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Donovan Long
Psychology / Sociology

Bertram Malle, Mentor

Changing Perspective: Investigating Actor-Observer Asymmetry

Social psychologists working with attribution theory have postulated that ordinary people use a dichotomy of situational vs. dispositional factors to explain human behavior. Within this framework, an asymmetry was found such that “actors” tend to attribute their behavior to the immediate situation, and “observers” tend to attribute others’ behavior to their dispositional characteristics (Jones and Nisbett, 1972). Storms (1973) appeared to eliminate this actor-observer asymmetry through a manipulation in which actors saw their own behavior from the external (observer) perspective. Several attempts to replicate Storms’s work, however, have failed. The present study tests the changing-perspective hypothesis by replicating Storms’s original procedure, but using a more complex and robust folk-conceptual model behavior explanation (Malle, 1999). This study hypothesizes that the results Storms reported will not be replicable using the traditional situation-disposition dichotomy, but that the folk-conceptual analysis will yield meaningful actor-observer differences that are sensitive to a change in perspective.