Making Attributions for Behaviors: The Prevalence of Correspondence Bias in the General Population

Empirical evidence for the claim that people from Western cultures are prone to correspondence bias is based exclusively on college student samples. Using the attitude attribution paradigm, the current study explored (a) the prevalence of correspondence bias in a national representative sample of American adults, (b) the degree that correspondence bias generalized across demographic characteristics, and (c) whether self-construal or lay philosophies of behavior accounted for correspondence bias. Although results generalized across demographic characteristics, correspondence bias was far from universal; 53% of participants exhibited correspondence bias. Correspondence bias was positively associated with a dispositionist lay philosophy of behavior but unrelated to self-construals.