Social psychologists have developed names for a host of
biases in the ways people perceive behaviour. The fundamental attribution error
is not only one of the most famous of these biases, but apparently one of the
most frequently misunderstood. Many laypeople confuse the fundamental
attribution error with distinctly different phenomena, such as the self-serving
attribution bias. Such confusion is not limited to laypeople, however. A recent
article by a sociologist making a misguided attempt to apply a sociological/social
psychological analysis to the popular TV show Game of Thrones illustrates
the same confusion, and perhaps illustrates a deeper confusion among those who
would attempt to deny the importance of human individuality in the name of
social science.
I have previously written about the fundamental attribution error in a pair
of articles
in which I argued that, despite the importance that some people claim for it,
it is actually highly overrated. Even though its name is well-known, a lot of
people seem to be confused about what this phenomenon is supposed to be,
perhaps because it is a counter-intuitive concept. Hence, I will start with
some definitions and distinctions. The fundamental attribution error was
defined by psychologist Lee Ross as a tendency for people, when making
attributions about the causes of behaviour "to underestimate the impact of
situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling
behaviour" (Reeder, 1982). In plainer language, this means that even when
someone has very little choice in how they behave because they were pressured
into doing something by external environmental demands (i.e., situational
factors controlled their behaviour), other people will tend to assume that they
behaved the way they did because of their own attributes, such as their
personality, attitudes, and desires (i.e., dispositional factors). This
phenomenon, which is supposed to be a ubiquitous and pervasive error, is said
to occur because laypeople have causal theories of behaviour in which they
believe that “situational factors have little impact on human behaviour” (Gawronski,
2004). That is, people supposedly underestimate the “power of the situation”
because they are “intuitive dispositionalists” who mistakenly think that people
act consistently with their personalities. Got all that?
At this point, some
readers may object that what I have described is not the fundamental
attribution error and that I don’t know what I am talking about. (Oh, ye of
little faith!) Instead, they might think that the fundamental attribution error
is something like the following:
We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.
This is a quote from an article by sociologist, Zeynep
Tufekci, with the modest and unassuming title, “TheReal Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones.” Like much else in her article, this explanation of
the supposed fundamental attribution error is horribly garbled and inaccurate,
and is part of an agenda to interpret this TV show through a situationist,
sociological lens to promote her own theories. What Tufekci describes is not
the fundamental attribution error at all but what social psychologists call the
actor-observer asymmetry (AKA actor-observer bias). There are two
main accounts of this latter phenomenon. In the strong or general account,
people routinely explain their own behaviour in situational terms and other
people’s behaviour in dispositional terms, regardless of whether the behaviour
is good or bad. Social psychologists have claimed that the general version of
the actor-observer asymmetry is a robust and pervasive effect. This is supposed
to occur because people have different perspectives depending on whether they
are actors (i.e. doing something) or observing another’s behaviour. That is,
when performing an action, people are supposed to be more aware of how their
environment affects their behaviour, whereas when they are observing an action,
they are more focused on the person doing the action than their environment (Malle,
2006). However, there is another more limited version of this phenomenon, in
which the way people judge their own vs. another’s behaviour depends on whether
the outcome was favourable or unfavourable. Specifically, actors attribute their
failures or negative behaviours to environmental, situational factors, and their
successes or positive behaviours to their own personal characteristics. On the
other hand, when observing others, they either do not show this bias or show
the opposite effect: attribute other people’s successes to the environment
(e.g., luck) and failures to their personal characteristics. This phenomenon is
also known as the self-serving bias in attribution (self-serving bias
for short).
Although the fundamental
attribution error and these two versions of the actor-observer asymmetry might
seem similar, there are nevertheless important conceptual differences between
them. First, advocates of the theory of situationism,
like Lee Ross and Richard
Nisbett, have claimed that the fundamental attribution error occurs because
people believe that situational factors have little impact on human behaviour,
that is, that people simply do not understand the “power of the situation” because
they prefer to explain behaviour in dispositional terms. Furthermore, this is
supposed to be an error because situational factors are the central causes
of behaviour while dispositions or personality traits are of little importance.
