23.4: Special Cases

There are certain special cases where we tend to give situational explanations sorts of behavior, and other cases where we tend to give dispositional explanations. We conclude with three important examples.

Blaming the Victim

Earlier we discussed the just world hypothesis. We tend to see people as getting pretty much what they deserve, and when someone suffers in a way that is not the result of obviously bad luck, we tend to think they must have brought it on themselves. They suffer their misfortune because of the sorts of people they are. When we reason in this way, we are giving a situational explanation of their behavior.

Ultimate Attribution Error

Many people tend to give dispositional explanations of the failures or the negative behavior of members of groups they don’t like: “It’s no wonder Wilbur did poorly on the exam; he’s an Okie, and Okies are dumb.” By contrast, we tend to explain their successes and positive behavior in situational terms: “He was just lucky,” “She must have gotten some special break”. We will return to this matter in more detail in Chapter 26.

Self-Serving Biases

We are more likely to attribute our own good or successful actions to internal causes and our bad or unsuccessful ones to external causes. There are two biases here. The self-enhancing bias is the tendency to attribute successful outcomes to our own abilities, and the self-protective bias is the tendency to attribute unsuccessful outcomes to the situation. There appears to be a stronger tendency to take credit for our good actions than to blame our failures on the situation, although the issue is a difficult one to study because people may not report their true feelings when discussing themselves and their own actions.

Biases in how we think about ourselves are related to the Lake Wobegon Effect. There we learned that a large majority of people think that they are above average in a variety of ways, and only a very small percentage think that they are below average.

For example, a survey of a million high school seniors found that 70% rated themselves above average in leadership skills, while only 2% felt they were below average. And all of them thought that they were above average in their ability to get along with others. Most people also think of themselves as above average in intelligence, fairness, job performance, and so on. They also think they have a better than average chance of having a good job or a marriage that doesn’t end in divorce.

Conclusion

A great deal of our thinking in daily life involves thinking about people, others and ourselves, trying to understand, explain, and predict their actions. Two of the more robust findings in recent psychology concern such social cognition or reasoning. First, we tend to commit the fundamental attribution error and, second, actors and observers view the causes of behavior differently. In this chapter, we have seen the various ways in which we are susceptible to these biases and a number of the ways they lead to suboptimal reasoning.