is, the implications are that we have less free will than we might otherwise have thought: certain types of situational factor can significantly reduce free will. The author discusses two types of approach to solving the problem, one of which (“nudge” or libertarian paternalism) will not solve it, and the other (being generally aware of situational interferences in freedom) will solve it only partly and unreliably. Finally, he outlines some general desiderata for any solutions to the problem. He argues that the tradition of positive liberty deserves reviving in light of the conclusions about free will reached in the discussion of the Situationist Thesis, and moreover that those conclusions suggest a new way of thinking about the difference between positive and negative liberty. This new way could help to overcome some of the reservations that liberal philosophers typically have about the idea of positive liberty, as well as helping us to think about what is needed to overcome the impediments to free will shown by the situationist literature.
Psychological biases strongly affect foreign policy decision-making. The authors argue that the biases recently uncovered by psychological research favor hawkish decisions in conflict situations. By “hawkish," they refer to a propensity for suspicion, hostility and aggression in the conduct of conflict, and for less cooperation and trust when the resolution of a conflict is on the agenda. While much extant work examines links between cognitive biases and conflict, they offer a new and developed formulation based on the excellent insight of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in the field of psychology and Jonathan Renshon’s knowledge of IR and conflict.
Warm, sensitive, creative, outgoing, cheeky, creepy. Scan any personal ads page and it's clear that to get a life you need a personality first. It is also a notion with a long and often bizarre history: in early Greece and medieval Europe, it was thought to depend on the balance of bile in the body. On Personality is a thoughtful and stimulating look under the skin of this widely-used but little understood phenomenon. Peter Goldie points out that we rely on personality to do a lot of work: describe, judge, understand, explain and predict others as well as ourselves. Is it really up to this task? If personality is about 'character', is it a relic of a bygone Victorian age? If personality is so reliable, how can a virtue in one person be a vice in another? Drawing on a great range of philosophers, novelists and films, from Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to Joseph Conrad, Middlemarch, War and Peace and Bridget Jones' Diary, Peter Goldie also discusses some famous psychology experiments. If personality is a reliable guide to predicting what people will do, he reflects on why people often surprise us and asks whether personality is simply down to chance and circumstance. On Personality is essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating but slippery concept. It will also make you think twice before writing your CV.
This paperback is ideal as a main or supplementary text for courses in social psychology, introductory psychology, or research design.
This article presents a model of delusional experience which provides an integrated approach in which aberrations at the neurological level are directly related to a disorder of experience. It argues that higher order cognitive effects are not the proper locus for the explanation of the delusional experience itself. Through following out the neurological and phenomenological underpinnings of misattribution, this article provides a bottom-up account of the genesis of schizophrenic delusions, particularly those involving the misattributions of agency.
•A comprehensive analysis of the bad character provisions in the Criminal Justice Act 2003
•Explores conceptual, doctrinal, and theoretical issues underlying character evidence
•Examines the use of character evidence in determining sentences.
If a defendant is on trial for a crime such as burglary, to what extent should the fact that he has a previous conviction for burglary feature in his trial? Should the prosecution be allowed to tell the jury about the previous conviction as evidence that the defendant is more likely to have committed burglary? Should the judge give the defendant a longer sentence because he has a previous conviction? These are the fundamental questions examined in Character in the Criminal Trial.
Including an in-depth analysis of the character evidence provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, this book assesses the arguments for and against using character evidence to prove a defendant's guilt. It explores the sentencing provisions in the same Act, as well as the general use of criminal record and other character evidence to aggravate and mitigate sentence.
Issues examined in the course of the book include: psychological and philosophical debates about the stability of character; criminological research on recidivism and the nature of criminal careers; ethical debates about the use of prior behaviour to prove current or future offending; the process of reasoning underlying the use of bad character evidence; whether bad character evidence is prejudicial; and the use of risk assessment instruments to classify offenders as dangerous. By combining insights from law, psychology, criminology, and philosophy, Redmayne reassesses the use of character in the criminal trial and reflects on the significance of the law's increasing emphasis on character.
