Смещение атрибуции черт: как мы видим себя и других.

Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations. More specifically, it is a tendency to describe one's own behaviour in terms of situational factors while preferring to describe another's behaviour by ascribing fixed dispositions to their personality. This may occur because peoples' own internal states are more readily observable and available to them than those of others. This attributional bias intuitively plays a role in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes and prejudice, combined with the negativity effect. However, trait ascription and trait based models of personality remain contentious in modern psychology and social science research. Trait ascription bias refers to the situational and dispositional evaluation and description of personality traits on a personal level. A similar bias on the group level is called the outgroup homogeneity bias.

Trait ascription and the cognitive bias associated with it have been a topic of active research for more than three decades. Like many other cognitive biases, trait ascription bias is supported by a substantial body of experimental research and has been explained in terms of numerous theoretical frameworks originating in various disciplines. Among these frameworks are attribution theory (related to how people determine causes of observed events), theories of personality description such as the five factor model, and work regarding the circumstances under which personality assessments are valid. Seminal work includes Turner, Jones, Kammer, Incorrectly ascribing traits to other persons based on limited information or observations intuitively plays a role in the formation and perpetuation of some social phenomena such as stereotypes and prejudice. As such, methods to mitigate the effect of trait ascription bias on personality assessments outside of the lab are also of interest to social scientists. Although trait oriented theories of personality description, and indeed the very notion of universal, enduring traits themselves, have a natural appeal, some researchers are critical of their existence outside of the laboratory and present results which imply trait ascription, and consequently trait ascription bias, are simply residue of the methodologies historically used to "detect" them. Criticism is based either on the non existence of personality traits (contrary to five factor descriptions), or suggest divergent interpretations of results and alternative mechanisms of ascription, limiting the scope of existing work.

The empirical evidence supporting trait ascription and the psychological mechanisms underpinning it comes from a diverse body of research in psychology and the social sciences.

Jones and Nisbett on trait ascription bias.

In a 1982 study involving fifty six undergraduate psychology students from the University of Bielefeld, Kammer et al. demonstrated that subjects rated their own variability on each of 20 trait terms to be considerably higher than their peers. with those who preferred not to ascribe traits. This result is consistent with the type of personality commonly associated with promoting stereotypes and prejudice.

While trait ascription bias has been described by empirical results from various disciplines, most notably psychology and social psychology, explaining the mechanism of the bias remains a contentious issue in the theory of personality description literature.

Tversky and Kahneman describe a cognitive heuristic that suggests people make judgments (including about other people's personalities) on the basis of how easily examples of their (other people's) behaviour come to mind. This would appear to be consistent with the arguments of Jones and Nisbett is concerned with how people subsequently judge behavioural causes, which also bears relevance to trait ascription and related biases. In particular, attribution (and attributional) theory can help explain the mechanism by which individuals defer to ascribing dispositional traits vs. situational variability to observers.

The big five personality traits (or five factor model) arguably are interested in mitigating cognitive biases to reduce their effects on society.

Trait ascription bias has received criticism on a number of fronts. In particular, some have argued that trait ascription, and the notion of traits, are merely artefacts of methodology and that results contrary to conventional wisdom can be achieved with simple changes to the experimental designs used. Furthermore, the theoretical bases for trait ascription bias are criticized for failing to recognize constraints and "questionable conceptual" assumptions.