Correspondence bias is the tendency to form assumptions about a person’s character based on their behavior. When we try to explain why people act in a certain way, we often focus on personality traits, underestimating the power of specific situations to lead to specific behaviors. In other words, people are inclined to think that others’ actions reflect their personality.

As a result, we are more likely to react negatively to people and hold them directly accountable for their actions, even if this may not be the case.

What is correspondence bias?

Correspondence bias is a type of attribution bias that occurs when we try to explain the behavior of others. According to correspondence bias, we tend to blame someone’s character for a particular behavior they are displaying, even when this behavior is influenced by situational factors. In other words, we assume other people’s actions correspond to their character, regardless of whether we are aware of the external causes of this behavior.

Correspondence bias plays a role in the impressions we form of others, and can lead to erroneous assumptions about their character. For example, if a friend doesn’t return our call, correspondence bias may cause us to think that our friend is (always!) an inconsiderate person, even if they forgot or are traveling for work.

What causes correspondence bias?

Correspondence bias emerges from the way we explain the behavior of others, which has many possible causes. Some of these causes do lie within the individual (like their personality) but many lie outside (situational factors).

When it comes to other people’s behavior, we tend to downplay the role of the situation and attribute static personality characteristics from what we observe. Because we can only observe some aspects of a situation (e.g., we are trying to reach our friend all day) and can’t observe others (e.g., that our friend has lost their phone), this leads to correspondence bias.

It is important to remember that correspondence bias happens even when we are aware of the situation a person is in.  Because of our tendency to see things from our perspective (i.e., egocentric bias) we wrongly assume that others experience a situation exactly as we do. Due to this, we expect others to behave as we (think we) would in that situation (e.g., “if I lost my phone, I would log on to my computer to answer my messages”). If this doesn’t happen, we draw negative conclusions about their personality (i.e., “they’re flaky” or “they don’t care about their friends”).

Correspondence bias example

People tend to infer personality traits based on the behavior or actions of others, even when they are aware that external factors or constraints are at play.

Other types of attribution bias

Our efforts to understand the causes behind behaviors can sometimes be misguided by a number of biases.

• Actor-observer bias arises when we attribute other people’s behavior to internal causes while attributing our own behavior to external causes. This is usually the case with undesirable behaviors and negative outcomes. We are happy to deflect responsibility for our negative actions but quick to blame other people and their character for the same negative actions.
• Self-serving bias refers to our tendency to attribute our success to our personal characteristics and blame external factors for our failures. In an effort to protect our self-esteem, we explain the cause of an outcome based on whether the outcome is positive or negative.
• Group-serving bias (or ultimate attribution error) occurs when individuals from a socially defined group (i.e., an ingroup) make false assumptions regarding the behavior of people from a different group (i.e., an outgroup). For example, this occurs when people explain away outgroup success by attributing it to good luck or an easy task.