Abstract

It has been hypothesized that actors tend to attribute behavior to the situation whereas observers tend to attribute behavior to the person (Jones & Nisbett 1972). The authors argue that this simple hypothesis fails to capture the complexity of actual actor-observer differences in people's behavioral explanations. A new framework is proposed in which reason explanations are distinguished from explanations that cite causes, especially stable traits. With this framework in place, it becomes possible to show that there are a number of distinct actorobserver asymmetries in explanation, each stemming from a distinct psychological process by which explanations are generated. People can explain behavior from either of two basic perspectives. In actor explanations, a behavior is explained by the person who actually performed the behavior. In observer explanations, a behavior is explained by someone other than the person who performed the behavior. Now, suppose we pose the question: "What psychological processes might lead actor explanations to differ from observer explanations?" A sensible answer would be: "All sorts of different processes. Actors and observers attend to different kinds of events, they have access to different kinds of information, and they are influenced by different kinds of motivations." Thirty years ago, Jones and Nisbett (1972) advanced the hypothesis that all of these differences in psychological processes ultimately lead to a single difference in the behavior explanations that actors and observers provide. In other words, even though Jones and Nisbett endorsed the claim that the processes that guide actors' and observers' explanations differ in a wide variety of respects, they suggested that each of these process differences independently leads to the s...

Citations