Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: People routinely assume correspondence between acts and dispositions. This “correspondence bias” leads people to neglect the power of the situation to influence behavior. However, most of the research documenting the correspondence bias uses paradigms in which the situation operates in the background. The three studies presented here employ novel paradigms in which people have full information about the situation and its effect on behavior. We find that the bias persists in the face of debiasing treatments and even in situations where avoiding it amounts to a simple subtraction problem. We also find that the correspondence bias generalizes to inanimate objects. In light of this new evidence, we reconsider the psychological origins of the correspondence bias.
Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4226409403