On the other hand, the actor-observer asymmetry suggests that people do accept
that situational factors influence their behaviour, at least when considering
their own actions in the general account, or when it suits them in the
self-serving account. Furthermore, if the self-serving account is correct,
invoking situational causes is not necessarily a sign that one has grasped the
true causes of behaviour, but that one is attempting to look at things in
whatever way allows one to feel better about oneself. Hence, there seems to be
a contradiction between what these alleged phenomena imply. Hence, it may be
helpful to consider the current evidence for each of them.
First, let’s get the
fundamental attribution error out of the way. I have criticised this at length
elsewhere (here
and here),
so I will deal with it briefly by summarising the conclusion of a review (Gawronski,
2004) that I did not have a chance to cover in my previous articles. According
to this review, although there is evidence that people do draw dispositional
inferences from situationally constrained behaviour (which the author refers to
as correspondence bias), there is no evidence that laypeople have causal
theories in which “situational factors have little impact on human behaviour.”
Hence, the author proclaimed that “the fundamental attribution error is dead.”
Instead, the author argues that it is not that people underestimate the
importance of situational causes in general, but that they sometimes
misunderstand which specific situational factors may be acting on a
person.
What about the
actor-observer asymmetry? Regarding the general version of this phenomenon, the
author (Malle, 2006) of a review of more than 170 studies spanning 35 years
found that the mean effect size was indistinguishable from zero and concluded
that “The actor–observer hypothesis appears to be a widely held yet false
belief.” Additionally, he noted that “actors and observers do not notably
differ in their person and situation explanations” of behaviour. On the other
hand, the self-serving bias fared better, as there was evidence that this
effect replicated across studies. Specifically, the expected actor-observer
asymmetry occurred for negative events (i.e., people explained own failures
situationally and another’s failure dispositionally), whereas the reverse
occurred for positive events (i.e., people explained own successes dispositionally
and another’s success situationally). Hence, the actor-observer asymmetry is
not a general phenomenon, but does occur under certain circumstances, depending
on the evaluation of what is being explained. Additionally, this effect is a
fairly modest one, that is, one might say that people tend to engage in this
bias some of them time, but not consistently and constantly.
Why the confusion?
Why do so many people
confuse the fundamental attribution error with the actor-observer asymmetry?
I’m not altogether sure, but I suspect it might be because the fundamental
attribution error is a counter-intuitive, even weird idea that does not match
people’s everyday experience, while the self-serving version of the
actor-observer asymmetry is easier to relate to. Specifically, even though some
social psychologists have claimed that most people are “intuitive
dispositionalists” who mistakenly believe that “situational factors have little
impact on human behaviour,” there is actual a lack of evidence that this is
even true; on the contrary, there is evidence that most people accept an
interactionist view, in which both situations and personality traits influence
behaviour (Newman & Bakina, 2009). By the way, the interactionist view was
endorsed by the eminent psychologists Kurt Lewin in 1938, and also happens to
be in line with the empirical evidence. On the other hand, the idea that people
tend to be self-serving and believe whatever happens to make them feel better
is more intuitive and easier to understand as it matches people’s common
experience.
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Situations, dispositions:
which face is more important?
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One noted critic of the fundamental
attribution error (Funder, 2001) argued that the really, really fundamental
attribution error is committed by psychologists, and not by laypeople:
believing that the causes of behaviour are simple and easily dichotomized. More
specifically, proponents of situationism have tried to advance the fundamental
attribution error as a phenomenon that illustrates their dichotomous theories
that behaviour is really controlled by external situational factors vs.
internal dispositional ones. Returning to Zeynep Tufekci’s article, it seems
that she has tried to apply a similar dichotomous theory to pop culture in her Game
of Thrones article, in which she attempts to apply a situational vs.
dispositional analysis first to the TV show and then to society at large. This
irked me, because it seemed to reflect an attempt to deny the importance of
individuality in society, which has long been a theme of situationist discourse
in social psychology.
Was Storytelling in
Game of Thrones, Sociological, Psychological, or a Mix of Both?
