Behavior as seen by the actor and as seen by the observer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6206318 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard E Nisbett (University of Michigan), Craig Caputo, Patricia Legant, Jeanne Marecek (0000-0002-2486-0924) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 154-164 |
| Publication date | 1973-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-3514 • E-ISSN: 1939-1315 |
| Publisher | American Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1037/h0034779 |
| OpenAlex | W2020098385 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 218 |
| References cited | 5 |
Jones and Nisbett proposed that actors are inclined to attribute their behavior to situational causes, while observers of the same behavior are inclined to attribute it to dispositional qualities—stable attitudes and traits—of the actor. Some demonstrational studies consistent with this hypothesis were described. College student observers were found to (a) assume that actors would behave in the future in ways similar to those they had just witnessed (while actors themselves did not share this assumption); (b) describe their best friend's choices of girlfriend and college major in terms referring to dispositional qualities of their best friend (while more often describing their own similar choices in terms of properties of the girlfriend or major); and (c) ascribe more personality traits to other people than to themselves. The fact that different individuals often have very different views of the causes of a given person's behavior is a frequent theme of world literature. The diverse perspectives on the behavior of the central figure held by the central figure himself, the people whom he af-fects, the author, and the reader play an im-portant role in works as varied as Rashomon, Huckleberry Finn, the "Grand Inquisitor"
Observer (physics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Psychology · Social Psychology
Lenses of the Heart
The actor and the observer
A paradox in depression
The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution
Counterfactual reasoning as a framework for attribution theories
Perceptions of clients by professional helpers
Causal attribution across cultures
Conversational processes and causal explanation
Construal-level theory of psychological distance.
Causal Cognition
Schematismen der Interaktion
Mind Perception
Congruence of Others' and Self-Judgments of Personality
Perceiving Justice
Cross-cultural interaction, social attribution and inter-group relations
Heuristics and Biases
Norm theory
The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning.
The weighing of evidence and the determinants of confidence
Extensional versus intuitive reasoning
The Development of Self-Understanding from Infancy Through Adolescence
Individual differences in reasoning
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment
Support theory
The hot hand in basketball
The Paranoid Optimist
How People Explain Behavior
The Mutual Knowledge Problem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration
Nice to know you
Salience, Attention, and Attribution
When and Why We See Victims as Responsible
Spatial Distance and Mental Construal of Social Events
Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder
Representativeness Revisited
The Psychology of Rituals
Cross-cultural differences in metacognitive self
Perceptions of custody
Rewarding one’s Future Self
Artificial intelligence, types of decisions, and street-level bureaucrats
Face masks drive increased rational decision-making
Beyond traditional interviews
Who attributes what to whom? Moral values and relational context shape causal attribution to the person or the situation
Dissecting Dispositionality
Social Perception of Forecasters
Heroes Perceive Their Own Actions as Less Heroic Than Other People Do
Communicating With Distant Others
Person, situation, and person-by-situation interaction components in person perception
The hand of God or the hand of Maradona? Believing in free will increases perceived intentionality of others’ behavior
Metacognition and mindreading
Application of artificial intelligence
Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation
Konsensfiktionen in Kleingruppen
Schematismen der Interaktion
The Affect Heuristic
The Intuitive Psychologist And His Shortcomings
Pluralistic Ignorance and the Perpetuation of Social Norms by Unwitting Actors
Sozialperspektivität
Attribution as a mediator of bias in helping
Self as actor, active observer, and passive observer
Differential attribution of trait-descriptive terms to oneself as compared to well-liked, neutral, and disliked others
Actor-observer differences in perceptions of effective control
Impediments to forgiveness
Schemas and images as memory aids
How people see others is different from how people see themselves
Let's give the fundamental attribution error another chance
Territoriality and control
The "Barnum effect" revisited
Perceiving one's own traits and others
Falling in love
Close relationships as including other in the self
Ubiquitous Watergate
Unconfounding situational attributions from uncertain, neutral, and ambiguous ones
Videotape and the attribution process
Actor–observer differences in information inference and causal attribution
How long will I suffer?" versus "How long will you suffer?" A self-other effect in affective forecasting
Encoding of personal information
How alike is it versus how likely is it
Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior
Strategy Choice in Sociocultural Context
Comparing the Accuracy of Personality Judgments by the Self and Knowledgeable Others
Ambiguity and self-evaluation
Attribution Theory and Research
Self-serving biases in the attribution process
Empathy
Implicit personality theory and inferential illusions
Effect of expected and observed outcome of an action on the differential causal attributions of actor and observer1
Effects of justification and vocalization on actors'and observers'attributions of freedom 1
A Naturalistic Test of Two Fundamental Propositions
Attributional determinants of monetary help-giving1
Trait and situational attributions in a naturalistic setting
On seeing ourselves as others see us
The effect of previous actor/observer role experience on attribution of responsibility for failure 1
The enigma of altruistic lying
Love and expansion of the self
Distinguishing territoriality and privacy
Perceptions of informal communication in the workplace
Contributory Fault and Rape Convictions
A Bayesian Model for Performance Expectations
The Effects of Friendship and Outcome on Task Attribution
Contrasting Self-Esteem Theory and Consistency Theory in Predicting Interpersonal Attraction
| Unique citing works | 218 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,11 |
| Citation span | 1973 - 2026 (54) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 210 |