Trait Ascription Bias

Trait Ascription Bias

Time for Reflection

Remember confiding in someone as your "confidant" or "the secret keeper" but later discovering that everyone around was aware of the so called "secret" information/ news.  The realisation thereafter, that you would have done a better job as a "confidant" for someone as you can adapt well to the surrounding situation/ environment.

This tendency of ours to perceive ourself as a better "confidant" or "secret keeper" is an example of the presence of "Trait Ascription Bias". Let's look at it in more detail 

Definition

Trait Ascription is the tendency of the 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. 

More about Trait Ascription

This bias refers to the belief that other people's behavior are generally predictable while our own is more unpredictable. In this bias, we tend to describe our own behavior in terms of situational factors and that of other people by ascribing fixed disposition on their personality. The reason for occurrence could be because our own internal stats is more readily observable to us than the internal state of any other person. 

One of the important piece of research in this area (Trait Ascription Bias) is "the actor and the observer" by Jones and Nisbett. They argued that people are biased in how they tend to ascribe traits and dispositions to others that they would not ascribe to themselves. Their actor-observer asymmetry explains the errors that one makes when forming attributions about behavior of others. When people judge their own behavior, and they are the actor, they are more likely to attribute their actions to the particular situation than to a generalization about their personality. Yet, when an observer is explaining the behavior of another person (the actor), they are more likely to attribute this behavior to the actor's overall disposition than to situational factors. This frequent error shows the bias that people hold in their evaluations of behavior. Because people are better acquainted with the situational (external) factors affecting their own decisions, they are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the social situation they are in. However, because the situational effects of anothers' behavior are less accessible to the observer, observers see the actor's behavior as influenced more by the actor's overall personality.

This bias is responsible for the formation of creation of stereotypes and prejudice while evaluating the personality of the other person. The bias results in a person relying heavily on "gut feeling" instead of information to ascribe traits to other people.