Personal Attitudes, Constraint Magnitude, and Correspondence Bias

Abstract

Research on the conditions under which dispositional generalizations are mitigated has been primarily conducted within two experimental paradigms: the attitude attribution and questioner-contestant paradigms. In these situations, a target's behavior is constrained by random assignment. Despite learning that targets were randomly assigned to express predetermined views or enact social roles, participants continue to ascribe attitudes consistent with the position targets advocated or the role they enacted. This finding, which has been frequently replicated, has been called correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error. To date, many of the factors that might be expected to moderate this bias, such as participants' personal attitudes, or the strength of the constraint, have been surprisingly ineffective. The ineffectiveness of these factors may be due in part to the relatively small effect sizes obtained with the constraint of random assignment. Our studies examined the influence of personal attitudes and constraint magnitude on correspondence bias with more ordinary constraints (i.e., financial incentives and orders from a superior). Study 1 obtained effects of participants' own views on their target attributions and also effects resulting from the magnitude of the constraint. The effect of personal attitudes was replicated and extended in Study 2.