Imagine that, you are in a night club right now and you are a little bit drunk. Alcohol and DJ make you feel so energetic and excited so you decide to go dancing in the dancing floor. In next few hours you believe you are surly the dancing star of this night club and you are charming, attractive, amazing – just like Magic Mike. Then time turns to the next afternoon, when you finally wake up after hangover and check your Instagram and Facebook, you find your friends posted some photos about your dancing last night and your moves were so ugly and hilarious that you cannot even believe the guy in the photo who had the same face was you!

The scenario above actually isn’t a great example (but a hilarious one) of what I would like to talk about today because it has third part variable like alcohol and maybe DJ, too. A more proper example should be making a speech: You are well-prepared and confident about your speech, and when you are doing it you are pretty sure you are doing your best. However, later when you watch or listen to the record of your speech, normally you will feel that the speech was not that good, at least not as good as you thought. So why do we have such differences in our feeling and what can we learn from it?

First of all we have to know what attribution is. Attribution is the way an observer uses what he/she sees, feels and knows from the whole environment to explain events. In 1958, Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider first discuss about the idea of attribution theory in his book ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations’ as ‘a study trying to explain how different observers interpret same thing in different ways’ and later he also pointed out the exist of attribution bias which explains that ‘under certain circumstances that people have to find explanations about events only (or mostly) base on their own (misleading) understanding and knowledge, people will interpret things differently and wrongly.

Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske ran a related experiment in 1975. They let six observers standing on three different position observed two other people have a conversation (Of course they didn’t only do the experiment one time; A total number of 38 male and female students attend this experiment). Two people marked by C were people who had conversation and other people marked by O were observers. We can see from the picture that two observers were standing between two confederates and each talker also had two more observers who could only observe another confederate which was relatively away to them ( they could only see the backs of the confederates who were close to them). As other factors were been controlled by Taylor and Fiske (or at least they tried their best), the only variable, as also the X-variable in this experiment, was the differences of the observing position.

So after the conversation Taylor and Fiske asked six observers to determined ‘which confederate set the tone of the conversation, chosen the conversational topics, and caused his partner to behave as he did. The result is shown in table one:

So we can easily analyze the result just like Taylor and Fiske did as ‘observers who faced A believe A performed better than B in the conversation and observers who faced B believe B performed better than A in the conversation.’ Furthermore, those two observers (control group) who stood between the confederates believed their performances were in the same level. So the experiment proved that even observation position can affect people’s interpretation of an event.

We also need to consider the accuracy of this experiment. And the first question will be what if one of the confederate was truly better than another because of a better eloquence or better acknowledge of the topic. This variable was really difficult to control as Taylor and Fiske didn’t actually set a fixed plot for two confederates (like making a movie) about the conversation so there was no way to balance the performance of two confederates. The second question will be about how many times the experiment was run as only 38 students participated in this experiment. However, the obvious result from the experiment also proved that those problems I mentioned were unable to change the basic conclusion of the experiment, but maybe its accuracy. So I prefer to believe in what conclusion this experiment could provide.

So now we know the existence of attribution bias and how (easily) it can affect our interpretations. But the experiment I talked about still cannot answer the question in the speech scenario. So in the next blog I will talk further about the attribution bias and two specific attribution bias which can answer the question we brought from the beginning of the blog.

Resource:

1. ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations’ by Fritz Heider
2. ‘Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior’ by Himmelfarb. S
3. ‘Point of view and perceptions of causality’ by Shelly Taylor and Susan Fiske