Elsevier

Biological Psychology

Volume 103, December 2014, Pages 117-124
Biological Psychology

Stressing the person: Legal and everyday person attributions under stress

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2014.07.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Acute physiological stress increases dispositional attributions.

  • Increased stress relates to more dispositional attributions not only of mundane everyday behaviors, but also of criminal behavior.

  • When participants make attributions of criminal behavior, increased stress is accompanied by more dispositional attributions even when extenuating circumstances are present.

Abstract

When determining the cause of a person's behavior, perceivers often overweigh dispositional explanations and underweigh situational explanations, an error known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). The FAE occurs in part because dispositional explanations are relatively automatic, whereas considering the situation requires additional cognitive effort. Stress is known to impair the prefrontal cortex and executive functions important for the attribution process. We investigated if stress increases dispositional attributions in common place and legal situations. Experiencing a physiological stressor increased participants’ cortisol, dispositional attributions of common everyday behaviors, and negative evaluations. When determining whether a crime was due to the defendant's disposition or the mitigating situation, self-reported stress correlated with increased dispositional judgments of defendant's behavior. These findings indicate that stress may make people more likely to commit the FAE and less favorable in their evaluations of others both in daily life and when making socially consequential judicial decisions.

Introduction

In our daily lives we often interact with others under stress: a physician makes life-saving decisions, a businesswoman negotiates under high-stakes, a student receives critical feedback on a presentation. Stress has a profound effect on our thoughts, emotions, and how we regulate these processes, resulting in changes in our performance and decisions (Porcelli & Delgado, 2009). Specifically, stress negatively impacts our ability to engage in tasks that require complex and flexible thinking (Arnsten, 2009). Most stress research has focused on how stress affects cognitive functioning (Lupien, Maheu, Tu, Fiocco, & Schramek, 2007) or influences learning and memory systems (Roozendaal, Hahn, Nathan, de Quervain, & McGaugh, 2004). Less research has focused on how stress influences our interactions with and judgments of others and no studies to our knowledge have extended these findings to socially consequential real-world person judgments (c.f. Richeson & Shelton, 2003). In social situations it is important not only to characterize how stress affects the perceiver, but also how stress affects the perception of others and how this relationship may impact legal decisions where assessments of responsibility are critically important.

Successful social decisions often result from accurately representing the cause of someone else's behavior. Decades of attribution research suggest that seeking explanations for others’ behavior helps perceivers make sense of the world around them (Jones and Davis, 1965, Kelley, 1967). Unfortunately, this is a process fraught with biases and errors. For instance, a stranger who bumps into others is likely to be thought of as rude, even though the stranger may have just had his eyes dilated by the ophthalmologist. Although we quickly infer that the stranger's rude personality accounts for the collision, it is entirely possible that the situation fully explains the behavior. In judicial judgments, situational factors can be used to mitigate charges or exonerate defendants and thus are profoundly important in decisions of guilt. The tendency to overvalue dispositional explanations (i.e., an individual's personality characteristics) and undervalue situational explanations (i.e., the context in which the behavior occurs) is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE; Gilbert and Malone, 1995, Jones and Harris, 1967, Miller, 1976, Ross, 1977, Snyder and Jones, 1974).

Individuals may not simultaneously weigh behavioral and situational information when decoding behavior (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Instead, attributing a cause to someone's behavior is a process that is proposed to unfold over time (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). First, perceivers categorize a behavior (“Amy refused to shake Brenda's hand”). Next, they characterize the behavior in dispositional (i.e., personality trait) terms (“Amy is rude”). These two processes are relatively automatic. Finally, given sufficient time and motivation, the observer applies information about the prevailing situational constraints on the behavior (“Amy has a highly contagious illness”). The initial dispositional inference is adjusted by incorporating situational information, if warranted, through a controlled, effortful correctional step (Baumeister et al., 1998, Jones, 1979, Quattrone, 1982). The FAE occurs, in part, because automatic (versus controlled) processing has the advantages in our busy lives of speed and efficiency.

