Past exam of the social psychology course of the year 2 of the psychology (experimental) course of the University of Oxford / 2022 / 1

Dispositional attribution is most biased when a person's conduct is easy to encode as a trait but the constraints on that conduct are poorly represented or insufficiently used. The bias is conditional on attention, cognitive load, expectations and learned explanatory practices. Calling an inference biased requires a defensible benchmark: behavior sometimes really is informative about a person's enduring preferences. Correspondence bias concerns excessive correspondence between observed conduct and inferred disposition after relevant situational causes are taken into account, rather than the mere existence of a trait judgment.

The classic demonstration separates the direction of a political essay from whether its author chose that position. In the assigned-position condition, readers nevertheless inferred attitudes corresponding to the essay. Readers also distinguished choice from assignment, so the result supports insufficient discounting rather than complete blindness to constraint. The experiment by Edward E. Jones and colleagues makes the situation explicit and therefore challenges the explanation that perceivers simply had no situational information. It does not show that all information in an assigned essay is necessarily nondiagnostic: enthusiasm, wording or willingness to comply could still be informative under a different task model.^[ref]

Conditional diagnosticity in attribution provides a useful normative benchmark. Let $D$ denote a disposition, $B$ the observed behavior and $S$ the situation. By Bayes' theorem, posterior odds equal prior odds times a conditional likelihood ratio:If assignment makes the same behavior almost equally likely under either disposition, its likelihood ratio is near one. Treating this behavior as if it had been freely chosen exaggerates its diagnosticity. Conversely, repeated voluntary actions across varied situations can justify a strong dispositional attribution. The benchmark must therefore distinguish an inference from a single constrained act from an inference supported by a history of choices.

One mechanism is asymmetric attention. The actor is a discrete, changing object; the constraints can be dispersed across instructions, other people and background circumstances. A perceiver may accurately remember that a constraint existed without representing its causal force when interpreting the action. Explaining a nervous performance as anxiety is also economical: one familiar trait compresses many movements, whereas reconstructing an unfamiliar interview situation requires additional assumptions. This reasoning predicts more correspondence bias when the actor dominates attention, contextual information is ambiguous or perceivers lack relevant situational knowledge. Social salience alone, however, does not identify which trait will be inferred; expectations and category knowledge also shape interpretation.

The cognitive-load account receives a more direct test in Daniel T. Gilbert and colleagues' experiments. Participants watched silent videotaped clips of an apparently anxious target, with subtitles describing her discussion topics. Those required to rehearse the topics in order used this situational information less to adjust their trait judgments. The load therefore involved processing the context itself, rather than simply removing that information. Related experiments used constrained speech. The proposed sequence distinguishes identifying the behavior, deriving a characterization and correcting for context; the last step was especially vulnerable to cognitive load. This explains why merely telling observers about a constraint need not remove correspondence bias.^[ref]

The experimental manipulation supports a contribution from limited cognitive resources, but it does not prove that every social attribution follows a rigid three-stage sequence. A concurrent task may also alter attention to instructions or memory for diagnostic details. Context could influence the earliest interpretation when it is obvious and familiar. Thus the strongest claim is that effective situational use can require additional processing in these tasks, rather than that dispositional inference is universally automatic and situational inference universally controlled. A discriminating experiment would measure comprehension of the constraint as well as the final social attribution and vary processing time independently of contextual clarity.

Culture also changes the starting point of explanation. Michael W. Morris and colleagues compared American and Chinese explanations of social and physical events, using animated displays and accounts of killings in newspapers. The social explanations differed in their emphasis on individual characteristics and contextual causes; the comparison with physical events constrained an account based on a general inability to reason about causes. These findings suggest that learned explanatory frameworks influence which causes come readily to mind.^[ref]

These comparisons do not warrant treating national populations as uniform psychological types. Nationality was not randomly assigned, newspaper writing is not a transparent measure of private judgment, and language or knowledge of the events can affect the explanations elicited. Their theoretical importance is that a supposedly universal default must accommodate systematic variation. An observer who routinely represents relationships and constraints may need less later correction, rather than merely possessing more cognitive resources. Cross-cultural psychology therefore complements the resource account by asking what information is represented before correction becomes necessary.

Motivation matters through the same conditional logic. A consequential decision can encourage searching for alternatives, but a desire for a quick, blame-consistent explanation can instead favor a dispositional attribution. Neither effect follows from motivation alone; the relevant question is which information the motive makes useful. Clear constraints, sufficiently understood instructions, time to use them and observations across multiple settings should improve calibration. These are mechanistic predictions, not guarantees that deliberation removes every cognitive bias.

The evidence is best explained by an interaction between behavioral diagnosticity and the perceiver's representation of context. Correspondence bias is strongest when salient conduct is readily characterized but situational alternatives receive too little weight; it weakens when constraints are understood and effectively incorporated. This account preserves the genuine usefulness of trait inference while explaining why its accuracy varies across tasks, resources and cultural experience.