In his landmark book on personality, Walter Mischel (1968) made the case that people behave diff erently in diff erent contexts. Traits are not consistently expressed or revealed across diff erent environments. His convincing treatise provoked a storm of controversy and changed forever the shape of personality research as investigators struggled to determine what aspects of personality could be considered fi xed. Mischel’s book was actually about assessment, which makes the whole concept of consistency of behavior particularly relevant to the understanding of change. Good assessment should determine what factors are infl uencing behavior—change those factors and the behavior changes.
Because of Mischel we also know that neuropsychological and personality constructs do not function in isolation from environmental conditions. And so the other important part of barriers to change can be found in contextual vari- ables. We now need to consider infl uences on behavior completely diff erent from explanations based on traits and personality dynamics: socioecological infl u- ences (Oishi & Graham, 2010). Th is is not because there is a confl ict between the
importance of personality and the importance of context. Far from it; the two sources of infl uence are not only equally important but also closely intertwined.
T h e F u n d a m e nt a l A t t r i b u t i o n E r r o r
As important as Mischel’s demonstration that personality characteristics were not consistent across diff erent situations was Lee Ross’ articulation of what he called the “fundamental attribution error” (Ross, 1977). Th is is our tendency, when explaining behavior, to overvalue personality-based or dispositional explanations and to undervalue situational explanations. An interesting twist to the fundamental attribution error is that when explaining our own behavior we are more likely to justify it on situational grounds, whereas when it is some- one else’s behavior we tend to blame the way they are rather than the situation they are in. Th is diff erence is known as the actor–observer bias. Th erapists are especially prone.
Gilbert and Malone (1995) elaborated on the fundamental attribution error, calling it, in less memorable terms, the correspondence bias. Th ey defi ned this as “the tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dis- positions from behaviors than can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur” (p. 21). One of the features of everyday understanding about behavior is the importance we place on why it occurs. Th ese judgments have a very strong infl uence on how we respond to the behavior of others. If a parent attributes a child’s misbehavior to an internal disposition (“he’s naughty”) or to a negative motive (“he’s trying to provoke me”), the child is more likely to be punished than if the attribution is more forgiving (“it was an accident” or “he’s too young to know any better”) (Azar, Nix, & Makin-Byrd, 2005). Such attribu- tions not only infl uence the way a child will be treated by the parent or teacher, but will also shape therapeutic treatment in exactly the same way. Your inter- vention plan, perhaps unknowingly to you as a practitioner, will be largely deter- mined not by the scientifi c data on the validity of a treatment method but by the causal attributions you make for the problem being addressed—think back to the arguments made in Chapter 1 about the causes of a person’s weight or a child’s activity level.
One way Gilbert and Malone proposed to mitigate the correspondence bias is to help an observer understand that he or she may not be seeing the situation in the same way as the other individual is. Th ere are numerous social psychology experiments that indicate that we have diffi culty separating our assumptions from the construals of another. If you knew that a situation was dangerous it is harder to accept that someone else assumed it was safe and thus acted—in your view—recklessly or thoughtlessly. How often have you made that judgment about your teenager? Because of the work on “theory of mind” we now presume that this limitation in understanding another person’s understanding is a feature, maybe even an explanation, of autism (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). But
actually we all show it to some extent. Th ere are numerous versions of cognitive therapy in which the attempt is to encourage the client to recognize that their egocentric reading of another meaningful person’s behavior may be entirely dif- ferent from that person’s own construal.
A second possible way to reduce correspondence bias is to encourage people to reserve making a dispositional judgment until there have been more extended opportunities to observe behavior in diff erent situations. Gilbert and Malone presented considerable evidence that people tend to make these dispositional judgments fi rst. A teacher who has already decided that a pupil is a “trouble maker,” “holy terror,” “conduct disordered,” or “hyperactive” is much less likely to consider situational infl uences such as domestic discord at home, the struc- ture of the classroom rules, or coming to school hungry. Helping trainee clini- cians start with functional analyses of behavior and seek contextual infl uences (including socioeconomic, cultural, and lifestyle; Evans, Herbert, Fitzgerald, & Harvey, 2010) can reduce correspondence bias. We should repeatedly point out to trainees that in most cases they have seen the client in only one somewhat unusual setting (Swann, 1984).