Because correcting a judgment requires mental effort, this last correctional step is more likely to be incomplete when cognitive resources are drained or busy, such as when individuals are under time pressure or under cognitive load, resulting in dispositional attributions (Baumeister et al., 1998, Gilbert et al., 1988, Gilbert and Jones, 1986, Jones, 1979, Quattrone, 1982). Gilbert and colleagues found that when participants are distracted during attribution judgments, they make more dispositional attributions. The researchers concluded that when cognitive resources are consumed by another task, the correctional step of adjusting initial dispositional inferences with relevant situational information is impaired. This model is supported by a recent brain imaging study that found increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — a region linked with executive functions, including working memory, selective attention, and executive control (Banich et al., 2001, MacDonald et al., 2000) — when individuals made situational attributions (Brosch, Schiller, Mojdehbakhsh, Uleman, & Phelps, 2013).

In Gilbert et al. (1988), participants had two tasks to perform simultaneously, thus fundamentally making the attributional task one of divided attention. Another way that executive functions can be altered is by physiological stress. Stress has broad long-term effects on cognitive processes that may be critical in the attribution process. Stress results in neurohormonal changes that impair PFC function and a range of executive functions (Arnsten, 2009). Specifically, stress has a detrimental effect on tasks that require complex and flexible thinking (Arnsten, 2009), selective attention (Mogg, Mathews, Bird, & Macgregor-Morris, 1990), and working memory (Qin et al., 2009, Roozendaal et al., 2004, Schoofs et al., 2009). Acute stress results in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation and triggers the rapid sympathetic nervous system release of catecholamines that facilitates responding to stressors (Goldstein, 2003). Following this rapid release of catecholamines is the release of glucocorticoids, such as cortisol, which peak 20–30 min after stress exposure (Sapolsky, Romero, & Munck, 2000) and can be measured as a proxy for stress. One advantage of stress as a manipulation of executive function is that its effects last beyond the stressor itself. This permits examining how stress affects attributions without adding distractions or changing the structure of the task.

In the first study, we explore the effects of physiological stress on attribution judgments. Given that stress impairs executive functions, stress may also increase an individual's reliance on automatic, heuristic processes (Hoffman and al’Absi, 2004, Kahneman and Frederick, 2002, Reyna, 2004). In the second study, we extend our investigation into real-world, socially consequential person attributions where participants make attributions about legal scenarios. In both studies, we hypothesized that participants under stress would be less able to recruit the cognitive resources necessary to correct their initial dispositional inferences, resulting in fewer situational attributions both in everyday scenarios and in legal decisions.

Section snippets

Study 1

In the context of study 1, we define stress as a disruption of homeostasis that results in subsequent activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, widely considered the hallmark of a stress response (see De Kloet, 2004). Although an array of laboratory manipulations may result in cognitive interference, distraction, or negative affect, we specifically employed an acute stress manipulation that reliably elicits HPA-axis activation as assessed with increased cortisol, enabling us

Participants

Analyses included 56 participants (38 females, 18–29 years of age; M = 21.232, SD = 2.979; White = 28, Black = 4, Asian = 12; Latino/Hispanic = 8, Middle Eastern = 4; see Supplementary materials for exclusion criteria). Participants were recruited at NYU via flyers. All gave informed consent and were paid $15.00 for participation.

Cold-pressor task

The acute stress manipulation was a cold-pressor task (CPT), in which participants submerge their arm in ice-cold water for 3 min. This manipulation is commonly used to elicit the

Results and discussion

We conducted two separate analyses, of attribution and evaluation ratings, using 2 (target gender: male, female) × 2 (valence: positive, negative) × 2 (order of information: situation first, situation second) × 2 (stress group: stress, control) repeated measure ANOVAs, with gender, valence, and order as within-subject factors and stress group as a between subjects factor. Our hypotheses were focused on stress group differences. For a discussion of within-subject effects, see the Supplementary

Study 2

In study 1 we found evidence that physiological stress increases dispositional attributions and negative evaluations of attributions typical in daily life. In study 2 we extended these findings to explore how current perceived psychological stress affects legal attributions, a socially consequential real-world decision. Person attributions ascribe responsibility to behavior. Judgments of responsibility are critically important in the domain of legal decision-making and, given how common stress

Methods

We recruited 204 United States participants (85 females, 19 to 71 years of age; M = 37.21, SD = 12.84; White = 171, Black = 9, Asian = 6; Latino/Hispanic = 8, Middle Eastern = 2, Native American = 3, Biracial/Multiracial = 5) from the online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT; Buhrmester et al., 2011, Horton et al., 2011, Mason and Suri, 2012, Paolacci et al., 2010).3 AMT allows researchers to contract participants to perform tasks in

