For example, McArthur and Post (1977) found that observers tended to make more dispositional attributions for an actor’s behavior when the actor was strongly illuminated. Perceptual salience does indeed seem to have an important role in causal explanation. The actor and the observer quite literally have different perspectives on the behavior and thus explain it in different ways (Stomes, 1973). What's this?įurthermore, an actor cannot ‘see’ him/herself behaving, so the background situation assumes the role of figure against the background of self.
If we trip, however, we are more likely to attribute this event to the situational or external causes, such as a tiny crack on the sidewalk. Thus, when we see someone trip and fall, we tend to attribute this event to his or clumsiness. When we’re the actor, we have a lesser tendency to look to internal causes for the behavior than when we observe the same behavior in another person. There are two main explanations for the actor-observer effect: 1. Why does the actor-observer effect occur? As you might expect, prisoners tend to see their crimes as caused by the situation, whereas guards tend to see these crimes as caused by internal/dispositional factors. Likewise, in one study, both prisoners and guards were asked to rate the cause of the prisoners’ offenses (Saulnier & Perlman, 1981). But they attribute their peers’ risky driving to personal factors, such as trying to “act cool” (Harre et al., 2004). One amusing example of the actor-observer effect is teenage drivers' tendency to attribute their own risky driving to situational factors, such as running late. As observers, we tend to explain the behavior of other people in terms of personality factors. As actors explaining our own behavior, we tend to cite the situational factors that led us to act. To add more light, the actor-observer effect can be described as follows. In other words, the actor-observer effect, involves the tendency for actors to attribute their own behaviors to the situation and for observers to explain behaviors in terms of personal traits. It refers to the tendency of people to attribute internal/dispositional causes when observing others’ behavior (as in the fundamental attribution error), but attribute external/situational causes to their own behavior when they are the actors.
The actor-observer effect (also commonly called actor-observer bias) is really an extension of the fundamental attribution error Opens in new window.
In fact, we are very likely to focus on the role of the situation in causing our own behavior, a phenomenon called the actor-observer effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1972). Actor-Observer Effect What Is Actor-Observer Effect? Although we have a general tendency to see people’s behavior as caused by dispositional factors, we are much less likely to see our own behavior as caused by such factors.