Personal cognitive processes inform how individuals understand their environment. Cultural variation, fundamental attribution error, causal attribution, and durability bias create obstacles to Western understanding of irregular war and have created a significant institutional bias in how the US military perceives its enemies- a perception only somewhat softened after a decade of irregular war. United Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is in a better position to overcome these problems through persistent engagement. In the event of major conflict, environmentally sensitized military planners will be better able to achieve military and policy objectives.
Gilbert Harman argues that the warrant for the lay attribution of character traits is completely undermined by the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE). He takes it to have been established by social psychologists, that the FAE pervades ordinary instances of lay person perception. However, examination of recent work in psychology reveals that there are good reasons to doubt that the effects observed in experimental settings, which ground the case for the FAE, pervade ordinary instances of person perception. Furthermore,
it is possible to make sense of these experimental results without invoking the FAE. Harman's argument against lay character trait attribution is unsubstantiated. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 350-368
“Error of Opinion may be Tolerated When Reason is Left Free to Combat It.”
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address 4 March 1801
Critics of the experimental method claim that experiments rely too heavily on artificial settings, rely too heavily on college student participants, and do not provide practical solutions to applied problems. Contrary to these claims, I review evidence suggesting that natural research settings are often overrated, artificial research settings are often underrated, college student research participants provide remarkably useful data, and concrete thinking (i.e., focusing on superficial surface details rather than on underlying fundamental abstract principles) impedes learning and problem solving. Moreover, I suggest that much of the confusion concerning the experimental method stems from a preference for different types of information among different groups of individuals. A clearer understanding of this preference difference is needed to facilitate effective intercommunication between scientists and practitioners.
The dismissive attitude of intellectuals toward conspiracy theorists is considered and given some justification. It is argued that intellectuals are entitled to an attitude of prima facie skepticism toward the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists, because conspiracy theorists have an irrational tendency to continue to believe in conspiracy theories, even when these take on the appearance of forming the core of degenerating research program. It is further argued that the pervasive effect of the “fundamental attribution error” can explain the behavior of such conspiracy theorists. A rival approach due to Brian Keeley, which involves the criticism of a subclass of conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, is considered and found to be inadequate.
such distinguished psychologists as Daryl Bem, Baruch Fischhoff, Lewis Goldberg, and Mark Snyder. We also learned a great deal from the reviews. Each of the reviewers, while appreciating at least some aspects of our book, has mused about the way it could, and perhaps should, have been written. In our response, we highlight these alternative texts. We suspect that the reader will agree with our reviewers, and with us, that the interface of the fields of cognitive, social, and personality psychology holds the promise of some excellent books waiting to be written by the right people. Fischhoff, a cognitive psychologist with social leanings (or at least many friends and admirers in the field of social psychology), has chosen to see our book in the context of his
What does it mean to be rational – to reason well and effectively? How does rationality, broadly conceived, relate to the knowledge one acquires, the beliefs one forms, the explanations one constructs or appropriates, the judgments and decisions one makes, the values one adopts? What is the character of human reasoning and, in particular, does it tend to be rational?
The thesis that teleological explanations are best understood as causal explanations is defended (contra Valentine). I shift the focus of debate from behavior simpliciter to allegedly rational behavior. Teleological explanation, in the case of rational agents, involves reason‐giving; and the reasons agents give for acting must be causative of that action if those agents are to be rational in practice. I argue initially that to abandon the claim that reasons are causes of action is to abandon that which renders many generalisations of systematic human behavior intelligible. I then adduce and defend against two major objections to the secondary thesis that reasons can be causes of action: (1) Experiments in attribution research suggest that agents are characteristically mistaken when reporting on the causes of their behavior; (2) Causal explanation must refer to some law, and reasons cannot enter into such laws as causes of action. In responding to these objections, I note that strict predictability is probably not a reliable indicator of genuine causal explanation; some explanations will afford predictions, others will not.
