Interpreting others on the basis of their behavior: correspondent inferences

At work we are often in contact with many people we get to know only superficially. How do we judge them when we have no rational grounds to go on?

There are many shortcuts; probably the most common one in medium-sized and large organizations is to apply an inductive criterion to the various groups. Being able to extend to the whole group the judgment I have formed of a few of its members lets me build schemas into which I can slot people with little effort.

It seems more rational to judge reality as we see it, yet clearly we do not wait until we have enough to go on, and we build ourselves a picture from limited knowledge (extending to the formation of attitudes Simon’s theory of bounded rationality in decision making http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality, taken up again in the article How to make decisions within an organization).

Sometimes it is enough to rely on improvised interpretations, influenced by the associations and representations accessible at that moment, if we do not intend or do not expect to interact with a person.

Characterizing a person as having a personality trait that corresponds to their behavior amounts to drawing a correspondent inference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondent_inference_theory). When the initial interpretation is followed by the correspondent inference, we have our own stable representation of the person.

According to Jones and Davis (1965), this mechanism is justified when:

• the behavior is freely chosen by the individual (it must not be the result of coercion)
• the behavior has effects that distinguish it from the other possible courses of action (noncommon effects)
• the behavior is unexpected or low in social desirability

The tendency to draw mistaken correspondent inferences is called the correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error. In practice, people tend to assume that the behaviors they observe reflect the characteristics of the person even when other explanations are possible. The review by Gilbert and Malone (1995) describes it as the tendency to draw conclusions about a person’s enduring dispositions from behaviors that the situation would be enough to explain, and regards it as one of the fundamental phenomena of social psychology.

Applying the correspondence bias to the world of work, it is easy to see that the impressions we form of a person end up being determined by the behaviors that go with the job they do.

If we think about people we know superficially at work, we realize that roles often define people. A classic experiment shows this: in a quiz, those who asked the questions were judged more knowledgeable than those who answered, because the people judging did not take enough account of the advantage conferred by the role (Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz, 1977). Once we have created an image of a person, we work to find confirmation and disregard whatever does not fit it. Clearly, someone who is highly competent in one role is unlikely to be seen as gifted for a different one as well. As this image spreads, it can win over the person themselves and in the end make it true (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profezia_che_si_autoadempie).

(Alberto Viotto)