SELF AS THE AXIS OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

[Peetee Aitchei]

SELF AS THE AXIS OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

Alike with the individual and the group, the
past is being continually re-made, reconstructed
in the interests of the present. (Bartlett, 1932,
p. 309)

As historians of our own lives we seem to be,
on the one hand, very inattentive and, on the
other, revisionists who will justify the present
by changing the past. (Wixon & Laird, 1976,
p. 384)

"Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan,
"controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past." (Orwell, 1949, p. 32)

In a chapter entitled "Overestimating One's Importance
as Influence or Target," Jervis (1976), a political
scientist, presents an analysis of egocentric
mis-perceptions in international politics. These
involve a decision maker unreasonably perceiving
the act of a foreign nation as being either (a) made
in response to (i.e., having been caused by) a prior
act of the decision maker or (b) made with the
intent of eliciting some response from the decision
maker. The first of these categories corresponds
somewhat to the "illusion of control," which has
been demonstrated in a series of experiments by
Langer (1975).

This illusion takes the form of people seeing
their behavior as capable of influencing
outcomes that are, objectively, determined by
chance, such as the probability of a lottery ticket
they selected being a winner. Ross and Sicoly
( 1979), investigating- egocentric processes in 'group
settings, in addition to confirming Brenner's finding
of people remembering best their own contributions
to a group effort, also found that "individuals
accepted more responsibility for a group product
than other participants attributed to them" (p.
322).

The other side of Jervis's thesis -- over perception
of self as an intended target of another's action has
yet to be documented as a pervasive bias in
experimental research settings. This bias is a
defining characteristic of paranoia, in which one
sees oneself as the intended victim of actually
benign others. Milder versions of this phenomenon
may also surface in the behavior of normal subjects,
as soon' as it is sought in the psychological
laboratory.

Beneflectance: Ego as Self-Aggrandizing Historian

One of the best established recent findings in social
psychology is that people perceive themselves
readily as the origin of good effects and reluctantly
as the origin of ill effects (see reviews in support of
this conclusion by Bowerman, 1978; Bradley, 1978;
Jervis, 1976, chap. 9; Miller & Ross, 1975; Myers
& Ridl, 1979; Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfield, 1978;
Wicklund, 1978 ; Wortman, 1976; Tetlock & Levi,
Note 1).

The finding has variously been labeled ego-defensive,
self -serving, egocentric, or egotistic
attribution in these reviews. Because the first two
of these terms include more than just the result
presently being considered and the latter two lend
themselves to confusion with the egocentricity bias,
a new designation is suggested here: benefiectance,
which is a compound of beneficence (doing good)
and effectance (competence; see White, 1959).

Beneffectance is thus the tendency to take credit for
success while denying responsibility for failure.

Beneffectance in group settings.

When a task is performed collectively by members of
a group, individual-ability feedback may not be available.

This provides free reign for people to believe that
they have contributed more than their equal share
toward a group success but less than an equal share
toward a failure. Johnston (1967) demonstrated
just this effect by having subjects believe themselves
to be members of two-person teams performing
a skilled task (compensatory tracking).

Subjects received only team feedback, which indicated
that they and their partner, as a team, were performing
below average, average, or above average at the
tracking skill. Subjects accepted credit for the good
scores, but assigned most of the blame for the poor
scores to their assumed partners. Interestingly,
when team feedback was "average," subjects were
inclined to assume that this must have resulted from
a combination of their own better-than-average
performance with the partner's worse-than-average
performance.

Schlenker and Miller (1977) demonstrated a similarly
strong bias in a knowledge-test group task, even when
using a form of group feedback that provided enough
information for subjects to have made more accurate
inferences about their individual performances.

Denial of responsibility for harming.

In a variation of Milgram's ( 1963 ) well-known
procedure for demonstrating obedience, Harvey, Harris,
and Barnes (1975) induced some subjects, who were
playing the role of teachers, to administer (apparently)
severe shocks, while others believed themselves
to be administering only mild shocks. Subject-
teachers accorded themselves less responsibility
for their learners' apparent distress when the shocks
appeared to be severe than when they were mild.

Additionally, third-person observers saw the teachers
as more responsible for the learners' severe
distress than did the subject-teachers themselves.

Cognitive Conservatism: Ego as Self-Justifying Historian

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.
(Orwell, 1949, p. 177)

Conservatism is the disposition to preserve that
which is already established. Cognitive conservatism
is therefore the disposition to preserve existing
knowledge structures, such as percepts, schemata
(categories), and memories. Object conservation
(permanency or perceptual constancy) is the
fundamental cognitive achievement of a conservative
nature, followed somewhat later by assimilation
(the fitting of new events into existing cognitive
classifications, or category conservation).

