Trait ascription bias

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Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations.^[1] More specifically, it is a tendency to describe one's own behaviour in terms of situational factors while preferring to describe another's behaviour by ascribing fixed dispositions to their personality. This may occur because peoples' own internal states are more readily observable and available to them than those of others.

This

Trait ascription and the cognitive bias associated with it have been a topic of active research for more than three decades.

Jones and Nisbett[7] were among the first to argue that people are biased in how they tend to ascribe traits and dispositions to others that they would not ascribe to themselves. Motivated by the classic example of the student explaining poor performance to a supervisor (in which the supervisor might superficially believe the student's explanations but really thinks the performance is due to "enduring qualities": lack of ability, laziness, ineptitude, etc.) their actor–observer asymmetry argument forms the basis of discourse^[1][8][11] on trait ascription bias.

In a 1982 study involving fifty-six undergraduate psychology students from the University of Bielefeld, Kammer et al. demonstrated that subjects rated their own variability on each of 20 trait terms to be considerably higher than their peers.^[1] Building on the earlier work of Jones and Nisbett,^[7] which suggests people describe the behaviour of others in terms of fixed dispositions while viewing their own behaviour as the dynamic product of complex situational factors, Kammer hypothesized that one's own behaviours are judged to be less consistent (i.e. not as predictable) but of higher intensities (with regard to particular traits) than the behaviour of others. The experiment had each student describe themselves as well as a same-sex friend using two identical lists of trait-descriptive terms. For example, for the trait of dominance the student was first asked "In general, how dominant are you?" and then "How much do you vary from one situation to another in how dominant you are?"^[1] Kammer's results strongly supported his hypothesis.

David C. Funder's work

While trait ascription bias has been described by empirical results from various disciplines, most notably psychology and social psychology, explaining the mechanism of the bias remains a contentious issue in the theory of personality description literature.^[4][13]

Tversky and Kahneman describe a

Attribution plays a role in how people understand and judge the causes of the behaviour of others,^[2] which in turn affects how they ascribe traits to others. Attributional theory^[17] is concerned with how people subsequently judge behavioural causes, which also bears relevance to trait ascription and related biases. In particular, attribution (and attributional) theory can help explain the mechanism by which individuals defer to ascribing dispositional traits vs. situational variability to observers.^[18]

The big five personality traits (or five factor model) arguably^[4][13] provides a robust set of traits by which personalities can be accurately described. It supports the notion that there are cross-cultural, enduring traits which manifest in behaviour and can, if correctly ascribed to individuals, provide an actor with predictive power over an observer.

Trait ascription bias, regardless of the theoretical mechanisms underpinning it, intuitively plays a role in various social phenomenon observed in the wild.

Trait ascription bias has received criticism on a number of fronts.[6]^[13] In particular, some have argued that trait ascription, and the notion of traits, are merely artefacts of methodology and that results contrary to conventional wisdom can be achieved with simple changes to the experimental designs used.^[1][8][13] Furthermore, the theoretical bases for trait ascription bias are criticized^[13] for failing to recognize constraints and "questionable conceptual" assumptions.