In last post I discussed the existence of people’s attribution bias and how it will affect interpretations. However, we haven’t answered the original question: why will we feel our speech is worse when we listen to record than when we are making the speech? Generally, it is also because of the difference in observation positions – being in the party involved or being in the observation party.
The most well-known relative experiment about this difference was done by Richard Nisbett and his coworkers in 1973. Richard invited a large number of undergraduate male students to join the experiment and ask them the following questions: 1. Why do you love the girl you dated the most in this year? 2. Why do you choose your current major? 3. Why does your best friend love the girl he dated the most in this year? 4. Why does your best friend choose his current major?
After collecting the results and analyzing, Richard found that when students answered the question ‘why do you love the girl you dated the most in this year?’, they would give situation factors (like girl’s personality or characteristics) as twice as much individual factors (like personal demand or favorites about girls’ eyes or hair colors). On the other side, when they answered the question ‘Why does your best friend love the girl he dated the most in this year?’, they would give same number of situation factors as individual factors. Same thing happened when they answered the questions about major: They would give the same number of situation factors as individual factors when the question was about their majors, but they would give individual factors as forth as much situation factor when the question was about their best friends’ majors.
So at the end Richard concluded as ‘when people explain for their own actions, they prefer to attribute under the effects of situation factors; when people explain for other’s actions, they prefer to attribute under the effects of individual factors.’
Unfortunately, the mechanism of this difference still remain unknown. However, I would like to share my own hypothesis: when people are the party involved doing something in a friendly environment (people relax), they will be focus more on the situation factors than individual factors; for example, when kids walk back from school to home, they will be attracted by what is happening around them but not their own actions. When people are in a unfriendly environment (people stress), they will inevitably receive more information from individual factors, for example, when rookies play their first game in the NBA, they will feel their hearts speeding up or sweeting, but effects from audiences’ shouting and flashlight will somehow be reduced or even ignored. However, when people are observers, they can only get information from the performances of the party involved or the actions themselves. Observers cannot analyze any situation factors as they are unable to receive. This kind of ‘information failure’ causes the difference we are discussing.
Finally, we may have an answer for the original question: when people are making speech, they are focus more on their inside feeling, so they have more specific information about own heartbeat, echo, temper and feeling than other observers. However, when people then listen to the record of their speech, they turn to be observers. All situation factors cannot be represented so observer can only get information from the speech itself as individual factors. After all, we always have good comment on our speech at first, but the compliments go down after we listen to the listen as we can only be focus on the speech itself. Furthermore, we can also discuss some other relative cases or problems. When people interpret other’s action, they will overestimate the effects of personality (individual factor) because they can only get information from it. So when people need to answer the question like why this man is poor, people are prefer to give a reason like the man is not hard-working. Same case will be if people are asked why a disabled people fails to do something, they are prefer to talk about disability. On the other side, when people are asked why some businessmen and world leader are successful, they are prefer to attribute successes to good personalities. This kind of attribution bias is called fundamental attribution error.
However, when people interpret their own action, they will overestimate the effects of situation factors, especially when people interpret own failures. For example, when students failed to pass an exam, most of them would complain the exam was too difficult, the review session was not helpful or questions were too tricky. They might also said they didn’t do well because they slept bad last night or the weather was horrible. This attribution bias is called self-serving bias in attribution. After all, many dilemmas could be solved after we know clearly about attribution bias. For example, when an employee is late for his work, he will find situation factors as his reasons, like traffic jam. However, his boss will find individual factors as his reasons like laziness. And that’s why most of employees thought it was unfair to be fired because they didn’t think their wrongs were worse enough to be fired, but their bosses thought so.
Resource:
- ‘Point of view and perceptions of causality’ – Taylor S.E. & Fiske S.T.
- ‘Popular induction: Information is not always informative’ – Nisbett R.E., Caputo, C., Legant P.,& Reed H.
3. ‘Cognition and social behavior’ – Carroll J.S. & Payne J.W.