Two additional cognitive processes of a conservative
nature, both documented in research only quite recently,
are referred to here as confirmation bias and rewriting
of memory.

CONFIRMATION BIAS

Several recent studies have shown that people manage
knowledge in a variety of ways to promote the
selective availability of information that confirms
judgments already arrived at. This bias occurs not
only in the domain of (controversial) opinion judgments
but also in domains of (presumably noncontroversial)
factual knowledge (cf. Nisbett & Ross's 1980, recent
discussion of belief perseverance).

Confirmation bias in information search.

Snyder and Swam (1978) showed that when asked to
determine if an interviewee was, say, an introvert,
subject-interviewers selected questions that were
biased toward the introvert hypothesis. Mischel,
Ebbesen, and Zeiss (1973) found that subjects
selectively examined available information to
confirm experimentally established positive or
negative self-expectations.

Kuhn ( 1970) and Lakatos (1970) have proposed that
the predisposition to confirm existing theoretical
beliefs is pervasively characteristic of the
research behavior of scientists, and I ( Greenwald,
1975a) have reported data showing that psychologists
are strongly inclined to disregard research results
inconsistent with their theoretical hypotheses
(caveat lector! ).

Confirmation bias in memory search.

In a study parallel to their 1973 study, Mischel,
Ebbesen, and Zeiss (1976) showed that subjects
selectively recalled information that confirmed
experimentally established positive or negative
self-expectations. Snyder and Uranowitz (1978)
found a similar memory selectivity in their subjects'
retrieving information about a target person so as
to confirm a recently established belief about that
person's sexual orientation (heterosexual vs.
homosexual).

Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein ( 1977 ) asked
people to give answers to difficult general information
questions and then asked them to estimate the
probability of correctness of their answers. Under
these circumstances people tend to be overly confident
in estimating their correctness; Koriat, Lichtenstein,
and Fischhoff ( 1980) have suggested that this
overconfidence in memory is due at least in part to
a selective search of memory for evidence that
confirms what has been recalled. The demonstration
of overconfidence in memory recently reported
by Trope ( 1978)-subjects treating weak (error-prone)
memories as if they were valid-may have a similar
explanation.

Confirmation bias in responding to persuasion.

The persuasive impact of a communication on a
target audience member is, puzzlingly, not readily
predictable from knowledge either of the position
advocated in the message or of what the target
remembers of its content (Anderson & Hubert,
1963; Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953). On the
other hand, persuasive impact is readily predictable
from knowledge of the target's prior opinion people
tend to reject messages that disagree with
their prior opinions, while being accepting of messages
that reinforce existing opinions (Cullen, 1968;
Greenwald, 1968; Janis & Terwilliger, 1962; Sherif
& Hovland, 1961 ). This potency of prior opinion,
relative to communication content, as a predictor
of response to persuasion reflects a cognitive response
process (Greenwald, 1968; Petty, Ostrom, & Brock,
in press) that can be viewed as a complex form of
confirmation bias. It is complex in that it
involves not only selective retrieval from
memory of information that supports existing opinion
but also active construction of new arguments
required to refute novel, opinion-opposing arguments.

A related confirmation bias, primacy in person
impression formation, is the relative potency of
information received early in a description. A well
known example is Luchins's (1957) finding that the
impression resulting from two somewhat contradictory
person-descriptive paragraphs varies sharply
as a function of the order in which they are presented,
being guided more by the first of the two.

Presumably, this happens because the first paragraph
establishes an impression of the target person,
and the subject then interprets the second paragraph
with a confirmation bias that tends to negate its
independent, opposing effect. (Both the primacy
phenomenon and systematic exceptions to it have
recently been reviewed by Schneider, Hastorf, &
Ellsworth, 1979.)

REWRITING OF MEMORY

In 1932 Bartlett suggested the existence of constructive
processes in human memory:

"The construction that is effected is [onel that would justify
the observer's attitude . . . [which is] very much a matter
of feeling or affect. . . . When a subject is being asked to
remember, very often the first thing that emerges is
something of the nature of an attitude. The recall is then a
construction, made largely on the basis of this attitude, and
its general effect is that of justification of the
attitude. (pp. 206-207)


The knew-it-all-along efect . Fischhoff ( 19 75,
1977) gave subjects a general knowledge test in
which each question was to be answered by assigning
a probability of correctness to one of two alternative
answers. Some of the subjects were first
informed of the correct answers and then asked
to indicate the probability judgments they would
have given had they not first been told these answers.
These subjects substantially overestimated
their prior knowledge of correct answers, as indicated
by comparison of their judgments with correctness-
probability judgments of naive subjects.