The theory developed in more detail the psychological significance of (a) giving reason explanations (rather than its chief alternative, a “causal history of reason explanation”), (b) choosing either belief reasons or desire reasons, and (c) linguistically marking a belief reason with its mental state verb (e.g., “She thought that…” “He assumes that…”). An empirical theory of how people explain behavior was proposed and tested by Malle (1999, 2004), centering on the postulate that intentional behaviors are explained by reasons-the mental states (typically beliefs and desires) in light of which agents consider to act and on the grounds of which they do in fact decide to act (a postulate long discussed in the philosophy of action). People explain unintentional events in ways that the traditional disposition-situation framework can capture, but they explain intentional events by using very different concepts (Hilton, 2006?). This assumption turned out to be incorrect for the predominant class of events that people explain in real life (Malle & Knobe, 1997a): intentional behaviors (e.g., buying a new car, making a mean comment). But all the tests of the classic hypothesis presupposed that people explain behavior by referring to “dispositional” vs. The result of the meta-analysis implied that actors and observers explain behaviors exactly the same way. The conclusion was that the widely held assumption of an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution was false. (The average effect sizes, computed in several accepted ways, ranged from d = -0.016 to d = 0.095 corrected for publication bias, the average effect size was 0.) Under circumscribed conditions, it could sometimes be found, but under other conditions, the opposite was found. The result of this analysis was stunning: across the 170 studies, the asymmetry practically did not exist. This entire literature was re-examined in a meta-analysis, which is a most robust way of documenting consistent patterns of evidence regarding a given hypothesis. Some of these studied examined the generality of the asymmetry, many conducted a secondary analysis of data gathered for somewhat different purposes. 168).ĭespite the widespread belief in the actor-observer asymmetry, over 170 studies have been published since 1971 in which the hypothesis was put to further tests. Likewise, evidence for the asymmetry was considered to be “plentiful” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, p. 698), and “an entrenched part of scientific psychology” (Robins, Spranca, & Mendelsohn, 1996, p. The asymmetry was described as “robust and quite general” (Jones, 1976, p.

Based largely on this initial supporting evidence, the confidence in the hypothesis became uniformly high. The authors found initial evidence for the hypothesis, and so did Storms (1973), who also examined one possible explanation of the hypothesis: that actors explain their behaviors by reference to the situation because they attend to the situation (not to their own behaviors) whereas observers explain the actor’s behavior by reference to the actor’s dispositions because they attend to the actor’s behavior (not to the situation). Soon after the publication of the actor-observer hypothesis, numerous research studies tested its validity, most notably the first such test by Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, and Marecek (1973). This interest was instigated by Fritz Heider’s book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and the research in its wake has become known as “attribution research” or “attribution theory.” The background to this hypothesis was social psychology’s increasing interest in the cognitive mechanisms by which people make sense of their own and other people’s behavior.

Jones and Nisbett’s (1971) hypothesis implies that a student who studies hard for an exam is likely to explain her own (the “actor”‘s) intensive studying by referring to the upcoming difficult exam whereas other people (the “observers”) are likely to explain her studying by referring to her dispositions such as being hardworking or ambitious. They hypothesized that “actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971, p. The hypothesis of an “actor–observer asymmetry” was first proposed by social psychologists, Jones and Nisbett in 1971.

Studies on actor observer bias