Stress and legal attributions

As predicted, current stress correlated with legal attributions, such that as current stress increased, dispositional assessments of criminal behavior increased (β = .19, t(202) = 2.70, p = .008, Rp2=.04; Fig. 4).4

General discussion

Using both experimental and correlational methods, the current study highlights how everyday stress relates to our attributions and evaluations of others. We found that physiological stress increased dispositional attributions in daily life situations and that self-reported stress was correlated with increased dispositional attributions for legal scenarios. These results support a three-step model of person attributions that ends with controlled correction for situational information (Gilbert

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted in part thanks to the NYU Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund and the National Institute of Mental Health (RO1MH08075605 and RO1AG03928305). Thank you to Gregory D. Webster for comments and suggestions on analyses and Jerry Kang for comments on stress in legal contexts.

References (80)

  • M. Snyder et al.

    Attitude attribution when behavior is constrained

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (1974)
  • A.E. Stewart

    Attributions of responsibility for motor vehicle crashes

    Accident Analysis & Prevention

    (2005)
  • R.L. Woolfolk et al.

    Identification, situational constraint, and social cognition: Studies in the attribution of moral responsibility

    Cognition

    (2006)
  • A.F.T. Arnsten

    Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function

    Nature Reviews Neuroscience

    (2009)
  • R.M. Baron et al.

    The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1985)
  • R.F. Baumeister et al.

    Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1998)
  • J. Blascovich et al.

    The robust nature of the biopsychosocial model challenge and threat: A reply to Wright and Kirby

    Personality and Social Psychology Review

    (2003)
  • T. Brosch et al.

    Neural mechanisms underlying the integration of situational information into attribution outcomes

    Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience

    (2013)
  • M. Buhrmester et al.

    Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data?

    Perspectives on Psychological Science

    (2011)
  • S. Cohen et al.

    A global measure of perceived stress

    Journal of Health and Social Behavior

    (1983)
  • F.T. Cullen et al.

    Attribution, salience, and attitudes toward criminal sanctioning

    Criminal Justice and Behavior

    (1985)
  • T.D. Eells et al.

    Work-related stress in American trial judges

    Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online

    (1994)
  • R.S. Feidman et al.

    Diffusion of responsibility in crime, punishment, and other adversity

    Law and Human Behavior

    (1978)
  • G. Fontaine et al.

    Causal attribution and judicial discretion: A look at the verbal behavior of municipal court judges

    Law and Human Behavior

    (1978)
  • J. Forgas et al.

    Affective influences on causal inferences: The effects of mood on attributions for positive and negative interpersonal episodes

    Cognition & Emotion

    (2005)
  • D.T. Gilbert et al.

    Perceiver-induced constraint: Interpretations of self-generated reality

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1986)
  • D.T. Gilbert et al.

    The correspondence bias

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1995)
  • D.T. Gilbert et al.

    On cognitive busyness: When person perceivers meet persons perceived

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1988)
  • B.A. Glaser et al.

    Multi-observer assessment of problem behavior in adjudicated youths: Patterns of discrepancies

    Child & Family Behavior Therapy

    (2001)
  • D.S. Goldstein

    Catecholamines and stress

    Endocrine Regulations

    (2003)
  • H.G. Grasmick et al.

    Religion, attribution style, and punitiveness toward juvenile offenders

    Criminology

    (1994)
  • R.K. Hanson et al.

    Sexual victimization in the history of sexual abusers: A review

    Annals of Sex Research

    (1988)
  • D.F. Hawkins

    Causal attribution and punishment for crime

    Deviant Behavior

    (1981)
  • J. Horton et al.

    The online laboratory: Conducting experiments in a real labor market

    Experimental Economics

    (2011)
  • E.E. Jones

    The rocky road from acts to dispositions

    American Psychologist

    (1979)
  • D. Kahneman et al.

    Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment

  • M.F. Kaplan et al.

    Reducing the effects of juror bias

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1978)
  • S.M. Kassin

    On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk?

    American Psychologist

    (2005)
  • S.M. Kassin et al.

    Coerced confessions and the jury: An experimental test of the harmless error rule

    Law and Human Behavior

    (1997)
  • B.J. Kelly

    Supervising the cyber criminal

    Federal Probation

    (2000)
  • Cited by (11)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text