Beliefs About Behavior Account for Age Differences in the Correspondence Bias

THE “correspondence bias” is a robust phenomenon in the social psychology literature that occurs when a person’s behavior is attributed to a dispositional cause without appropriate weighting of situational forces (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). This tendency, or bias, is found even when strong situational forces for the behavior are present (see Gilbert & Malone, 1995 for a review). The correspondence bias is typically studied by employing the attitude attribution paradigm (Jones & Harris, 1967), in which participants read an essay and are told that the author was instructed to write in a specific direction (i.e., for or against a controversial social issue). When asked to rate the writer’s own attitude on the topic of the essay, participants consistently align their judgments with the direction of the essay. That is, participants tend to believe that the opinion expressed in the essay corresponds with the writer’s true attitude despite the writer being situationally constrained to write the essay in that direction. This phenomenon has been replicated in many studies (e.g., Blanchard-Fields & Horhota, 2005; Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Follett & Hess, 2002; Lord, Scott, Pugh, & Desforges, 1997). The tendency to make dispositional judgments is greater as we grow older, at least in some content domains (Blanchard-Fields, 1994; Blanchard-Fields & Beatty, 2005). For example, in the relationship domain, older adults are more likely to blame a character in a story for a negative outcome rather than the pressures of the situation (Blanchard-Fields & Beatty, 2005). In accordance with these findings, older adults endorse more extreme dispositional inferences than young adults when committing the correspondence bias (Blanchard-Fields & Horhota, 2005; Follett & Hess, 2002; Horhota & Blanchard-Fields, 2006; Mienaltowski & Blanchard-Fields, 2005). An age-related increase in the tendency to discount situational factors is important to understand. Why are older adults more extreme in their judgments and under what conditions is this adaptive versus maladaptive? Older adults might be more extreme in their attributions because they tend to rely on heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, to a greater degree than young adults when making social judgments (Chen & Blanchard-Fields, 2000; Hess, McGee, Woodburn, & Bolstad, 1998; Klaczynski & Robinson, 2000). It is suggested that older adults are more apt to rely on heuristics because they are either unable or unwilling to expend their more limited cognitive resources to effortfully process the task (Gigerenzer, 2003; see Salthouse, 1996 for a description of cognitive resources that decline with age). According to one influential model of attributional processing, there are three stages to making an attribution: categorization, characterization, and correction (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). Gilbert and colleagues (1988) maintain that the correction stage is the most effortful, or least automatic, of the three stages. In support of this assertion, dispositional attributions are made more quickly and effortlessly than situational attributions (Gilbert, McNulty, Giuliano, & Benson, 1992; Lupfer, Clark, & Hutcherson, 1990; Obsorne & Gilbert, 1992). Thus, one possibility is that older adults tend to make stronger dispositional attributions than young adults because they are unable to devote the necessary cognitive resources to correct initial dispositional attributions. If this is the primary underlying cause for age differences in the correspondence bias, we would expect age differences in cognitive abilities to be strongly related to age differences in the correspondence bias. A second possible explanation is that individual differences in cognitive style might account for stronger dispositional attributions by older adults. For example, among young adults, high attributional complexity is related to less bias (Devine, 1989). A person who is high in attributional complexity considers many different possible causes for behavior (Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, & Reeder, 1986). Thus, if older adults are less motivated (i.e., less willing) than young adults to consider several possible causes for a behavior, they may be less likely to correct their initial strong dispositional attributions. Although young and older adults do not systematically exhibit different mean levels of attributional complexity, there is increased variability in attributional complexity scores among older adults (Follett & Hess, 2002). Recent work has found that differences in attributional complexity moderate age differences in the correspondence bias (Horhota & Blanchard-Fields, 2006). Similar to cognitive style, but perhaps more specific to causal attributions, a person’s lay theory (or schema) on trait–behavior relations might relate to individual differences in the correspondence bias. Specifically, individuals who believe that people generally behave consistently with their attitudes might be more likely to commit the correspondence bias (Reeder, 1993). Most people do expect others’ behavior to be consistent with their attitudes (Miller, Ashton, & Mishal, 1990), which suggests that lay theories on attitude–behavior relations may in part account for the correspondence bias phenomenon among young adults. Might it be that older adults subscribe to stronger or more rigid lay theories of attitude–behavior consistency? If indeed this is the case, maybe the strength of this belief accounts for age differences in the correspondence bias. We do not know of any research to date that has investigated this question specifically. However, in postmanipulation interviews in numerous studies conducted in our lab (Blanchard-Fields & Horhota, 2005; Horhota & Blanchard-Fields, 2006), comments from our older adult participants indicated that they do indeed believe that a person would never write an essay that does not align with their own belief. Additionally, in a more targeted investigation of the relationship between beliefs about behavior and the correspondence bias among young adults, Lord and colleagues (1997) measured what they termed “leakage beliefs” or the degree to which a participant feels that a writer’s true disposition leaks out into an essay regardless of situational constraints. They found that levels of leakage beliefs predicted levels of the correspondence bias. We were interested in investigating whether age differences in the correspondence bias were related to beliefs about attitude–behavior consistency that go beyond the correspondence bias situation investigated in the leakage beliefs study. However, because content domain has been shown to be important when investigating age differences in dispositional attributions (Blanchard-Fields, 1994; Blanchard-Fields & Beatty, 2005), we focused the present study on whether age differences in attitude–behavior consistency beliefs within the domain of dishonesty or small transgressions—like that in the correspondence bias situation (Sabini & Silver, 2005)—would be related to age differences in the correspondence bias.