Tufekci’s article makes
several claims that she thinks explain why season eight of the show was
unsatisfactory to many fans. She argues that the show switched from what she
calls sociological storytelling to psychological storytelling. As
she explains, the former involves “structural storytelling” in which
“characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings,
incentives and norms that surround them.” Psychological storytelling, on
the other hand, which is apparently the norm for most TV shows, focuses on “overly
personal” stories about individuals and their distinctive personalities. She
seems to imply that this switch began with season eight because the show ran
ahead of the George R.R. Martin novels, which focused on sociological stories,
and the show’s producers did not understand how to continue doing sociological
story-telling and switched to the more familiar mode of psychological story-telling
instead. (Actually, the show had completely ran ahead of the books by the beginning
of season six, but Tufekci’s article does not acknowledge this).
Apparently, “the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand
and react to social change.”
Tufekci argues that characters in sociological storytelling
still “have personal stories and agency,” but “are also greatly shaped by
institutions and events around them,” and act according to incentives that
“come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence
their inner life.” However, despite her assertion that characters have their
own agency, she goes on to argue that a character’s choices are basically
driven by situational factors and implies that individuality is not that
important:
“The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. ‘Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances’ is a way into a broader, deeper understanding.”
Note that she says any character, no matter how
depraved or shocking their behaviour, which seems to imply that people and characters are basically interchangeable. If it were
true that people make similar choices based only on circumstances, then this
would imply that a person’s values, desires, and inclinations, indeed their
personality, is of no real importance. Using some salient examples from the
show, if viewers can put themselves in the place of any character and
imagine themselves behaving the same way under the circumstances, this would
mean that, on the one hand, they could see themselves being treacherous and
opportunistic if they were in the place of someone like Petyr Baelish, yet also
imagine that they would be honourable to a fault, even if it meant their own
downfall, in the shoes of someone like Ned Stark. This does not make any sense.
The meaning of honour is that a person does not betray their friends
when it happens to suit their incentives. In fact, it means making hard
choices, even when it would be convenient to put personal interests first.
Arguing that viewers can imagine that they would act willy-nilly depending on
the whims of circumstances would mean that they lack a concept of having
personal values that guide a character’s behaviour.
Tufekci particularly criticizes how the show handled the character arc of
Daenerys Targaryen, especially her murderous turn in episode 7. She argues that
this started out as a story of the corruption of power, and if it had been done
sociologically, it would have provided an interesting study of “a leader who
starts in opposition with the best of intentions, … and ends up acting brutally
and turning into a tyrant if they take power.” Her argument is that Dany’s
downfall was originally set up to illustrate how she became corrupted by
external forces provided her with ruinous incentives, “and season by season, we have
witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the
tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.”
Then, unfortunately, her storyline in season eight went from an interesting sociological one to being ruined by this psychological
storytelling[1] that
the producers seem to favour.
It’s not my intention to defend season eight or the handling of Daenerys’
storyline. (People could be arguing about this for years to come.) What I want
to point out instead is that the distinction that Tufekci makes between
sociological and psychological story-telling rests on a false dichotomy and that she twists the facts to fit her
pet theory. Even a casual inspection of the plots
from the early seasons of the show illustrates that Dany was portrayed as having
striking psychological characteristics that foreshadowed exactly her later
descent into genocide and tyranny, quite apart from any external sociological
forces that may have shaped her decisions.
Consider an important scene from season two, episode 3 (Garden
of Bones). (See the relevant clip here.)
Dany and her
retinue are at the gates of the city of Qarth seeking admission. She states
frankly, that her people have no food and water, and will all die if not
admitted. The person whom she needs to convince to let her in, requests to see
her dragons, as some of his colleagues doubt they even exist. Even though this
is a simple and reasonable request that she could easily accommodate, she
refuses and is denied admittance. She then makes the following remarkable statement,
that explicitly foreshadows what she will do in season eight: “When my dragons
are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who
wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!”
