Actors can access their thoughts, feelings, and situational context, shaping their understanding of their behaviour. The bias arises due to the difference in perspectives between the actor and the observer. Social representations due to their dynamic and fluid manner tend to be studied using qualitative methodologies.The following are some of the characteristics of actor-observer bias: Research helps us understand how beliefs about causality can be consensually shared and transmitted at a broader societal level, providing the common sense theories that make us all make sense of our world. Social representations referred to shared beliefs and understanding between broad groups of people and this can include culturally held and transmitted knowledge about casual relations. In this case, when the actors were shown their own faces their attention shifted on to themselves, which lead them to making an internal attribution Storm has shown that perceptual salience is essential when determining an external or internal attribution further by reversing the experiment, and the actors were shown videos f their opposite perspective before making attributions. The explanation is because the actor’s attention was directed away from themselves, as they were look at the situation, rather than themselves. Whereas the actors emphasised external situational factors when explaining their own behaviour. This was due to the actor being perceptually salient to the observer, in that all the observers’ attention was devoted to the actor, making their attribution focus on the actor. Storms found that observers emphasizes internal dispositional factors then explaining the actors behaviour. Participants were then asked to judge whether the opinions expressed reflected the speaker’s stable personality or some other contextual determinant. Storms ( 1973) conducted an experiment in which two actors would have a five minute conversation and two participants were given observer roles.

The tendency to attribute other people’s behaviour to internal causes and own behaviour to external ones.

In this way we protect and maintain our self esteem. This also occurs in group situations where the groups successes are attributed internally and other group successes are attributed externally. Intergroup attributions can serve to propagate prejudice and discrimination against minority groups in society. Olson and Ross (1988) argue that we are more likely to make internal attributions to our successes and external attributions to our failures. Cross cultural analysis suggests that it might not be so fundamental after all, as individualist cultures focus on the internal and collectivists focus on the external attributions. Limitations to this approach are that the early work conducted is ethnocentric as most studies were conducted in the UK or USA. In the choice condition participants reasonably assumed that the author was expressing their own opinions, although this was also true in the no-choice condition, even though there was a clear contextual cause for the behaviours observed. The reason why fundamental attribution bias occurs is appeared to be due to the person being observed being the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation so an internal attribution becomes more accessible. The two conditions were that participants were told that the authors had either chosen their own point of view or they were told what to write by the experimenter. Participants had to read essays by fellow students that were either for or against Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba. The person who has written the essay is the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation and so an internal attribution becomes much more accessible.

Jones and Harris ( 1967) conducted an experiment and found that American students making attributions for speeches made by other students tended to make more correspondent inferences for freely chosen socially unpopular positions. The idea that people have a general tendency to make internal rather than external attributions, even when there is a potential situational cause.

What is actor observer bias