Have you ever had—while driving—that extraordinary experience where anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, while anyone driving faster is a maniac?
That, my dear reader, is an example of the Correspondence Bias in full-blown action.
Generally, this bias refers to the tendency to infer that people’s behavior corresponds mainly to their personality, despite their behavior being explainable by the situations in which they occur.
In other words, we tend to see a far too direct correlation between people’s actions and their personalities.
We wrongly assume that a person’s action is based more on what “kind” of person he/she is—rather than the social and environmental forces at work on him/her—and this often leads to erroneous behavior explanations.
Too abstract? Here is a scenario:
You see someone kick a vending machine for no visible reason and you assume that he/she is “an angry person.” Nevertheless, when YOU kick ......