So, even though she is in a weak, vulnerable position, she
refuses to use the only bargaining chip she has, and instead makes threats that
she cannot yet carry out. Hence, even at this early stage, when she has quite
limited power and her dragons are only babies, she demonstrates grandiosity,
entitlement, and vindictiveness, even hints of madness. Is this an example of
sociological storytelling? What incentives exactly did Dany have to behave in
such an irrational and potentially suicidal manner? How many viewers think they
would act the same way under these circumstances? Despite Tufekci’s argument that Dany was gradually
corrupted by external forces and incentives, her own peculiar personality is
clearly an important factor in explaining her behaviour, as she acts in a way
that is clearly contrary to the “incentives” afforded by the situation.
Tufekci’s argument about
the supposed distinction between sociological and psychological storytelling,
with the psychological mode being the dominant but misleading
one, while the sociological mode tells the real story, mirrors the distinction
made by situationists between situational and dispositional accounts of behaviour.
Both Tufekci’s argument and the situationist argument misrepresent their
subject matter and both present a lopsided view of things that tries to deny
the importance of human individuality. This is not to say that sociological
factors are not important in good storytelling or in real life. An alternative
to the view that sees personality dispositions and situational influences on behaviour
as opposing forces, is that a person’s circumstances can reveal what their
personality is really like. For example, facing danger provides a test of
whether one will be cowardly or courageous, treacherous or loyal, depending on
one’s individual strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices. Similarly, when at
its best, Game of Thrones was able to tell stories in which interesting
characters faced trying circumstances that required them to make difficult choices,
and these choices revealed their true selves. Tufekci argued that being given
power corrupts even well-meaning leaders, but an alternative view is that power
provides a test of the strength of a person’s character, that is, whether one
has the capacity to act with moral integrity or whether one sees power as a
path to self-aggrandizement. This question of choice was actually raised in the
final episode of season eight in a scene in which Tyrion asks Jon Snow whether
he would have acted the same way as Daenerys if he had opportunity to do so. (See this
clip.)
Tyrion reminds him that he has ridden on a dragon’s back,
that he had that power, and asks him if he would have burned a city down? This question
brings into focus the crucial importance of personal responsibility and choice.
Situationist accounts of behavior tend to downplay personal responsibility and
imply that people are controlled by external forces, which also seems to be
Tufekci’s argument. This is a disempowering view of human nature and one that
is based on discredited ideas, like the fundamental attribution error.
Tufekci argues that sociological storytelling is important because “the dominance of the psychological and
hero/antihero narrative” may also be “the reason we are having such a difficult
time dealing with the current historic technology transition.” She goes on to talk about the need to
change the structures, incentives and forces that shape how people and their
companies behave, rather than trying to “dethrone antiheros and replace them
with good people.” This is all very well, but is worthwhile to remember that
structural changes to society are often brought about by individuals who have
the vision and the means to do so. For example, I noted in a previous post on American presidents that individual
personality traits were substantially related to a president’s effectiveness
while in office. I agree with her that it is important for society to build
good institutions and provide incentives for people to behave well. But let’s
not overlook the importance of individuals in shaping society.
© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without
permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original
article is provided.
[1]
Tufekci also complains that the scriptwriters explain Daenerys’ destructive choices
in terms of “genetic determinism,” because the other characters note that
madness runs in Dany’s family, as if this is a radical departure from the
show’s previous sociological emphasis. On the contrary, from season 1, one of
the show’s recurring themes was that incest has negative consequences for the
children of such unions, which includes Daenerys and her family, with its long
history of inbreeding. Hence, so-called “genetic determinism,” or at least
recognition that heredity matters, has been an integral component of the
storylines, even when it was supposed to be a “sociological” show.
References
Funder, D. C. (2001). The Really, Really Fundamental Attribution Error. Psychological Inquiry, 12(1), 21–23.
Gawronski, B. (2004). Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European Review of Social Psychology, 15(1), 183–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280440000026
Malle, B. F. (2006). The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 895–919. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.895
Newman, L. S., & Bakina, D. A. (2009). Do people resist social‐psychological perspectives on wrongdoing? Reactions to dispositional, situational, and interactionist explanations. Social Influence, 4(4), 256–273. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510802674292
Reeder, G. D. (1982). Let’s give the fundamental attribution error another chance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(2), 341–344. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.43.2.341
