Actor-observer Bias

This is a post in a series on cognitive biases that I am reading up on.

How we reason about behaviour and outcomes is key to the way that we interpret the world. When things happen, we think of possible reasons as to why they did, i.e. we infer or attribute causes for those events. This lends us susceptible to a class of potential fallacies known as attribution biases. One of these attribution phenomena, especially prominent in negative-outcome situations, is the actor-observer bias.

As the name suggests, actor-observer bias has two sides to it. We are the actor when it is our own behaviour that we reason about to ourselves. In this state, the bias causes us to over emphasise external, or situational, causes for our behaviour or some outcome. This is known as situational attribution because we tie the outcome more strongly to the situation.

Say we missed a deadline because something came up, e.g. family emergency. This is negative outcome, but as actors, we're inclined to blame what we perceive to be the cause, i.e. sudden life stuff coming up. As a result, we tend to under emphasise what we could have personally done to prevent this from happening. In this example, finishing the work well in time to leave a reasonable time buffer for the deadline. Neglecting the dispositional factors that we can effect causes us to feel less in control, which is generally harmful.

In contrast, when we are observers (of other people's plights), we tend to emphasise their personal disposition in our inference, i.e. engage in dispositional attribution. We reason that the particular thing, which happened to them was because of some inherent personal traits, or lack thereof. Had it been one of our peers who submitted their work late, we'd be more likely to think that it was a consequence of their lack of time management skills, prioritisation, etc. In reality, the reason could have well been similar to ours. This tendency may cause us to harbour ill feelings toward others as we suspect malicious intent in their actions, rather than extending benefit of the doubt. Unsurprisingly, this can be detrimental our existing relationships or the formation of new ones.

With actor-observer bias, the less personal information we have of someone, the more pronounced the bias tends to be, and vice-versa. The diagram below roughly illustrates this

The better we know someone, it's easier for us to assume the best of them. And of course, we know ourselves the best. Hence, why it's easier for us to blame circumstance over engaging in introspection.

My takeaway from this is that awareness of our inclinations when either an actor or observer can help in reasoning more sensibly about outcomes, especially the negative ones. For myself, this seems like a good ingredient for less stress and better relationships.