To investigate the relationship between implicit psychological hypotheses and explicit empirical findings, summaries of twenty published studies on attitude-behaviour consistency were presented to a sample of forty-eight psychology undergraduates. Subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of agreement between attitudes and behaviour obtained by each study. Correlations between subjects' covariation judgements and empirically obtained attitude-behaviour consistencies were minimal and nonsignificant. Results are discussed in the light of more recent research on attitude-behaviour relationship.
Pour examiner la relation entre les théories psychologiques implicites et les résultats empiriques explicites, des résumés de 20 études publiées sur la consistance attitude-comportement ont été presentés à un échantillon de 48 étudiants de psychologie. Les sujets devaient estimer le degré de concordance obtenu dans chaque étude entre les attitudes et Ie comportement. Les corrélations entre les jugements de covariation des sujets et les concordances obtenues empiriquement furent minimes et non significatives. Les résultats sont discutés a la lumière des plus récentes recherches dans le domaine des relations entre attitudes et comportement.
The conventional wisdom has been that U.S. legal culture discourages apologies. Defendants worry that apologies will be admissible at trial and interpreted as admissions of responsibility. In recent years, however, legal scholars have debated the merits of encouraging parties to apologize. Proponents of apologies claim that apologies will avert lawsuits and promote settlement. Consistent with this view, legislatures in several states have enacted statutes that make certain apologies inadmissible. In addition, some have argued that defendants might craft their apologies to better insulate them from legal liability (e.g., offering a mere expression of sympathy) in order to reap the benefits of apologizing while minimizing the risks. On the other side, however, critics of these so-called safe apologies have argued that apologies that avoid the legal consequences of apologizing are devoid of moral content and likely ineffectual. Much of this debate, however, has occurred in the absence of sound empirical data. The article reports the findings of two experimental studies in which participants were asked to read a vignette describing an accident, to take on the role of the injured party, to indicate whether or not they were likely to accept a settlement offer from the other party, and to respond to a series of questions about the situation. In the first study, a full, responsibility accepting, apology increased the likelihood that the offer would be accepted. In contrast, a partial, sympathy expressing, apology increased participants' uncertainty about whether or not to accept the offer. In addition, a full apology (but not a partial apology) resulted in more positive ratings of numerous variables that are thought to underlie the settlement decision. These underlying judgments provided the mechanism by which apologies influenced settlement decisions. Importantly for the debate over evidentiary protection for apologies, the nature of the applicable evidentiary rule did not influence the apologies' effect on settlement decisions nor did these rules influence participants' perceptions of the situation or the offender. Consistent with the results of the first study, the second study found that apologies influenced participants' attributions and perceptions of the situation and the offender. Overall, full apologies improved the participants' perceptions of the situation and the offender, while partial apologies did little to alter such perceptions. There were patterns in the data suggesting both that partial apologies may negatively impact perceptions where responsibility is relatively clear or where the injury is more severe and that partial apologies may positively impact perceptions where responsibility is relatively less clear or where the injury is relatively minor. In addition, and again consistent with the results of the first study, this study provided no evidence that the nature of the applicable evidentiary rule will influence participants' perceptions of the situation, the offender, or the apology. These findings provide some guidance for policymakers and litigants or potential litigants with difficult decisions to make about the appropriate evidentiary protection for apologies, whether to offer an apology to an opposing party in civil litigation, and how to respond to an apology so offered.
Central to Alex George's work was a concern with the psychology of presidential decision making. Our analysis focuses on George's work at the intersection of leadership psychology and the psychology of judgment in the making of consequential foreign policy decisions, specifically those dealing with issues of war and peace. We begin with a review of the fundamental dilemmas of political decision making, focusing on the various factors that present challenges to leaders seeking to make high-quality decisions. We then move to an analysis of the nature of judgment and the ways in which it both shapes and is shaped by cognitive dynamics and conclude by examining a number of steps designed to help leaders avoid the most damaging blind spots of their own psychologies and cognitive biases.
Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession.
