Actor-Observer Bias

Actor-observer bias, also called actor-observer asymmetry or actor-observer difference, describes a proposed difference in how people explain behavior depending on whether they are the actor or the observer: when explaining their own actions, people tend to cite situational factors, while observers explaining someone else's identical action tend to attribute it to that person's underlying character or disposition. The psychologists Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett originally proposed the hypothesis in 1971, illustrated by the example of a politician who might explain their own vote against a war in situational terms, such as believing the war unnecessary, while an observer might attribute the same vote to the politician simply being personally liberal. A 2006 meta-analysis by the psychologist Bertram Malle, examining 170 individual tests published between 1971 and 2004, found that the predicted asymmetry largely did not hold up across the accumulated research, and Malle also clarified that the actor-observer pattern, which concerns explanations of specific behavior, should be distinguished from the related fundamental attribution error, which concerns inferring a person's stable traits from their behavior more generally.