Dr. Joshua Liao explains how to overcome attribution bias, which can lead to aggression and other harmful behaviors (road rage, anyone?)
Society is grappling with how to safely send kids back to school.
Humans are hard-wired to make sense of each other’s actions. Never has this inclination been more on display in America than now, as society grapples with tough choices about how to safely send children back to school amid Covid-19. Do policies like mandatory masking reflect no-brainer public health measures or indefensible assaults on civil liberties? Do efforts to fully reopen in-person schools represent uncompromising commitment to education or blatant disregard for teacher and student safety?
In prompting people to take positions on these types of issues, the pandemic has also triggered an innate tendency to make attributions about other people, in other words, to find and then judge the reasons they act the way they do. Follow rigorous masking policies, and some may label you a communist. Flout those policies, and others may deem you a “covidiot,” an idiot with regards to safe Covid-related behaviors.
The problem with these characterizations, and human attributions more generally, is that they may not reflect reality. As psychology and behavioral science teach us, humans can be highly susceptible to attribution bias—a cognitive tendency that can cause us to incorrectly assign meaning to other peoples’ actions.
This bias is all around us. When another driver cuts us off on the road, we may be more likely to attribute the behavior to an innate deficiency (he’s inconsiderate) than the surrounding circumstances (he was preoccupied and did not see us). When a co-worker consistently signs off or leaves the office early, we may be prone to assume that she is lazy, not that she has adjusted her working hours to care for a sick family member.
Attribution bias not only closes us off to other viewpoints; acting on faulty attributions can lead to aggression and other harmful behaviors—road rage or workplace tension, in the examples above. These problems have been on full display amid Covid-19, as disagreements about federal and state leaders’ pandemic responses have led to confrontations between Americans whose views are increasingly divided along partisan lines.
Acting on faulty attributions can lead to harmful behaviors like road rage.
Despite this discord, we are all susceptible to attribution bias and its ill effects. In turn, several insights from behavioral science can help us fix this bias in ways that broaden our field of view and help us treat each other more charitably amid Covid-19.
When we ascribe meaning to others’ actions, we tend to emphasize personal factors over environmental ones. When colleagues run late to meetings, we assign meaning to their person (they are careless with their time) rather than their situations (they were held up by their supervisors in the hallway between meetings). This tendency to focus on peoples’ individual dispositions can be so strong that it’s known in psychology as the fundamental attribution error.
When it comes to attribution, we tend to treat others differently than how we treat ourselves. In particular, we tend to over-emphasize personal explanations of other peoples’ actions—particularly unintentional ones—but downplay personal explanations in our own actions. While attribution for intentional behaviors can involve more complex theoretical underpinnings, the risk of asymmetric attribution remains. Our colleagues are late to meetings because they are careless with their time, but we are late to meetings because of important hallway conversations with our supervisors.
We should reflect on the motivations behind our Covid-related behavior and consider how others could misperceive them.
A different dynamic can emerge when we attribute meaning in to success and failure. When our egos are at stake, we have a propensity to attribute our success to personal factors (I received a promotion because of my strong skillset), but not our failure (I didn’t receive a promotion because my supervisor is unfair). This tendency—called self-serving bias—is a protective form of attribution bias that helps us preserve self-esteem.
In the context of Covid-19, the lesson is three-fold. First, we should reflect on the motivations behind our Covid-related behavior and consider how others could misperceive them. Just because we know the reasons why we mask or implement certain distancing practices, others may not. Clearly externalizing these reasons can help avert misunderstanding and instead build understanding and empathy with others.
Second, we should correct the fundamental attribution error by explicitly considering environmental factors that drive other peoples’ Covid-related behaviors. When we observe people congregating in crowded stores, consider a situational explanation (due to work and family obligations, they have no other options for when they purchase essential goods) rather than a dispositional one (they are poorly educated covidiots). When we see others enforcing mandatory masking requirements, consider the potential context (they live with high-risk individuals and are taking every precaution) rather than the person (they are a blind follower of rules).
Third, as we encourage and beseech others to practice safe behaviors, we should account for self-serving bias. When identifying other people’s missteps, acknowledge the external forces that contributed, recognizing the human tendency to look outward when attributing failure. Conversely, make it a point to highlight the efforts that colleagues and loved ones have made to adhere to safe practices.
We should reflect on the motivations behind our Covid-related behavior.
To be fair, no theory or cognitive rewiring alone can overcome Covid-19. We also need to strengthen our public health systems and implement strategies to distribute therapeutic or vaccine solutions in the future. Fixing attribution bias also does not mean excusing misinformation or flagrantly unsafe actions. We need to reject these things outright.
But as the pandemic continues, how we interact with each other also matters. Attribution bias can distort our views of the common ground that many of us share—the desire to make our own decisions while being considerate of others; the value we place on individual liberties and safe communities; the need to balance our dispositions with the surrounding situation. To bring clarity to these values, let’s fix attribution bias wherever and whenever we find it.
