Attributional Bias

Following a car crash, John was prosecuted by the police. In court, John admitted that he was driving over the speed limit, but attributed the cause of the crash to the other driver. He blamed the other driver for braking late.

An attribution is what causes a person to act therefore; attributions are a way of humans making sense of the world. There are three main types of attribution bias which can affect recall: The fundamental attribution error (FAE), hedonistic relevance and self-serving bias. FAE involves a person over emphasise internal factors as the cause of other peoples behaviour, however, the person will over emphasise external factors as the cause of our own behaviour. Hedonistic relevance concentrates on how the consequences of behaviour affect a person. The more a person is affected, the higher the level of hedonistic relevance and consequently, the more likely the person is to hold the other person involved responsible. In contradiction to the FAE the self-serving bias states that people are inclined to attribute the person's accomplishments with internal factors and the person's failures with external factors. In this instance the most relative type of attribution bias is hedonistic relevance. The assumption of this type of attribution bias is that the more pain or pleasure an action causes, the more likely a person is to attribute it to internal factors as apposed to external factors in this case John has been affected by emotional and maybe physical pain therefore resulting in the attribution to internal factors and holding the other driver personally responsible. Judgements of attribution can however, change with the severity of the consequences, demonstrated by a study by Walster (1966) where Ps were asked to estimate the amount of responsibility a car owner should take. In the fictional situation the car owner's vehicle had rolled down a hill because the brake cable on the handbrake was rusty and broken. One group of Ps were told that the car injured someone badly the other group were told that car caused no car to anyone. The Ps were then asked to make the decision of how responsible the car owner was the results showed that Ps said that the car owner was more responsible when someone was hurt as opposed to the harmless option. This study provides support for hedonistic relevance and draws attention to the fact of the severity of John's crash and that it is very likely that due to the consequences hedonistic relevance is the cause of John's statement.