Ithaca College

Leigh Ann Vaughn (Psychology) has published an article with co-authors from The Ohio State University and the University of Oregon on how we understand the motivations for the behaviors of others.

When we try to figure out someone else's behavior, we tend to jump to the conclusion that the behavior was caused by something about the person (traits, attitudes, etc.), rather than the person's immediate situation, even when the immediate situation could have caused the person's behavior. For example, we might jump to the conclusion that a student was late to class because the student is lazy, when in fact the student was late because his or her car wouldn't start. This tendency is called the correspondence bias, and is also known as the fundamental attribution error.

We can avoid the correspondence bias if we think more carefully about possible causes of the person's behavior. Such careful thought requires both motivation and ability. The research examined one motivational and two ability influences on whether we try to avoid, or adjust for, that bias.

We can become more motivated when we are uncertain that we can figure out the causes of people's behavior. This causal uncertainty increases our motivation to think carefully and arrive at an accurate judgment, and increases the chance that we will pay attention to the person's immediate situation as a possible cause of that person's behavior.

Turning to ability, even if we are causally uncertain, we won't be able to think carefully about the causes of the person's behavior if we are distracted. Additionally, we will be less able to conclude that the person's behavior was caused by the situation if the immediate situation provides a poor explanation for the person's behavior.

There are numerous real-world implications of this research. For example, people with mild to moderate depression tend to be more causally uncertain than people without depression. Thus, our research perhaps counterintuitively suggests that people with mild to moderate depression might be less likely to jump to erroneous conclusions about another person's behavior than people without depression.

The article appeared in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:

Weary, G., Vaughn, L. A., Stewart, B. D., & Edwards, J. A. (2006). Adjusting for the correspondence bias: Effects of causal uncertainty, cognitive busyness, and causal strength of situational information. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 87-94.