The actor/observer bias is the tendency to see other people's behavior as ________ while making ________ attributions about our own behavior.

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The question asks to fill in the blanks for the actor/observer bias: 'The actor/observer bias is the tendency to see other people's behavior as ________ while making ________ attributions about our own behavior.'

Option 1: 'distinctive; stable' — This pairing would imply that we see others as having distinctive traits and we make stable attributions about our own behavior. However, the actor/observer bias specifically contrasts dispositional (internal) explanations for others with situational (external) explanations for ourselves, not about distinctiveness or stability.

Option 2: 'unstable; dispositional' — Here, 'unstable' would describe behavior of others, and 'dispositional' would describe our own attributions. This flips the typical pattern and also incorrectly assigns dispositional attributions to ourselves rather than to others in the common framing of the bias. It also uses 'unstable' where the standard distinction is not about stability.

Option 3: 'situational; stable' — This would attribute others' behavior to the situation and our own behavior to stability (a vague notion of consistency). This does not align with the classic actor/observer bias, which emphasizes internal (dispositional) explanations for others and external (situational) explanations for ourselves, not the labels 'situational' for others and 'stable' for self.

Option 4: 'dispositional; situational' — This matches the well-established description of the actor/observer bias: we tend to see others' actions as driven by their internal traits (dispositional) while explaining our own actions with external factors (situational). This option aligns with the standard theoretical distinction underlying the bias.

In summary, each incorrect option misassigns either the locus of attribution (internal vs external) or uses terms that do not correspond to how the actor/observer bias is defined. The correct alignment emphasizes internal attributions for others and external attributions for the self, which is captured by option 4.

PSYCH 3325 AU2025 (37320) Exam 1

The actor/observer bias is the tendency to see other people's behavior as while making attributions about our own behavior.

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