Attribution Bias

What is attribution bias?

Attribution bias is a systematic distortion in how people explain behavior or events. It is an umbrella term for several patterns, rather than one rule everyone follows.

Internal and external attributions

• An internal attribution explains behavior through personal factors, such as ability or effort.
• An external attribution explains it through circumstances, such as an unclear assignment.

Either can be accurate; bias concerns a distortion in the explanation.

Types of attribution bias

• Self-serving explanations give personal credit for success and place responsibility for failure elsewhere.
• Fundamental attribution error concerns giving personal characteristics too much weight while overlooking situational constraints.
• Actor–observer bias is the proposed contrast between explaining your own behavior through circumstances and other people’s behavior through their traits.

The last claim has a weaker record than its textbook familiarity suggests. Malle’s 2006 meta-analysis of 173 studies found little overall support for that broad actor–observer contrast. Results varied with the kind of event and the study methods.

Attribution bias example in the workplace

A manager might explain an employee’s mistake as carelessness while overlooking an ambiguous task description. The manager’s explanation could be wrong, but that has to be checked. A personality explanation is not automatically biased, and a situational explanation is not automatically correct.

Look at the relevant facts and plausible alternatives before deciding what caused the behavior. Knowing the names of attribution biases is useful only if it improves that examination.

For the broader study of how people infer causes, see attribution theory.