Actor-Observer Asymmetry

Actor-observer asymmetry, also called actor-observer bias or the actor-observer difference, is a bias exhibited when a person forms attributions about the causes of behavior, their own or someone else's. When people explain their own behavior they are more likely to attribute it to the particular situation they were in, a situational attribution, but when the same person explains someone else's behavior they are more likely to attribute it to that other person's personality, a dispositional attribution; a politician who voted against a war might explain the vote by saying war was not needed, a situational reason, while an observer judging the same vote might instead conclude the politician is simply too liberal, a trait-based reason. The psychologist Bertram F. Malle argued in 2006 that actor-observer asymmetry should be distinguished from the closely related fundamental attribution error, since the fundamental attribution error concerns inferring stable internal traits from behavior in general, while actor-observer asymmetry concerns specifically how a person explains behavior depending on whether they are the actor or the observer of it; researchers explain the asymmetry through perspective and salience, since the situation is more salient to an actor immersed in it, while another person's behavior is what is most salient to an observer watching from outside, and an actor additionally has far more information available about their own past behavior than an observer does.