Explaining Other People: How We Assign Causes, Intent and Blame

Start with the simplest asymmetry. Jones and Nisbett proposed in 1971 that we cite the situation when explaining our own actions but point to character when explaining the same action in someone else. A 2006 meta-analysis by Bertram Malle of 170 tests found the predicted asymmetry largely did not hold up, so this stop is also a lesson in how contested a famous bias can be.

A close relative of the first stop. People see themselves as variable in personality, behavior and mood across situations while seeing others as much more predictable and consistent. Read it beside the actor-observer asymmetry to see two versions of the same gap between self and other.

Here the question shifts from why to whether it was on purpose. This bias is the tendency to read other people's behavior as deliberate even when it was unconscious or accidental, and it persists even after evidence that the act was not intentional, which can escalate ordinary disagreements.

A sharper form of the previous stop. Kenneth Dodge and colleagues found that aggressive children were more likely to read an ambiguous provocation, such as being bumped, as hostile and to respond aggressively, and the term itself was coined in 1980 by Nasby, Hayden and DePaulo.

Blame can serve the blamer. Walster suggested in 1966 that assigning responsibility for a misfortune eases the fear that it could happen to us, and Shaver showed in 1970 that the more similar the observer feels to the person involved, the less responsibility that person is assigned.

Now the path widens from individuals to groups. Quattrone and Jones reported in 1980 that people overestimate how uniform an outgroup is, summed up as the idea that they are alike while we are diverse. Researchers still debate whether it is a cognitive error or a normal, even adaptive, way of processing social information.

Two patterns sit under this name. One assumes a single member represents the whole group, described by Hamill, Nisbett and Wilson in 1980. The other assumes a group decision must reflect its members' preferences, described by Allison and Messick in 1985. It is often presented as the group-level counterpart of the fundamental attribution error.

Pettigrew extended the fundamental attribution error to intergroup judgment in 1979. Bad behavior by an outgroup member is put down to character while good behavior is explained away as luck or circumstance, and the reverse holds for the ingroup, which produces ingroup favoritism.

Step back to the belief that sits underneath many of these biases. Naive realism is the sense that we see the world objectively and that anyone who disagrees must be uninformed, irrational or biased. The entry notes it is described as underlying the actor-observer bias, the false consensus effect and the fundamental attribution error.

A cynical twist on the same self-other split. Kruger and Gilovich formally proposed in 1999 that people expect more egocentric bias in others than is actually there, assuming others are more driven by self-interest than they really are.

Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky and Ross found in 2001 that people believed they knew their close friends better than their friends knew them, and judged their own off-the-cuff answers as less revealing than the same answers from others. It is the point where the self-other gap becomes a belief about who understands whom.

Finish with the media version of the gap. W. Phillips Davison described in 1983 the belief that mass media messages affect other people more than ourselves, and that this perceived gap can itself shape behavior, for example by increasing support for censorship of content seen as dangerous to others.