Philosophical accounts of altruism that purport to explain helping behavior are vulnerable to empirical falsification. John
Campbell argues that the Good Samaritan study adds to a growing body of evidence that helping behavior is not best explained
by appeal to altruism, thus jeopardizing those accounts. I propose that philosophical accounts of altruism can be empirically
challenged only if it is shown that altruistic motivations are undermined by normative conflict in the agent, and that the
relevant studies do not provide this sort of evidence. Non-normative, purely causal, psychological factors would be empirically
relevant only if the notion of altruism is broadened to include the requirement that one recognize certain situations as calling
for altruism. But even in that case, the relevant studies are not designed in such a way that could threaten philosophical
theories of altruism.
KeywordsAltruism–Helping behavior–Darley–Campbell–Good Samaritan study
The authors tested the hypothesis that East Asians, because of their holistic reasoning, take contradiction and inconsistency for granted and consequently are less likely than Americans to experience surprise. Studies 1 and 2 showed that Korean participants displayed less surprise and greater hindsight bias than American participants did when a target's behavior contradicted their expectations. Studies 3 and 4 further demonstrated that even when contradiction was created in highly explicit ways, Korean participants experienced little surprise, whereas American participants reported substantial surprise. We discuss the implications of these findings for various issues, including the psychology of conviction, cognitive dissonance, and the development of science.
BACKGROUND Although salt intake can be estimated from 24-h urinary sodium excretion (Na24 ), for a long time there has been no precise and easy method for its measurement.
To investigate the possibility of estimating Na24 using pipe-sampling of overnight urine and lean body mass.
Body height, body weight and body fat determined by bioelectrical impedance (lean body mass = body weight body fat) was measured in 351 healthy individuals (126 men, 225 women). Twenty-four-hour urine was collected and creatinine and sodium were measured. To predict 24-h urinary creatinine excretion (Cr24 ), the relationship between Cr24 and lean body mass was investigated. Both 24-h urine and overnight urine specimens were collected in 149 individuals (71 men, 78 women) using a sampling pipe (semi-automatic proportional urine sampling device; height 16 cm, width 1.5 cm). Multiple regression analysis was used to estimate Na24.
The prediction of Cr24 (Pr.UCr24 ) was derived from lean body mass. Using Pr.UCr24 and the overnight urinary Na/Cr excretion ratio (Na n /Cr n ), Na24 was estimated as 0.634 (Na n /Cr n ) Pr.UCr 24 + 104.7 mmol/day for men and 0.682 (Na n /Cr n ) Pr.UCr 24 + 62.6 mmol/day for women. The correlation coefficient (r) between true Na24 and Na24 estimated by these formulae was r = 0.78 ( P<0.001; mean difference SD-0.03 39.0 mmol/day).
A new pipe-sampling method using overnight urine and lean body mass was easy and reliable for the estimation of Na 24. Furthermore, this method is convenient and may enable counselling on salt intake.
The authors conducted 2 studies regarding behavior perceptions of "self" and "typical other" in hypothetical replications of S. Milgram's (1963) obedience experiment. In Study 1, participants' knowledge about Milgram's actual results was manipulated. Regardless of knowledge, results demonstrated several specific social and perceptual biases (e.g., the self-other bias; J. D. Brown, 1986), in addition to several general, fundamental lessons of social psychology (e.g., the perseverance of lay dispositionism). Study 2 was designed to explore the possibility that participants' own academic interests and worldview could influence the biases explicated in Study 1. The authors assessed perceptions of both criminal-justice majors and non-criminal-justice majors regarding their perceptions of behaviors of self and typical other. The criminal-justice students' self-other obedience estimates were significantly higher than those of the non-criminal-justice students. Further, the self-other discrepancy for criminal-justice students was significantly smaller than the difference reported by non-criminal-justice majors, suggesting that the criminal-justice students demonstrated the self-other bias significantly less than non-criminal-justice students in this context. The findings indicate that specific social-perceptual biases may have been moderated by career interest and worldview.
