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Correspondence Bias

Definition

The term correspondence bias describes perceivers' tendency to infer stable personality characteristics from other people's behavior even when this behavior was caused by situational factors. For example, students may infer a high level of dispositional (trait) anxiety from a fellow student's nervous behavior during a class presentation, even though such nervous behavior may simply be the result of the anxietyprovoking situation. The correspondence bias is an important phenomenon in research on impression formation, as it can lead to systematic errors in first impressions of other individuals.

History

Research on the correspondence bias has its roots in the works of social psychologists Fritz Heider and Gustav Ichheiser in the 1950s and experienced a rapid increase in the 1970s. However, it wasn't until 1986 that the term correspondence bias ...

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