Trait ascription bias

Overview

Trait ascription and the cognitive bias associated with it have been a topic of active research for more than three decades.{{cite journal |title=Measuring Dispositional and Situational Attributions

The actor and the observer

Jones and Nisbett were among the first to argue that people are biased in how they tend to ascribe traits and dispositions to others that they would not ascribe to themselves. Motivated by the classic example of the student explaining poor performance to a supervisor (in which the supervisor might superficially believe the student's explanations but really thinks the performance is due to "enduring qualities": lack of ability, laziness, ineptitude, etc.) their actor–observer asymmetry argument forms the basis of discourse{{cite journal |title=Trait Ascription and Depth of Acquaintance: The Preference for Traits in Personality Descriptions and Its Relation to Target Familiarity

Kammer et al.

In a 1982 study involving fifty-six undergraduate psychology students from the University of Bielefeld, Kammer et al. demonstrated that subjects rated their own variability on each of 20 trait terms to be considerably higher than their peers. Building on the earlier work of Jones and Nisbett, which suggests people describe the behaviour of others in terms of fixed dispositions while viewing their own behaviour as the dynamic product of complex situational factors, Kammer hypothesized that one's own behaviours are judged to be less consistent (i.e. not as predictable) but of higher intensities (with regard to particular traits) than the behaviour of others. The experiment had each student describe themselves as well as a same-sex friend using two identical lists of trait-descriptive terms. For example, for the trait of dominance the student was first asked "In general, how dominant are you?" and then "How much do you vary from one situation to another in how dominant you are?" Kammer's results strongly supported his hypothesis.

The "trait" of ascribing traits

David C. Funder's work on the "trait" of ascribing personality traits investigates the psychology of individuals who tend not to grant others the variability (i.e. lack of predictability) they grant themselves, instead preferring to ascribe traits and infer dispositional explanations of behaviour. It had been generally established that people ascribe more traits to others than to themselves, known as the actor–observer asymmetry in attribution, but Funder's hypothesis was that some individuals are more inclined to make dispositional trait attributions than others, regardless of who they are describing. In the experiment, sixty-three undergraduates filled out a series of questionnaires which asked them to describe themselves, their best friend, and an acquaintance. For each of twenty pairs of polar opposite trait terms (e.g. "friendly—unfriendly") subjects either ranked the person on a discrete scale or chose "depends on the situation", allowing the subject to "not make a dispositional ascription." Based on third-party Q-Sort personality descriptions of the subjects, certain negative personality traits were correlated with those subjects who tended to ascribe dispositions to others, while traits such as "charming", "interesting", and "sympathetic" were associated{{cite journal |title=Associations and Ascriptions of Positive and Negative Characteristics

Theoretical basis

While trait ascription bias has been described by empirical results from various disciplines, most notably psychology and social psychology, explaining the mechanism of the bias remains a contentious issue in the theory of personality description literature.{{cite journal |title=A Contrarian View of the Five-Factor Approach to Personality Description

The availability heuristic

Main article: Availability heuristic

Tversky and Kahneman describe a cognitive heuristic that suggests people make judgments (including about other people's personalities{{cite journal |title=Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic

Attribution theory

Main article: Attribution (psychology)

Attribution plays a role in how people understand and judge the causes of the behaviour of others, which in turn affects how they ascribe traits to others. Attributional theory{{cite journal |title=Attribution Theory and Research

Mitigation

Trait ascription bias, regardless of the theoretical mechanisms underpinning it, intuitively plays a role in various social phenomenon observed in the wild. Stereotyping, attitudes of prejudice and the negativity effect, among others, involve ascribing dispositions (traits) to other people on the basis of little information, no information or simply "gut instincts", which amounts to trait ascription bias. As such, some researchers are interested in mitigating cognitive biases to reduce their effects on society.

Criticism

Trait ascription bias has received criticism on a number of fronts. In particular, some have argued that trait ascription, and the notion of traits, are merely artefacts of methodology and that results contrary to conventional wisdom can be achieved with simple changes to the experimental designs used.

References

References

1. Kammer, D.. (1982). "Differences in trait ascriptions to self and friend: Unconfounding intensity from variability". Psychological Reports.
2. (1971). "The actor and the observer: divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior". American Political Science Review.
3. (1973). "Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability". Cognitive Psychology.
4. (January 1982). "The psychology of preferences". Scientific American.
5. (2009). "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions". HarperCollins Publishers.