Examined the influence of situational variables and religiosity, as measured by several personality scales (e.g., the Religious Life Inventory), on the helping behavior of 40 theology students in an emergency situation suggested by the parable of the Good Samaritan. Ss going between 2 buildings encountered a shabbily dressed person slumped by the side of the road. Ss in a hurry to reach their destination were more likely to pass by without stopping. Some Ss were going to give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, others on a nonhelping relevant topic; this made no significant difference in the likelihood of their giving the victim help. Religious personality variables did not predict whether S would help the victim or not. However, if S did stop to offer help, the character of the helping response was related to his type of religiosity. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted 2 experiments to determine whether Ss take into account the representativeness of a sample before generalizing from the sample to a population. 274 undergraduates were presented with vivid 1-case samples of populations—a welfare recipient in one study and a prison guard in another. Ss were then asked to rate the population (of welfare recipients or prison guards) on a number of dimensions. Results indicate that exposure to the sample case influenced attitudes about the population whether Ss were told nothing about the typicality of the case, were told that the case was highly typical of the population, or were told that the case was highly atypical of the population. Results suggest that, at least when information about sample bias is pallid and information about the nature of the sample is vivid, people may make unwarranted generalizations from samples to populations. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments demonstrated that self-perceptions and social perceptions may persevere after the initial basis for such perceptions has been completely discredited. In both studies subjects first received false feedback, indicating that they had either succeeded or failed on a novel discrimination task and then were thoroughly debriefed concerning the predetermined and random nature of this outcome manipulation. In experiment 2, both the initial outcome manipulation and subsequent debriefing were watched and overheard by observers. Both actors and observers showed substantial perseverance of initial impressions concerning the actors' performance and abilities following a standard "outcome" debriefing. "Process" debriefing, in which explicit discussion of the perseverance process was provided, generally proved sufficient to eliminate erroneous self-perceptions. Biased attribution processes that might underlie perserverance phenomena and the implications of the present data for the ethical conduct of deception research are discussed.
This articles describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock generator with 30 graded switches ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The victim is a confederate of the E. The primary dependent variable is the maximum shock the S is willing to administer before he refuses to continue further. 26 Ss obeyed the experimental commands fully, and administered the highest shock on the generator. 14 Ss broke off the experiment at some point after the victim protested and refused to provide further answers. The procedure created extreme levels of nervous tension in some Ss. Profuse sweating, trembling, and stuttering were typical expressions of this emotional disturbance. One unexpected sign of tension––yet to be explained––was the regular occurrence of nervous laughter, which in some Ss developed into uncontrollable seizures. The variety of interesting behavioral dynamics observed in the experiment, the reality of the situation for the S, and the possibility of parametric variation within the framework of the procedure, point to the fruitfulness of further study.
Conducted 2 experiments to determine whether Ss take into account the representativeness of a sample before generalizing from the sample to a population. 274 undergraduates were presented with vivid 1-case samples of populations--a welfare recipient in one study and a prison guard in another. Ss were then asked to rate the population (of welfare recipients or prison guards) on a number of dimensions. Results indicate that exposure to the sample case influenced attitudes about the population whether Ss were told nothing about the typicality of the case, were told that the case was highly typical of the population, or were told that the case was highly atypical of the population. Results suggest that, at least when information about sample bias is pallid and information about the nature of the sample is vivid, people may make unwarranted generalizations from samples to populations. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
After seeing Milgram's Obedience film, students apparently conclude that people are evil and would harm a stranger if given the opportunity. Students overestimate the shock level which subjects deliver when uncoerced by the experimenter.
Attribution theory is concerned with the attempts of ordinary people to understand the causes and implications of the events they witness. It deals with the “naive psychology” of the “man in the street” as he interprets his own behaviors and the actions of others. For man—in the perspective of attribution theory—is an intuitive psychologist who seeks to explain behavior and draw inferences about actors and their environments. To better understand the perceptions and actions of this intuitive scientist, his methods must be explored. The sources of oversight, error, or bias in his assumptions and procedures may have serious consequences, both for the lay psychologist himself and for the society that he builds and perpetuates. These shortcomings, explored from the vantage point of contemporary attribution theory, are the focus of the chapter. The logical or rational schemata employed by intuitive psychologists and the sources of bias in their attempts at understanding, predicting, and controlling the events that unfold around them are considered. Attributional biases in the psychology of prediction, perseverance of social inferences and social theories, and the intuitive psychologist's illusions and insights are described.