Does the Correspondence Bias Apply to Social Robots?: Dispositional and Situational Attributions of Human Versus Robot Behavior

Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to over-emphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people’s behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, but do people make the same causal inferences when interpreting the actions of a robot? As compared to people, social robots are less autonomous and agentic because their behavior is wholly determined by humans in the loop, programming, and design choices. Nonetheless, people do assign robots agency, intentionality, personality, and blame. Results of an experiment showed that participants made correspondent inferences when evaluating both human and robot speakers, attributing their behavior to underlying attitudes even when it was clearly coerced. However, they committed a stronger correspondence bias in the case of the robot–an effect driven by the greater dispositional culpability assigned to robots committing unpopular behavior–and they were more confident in their attitudinal judgments of robots than humans. Results demonstrated some differences in the global impressions of humans and robots based on behavior valence and choice. Judges formed more generous impressions of the robot agent when its unpopular behavior was coerced versus chosen; a tendency not displayed when forming impressions of the human agent. Implications of attributing robot behavior to disposition, or conflating robot actors with their actions, are addressed.

On the Robustness and Generality of the Correspondence Bias

People routinely assume correspondence between acts and dispositions. This “correspondence bias” leads people to neglect the power of the situation to influence behavior. However, most of the research documenting the correspondence bias uses paradigms in which the situation operates in the background. The three studies presented here employ novel paradigms in which people have full information about the situation and its effect on behavior. We find that the bias persists in the face of debiasing treatments and even in situations where avoiding it amounts to a simple subtraction problem. We also find that the correspondence bias generalizes to inanimate objects. In light of this new evidence, we reconsider the psychological origins of the correspondence bias.

Fundamental Attribution Error

We live in a world that is greatly imagined and made of quick and dirty inferences, especially in the social domain that is mined with moral heuristics and other quick moral judgments. A major moral drift is the so-called fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias. This error consists in the propensity to erroneously explain and attribute strongly biased causes to the behaviors of self and others. At least in our individualistic Western cultures, we tend to make attribution and explain our as well as others’ behavior mainly in terms of dispositional features of the individual and much less in terms of the situation in which the person is embedded (e.g., her social class, economic resources, place in society, etc.).

Benefits of Being Ambivalent: The Relationship between Trait Ambivalence and Attribution Biases

Ambivalence refers to the experience of having both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time about the same object, person, or issue. Although ambivalence research has focused extensively on negative consequences, recently, scholars turned their lens to the positive effects of ambivalence, demonstrating beneficial effects on judgments and decision-making processes. So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, which is ambivalence as a direct response to a specific stimulus. However, there are substantial individual differences in ambivalence: some people are just more ambivalent than others. Taking a first step in understanding how these individual differences relate to judgment and decision-making, we examine the relationship between trait ambivalence and cognitive bias in social judgments tasks. Specifically, we look at two of the most pervasive and consequential attribution biases in person perception: correspondence bias and self-serving bias. We find a negative relationship between trait ambivalence and correspondence bias. The higher individuals are in trait ambivalence, the smaller their bias towards attributing behavior to a person’s disposition (Study 1A and B). We find the same for self-serving bias (Study 2A and B). In sum, we show that trait ambivalence is negatively related to cognitive bias in person perception.