The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.
—Gilbert and Malone¹

We tend to see far too direct a correspondence between others’ actions and personalities. When we see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, we assume they are “an angry person.” But when you yourself kick the vending machine, it’s because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.

We attribute our own actions to our situations, seeing our behaviors as perfectly normal responses to experience. But when someone else kicks a vending machine, we don’t see their past history trailing behind them in the air. We just see the kick, for no reason we know about, and we think this must be a naturally angry person—since they lashed out without any provocation.

Yet consider the prior probabilities. There are more late buses in the world, than mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels that cause them to sometimes spontaneously kick vending machines. Now the average human is, in fact, a mutant. If I recall correctly, an average individual has two to ten somatically expressed mutations. But any given DNA location is very unlikely to be affected. Similarly, any given aspect of someone’s disposition is probably not very far from average. To suggest otherwise is to shoulder a burden of improbability.

Even when people are informed explicitly of situational causes, they don’t seem to properly discount the observed behavior. When subjects are told that a pro-abortion or anti-abortion speaker was randomly assigned to give a speech on that position, subjects still think the speakers harbor leanings in the direction randomly assigned.²

It seems quite intuitive to explain rain by water spirits; explain fire by a fire-stuff (phlogiston) escaping from burning matter; explain the soporific effect of a medication by saying that it contains a “dormitive potency.” Reality usually involves more complicated mechanisms: an evaporation and condensation cycle underlying rain, oxidizing combustion underlying fire, chemical interactions with the nervous system for sopo...

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