Correspondence Bias

By Yi-Hsing Han, Yiming Liu, George Loewenstein. 2020

When drawing inferences about a person’s enduring characteristics from her actions, correspondence bias is the tendency to overestimate the influence of the person’s enduring characteristics and underestimate the influence of transient situational factors. Focusing on incentives as one important situational factor, we build a simple model to formalize correspondence bias, and test predictions of the model in an online experiment. All players first play the dictator game, as the dictator, with an unknown receiver. Next, depending on their experimental condition, players are assigned to play a ‘benign’ game that encourages cooperation with another player, a ‘malign’ game that encourages selfish behavior, or both games with different players. Everyone then chooses to receive the dictator givings from one of two players who they may have played the benign or malign game with. Consistent with correspondence bias, subjects are on average willing to pay to receive the dictator givings from a player with whom they played the benign game. We show, further, that experiencing both games oneself, as opposed to playing one and observing the other, reduces the bias, and receiving information about how each of the players behaved in both games, eliminates it. ∗Han: Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, yi.han@pitt.edu; Liu: Humboldt University of Berlin, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, yiming.liu@wzb.eu; Loewenstein: Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, gl20@andrew.cmu.edu. We thank Kareem Haggag, David Huffman, Lise Vesterlund, Alistair Wilson for helpful comments.

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, methodology): “Such a model accounts for the correspondence bias noted by Gilbert and Malone [51], which is the tendency for people to explain others’ behaviours based on traits rather than situational factors, because the situational factors (beliefs, desires) are invisible.”
Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings (2018, background): “For example, people tend to attribute behavior to characteristics of the person rather than characteristics of the situation (e.g., Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones & Harris, 1967), but some evidence suggests that this effect is stronger in Western than in Eastern cultures (Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002).”