Actor-observer effect and attribution bias in teenage drivers

Actor-Observer Affect Examined With Young Drivers

The actor-observer effect has been studied in great detail with mixed results. The goal of this study is to determine if by using a situation that is more socially undesirable, the attributions used by the respondents will offer a more definite bias. The question is whether the observer exhibits more risky driving behavior or do his/her friends. A set of survey questions was answered by 70 participants who ranged in age from 16 to 17 years of age, and all were drivers themselves. By asking a question that would seem to place the respondent in the place of admitting irresponsible behavior it was hoped that the difference between the responses would give the desired result. The research concluded that the individual teens did view their own behavior in a more positive light and that of their friends as more risky. The teens responded that their own behavior was related more often to situational reasons and that their friends acted due to dispositional factors. This was a confirmation of the original question asked by the researchers.

Actor-Observer Affect Examined with Young Drivers

Introduction

Importance of the Study

People have a bias towards themselves. This should not be a surprise to anyone because a great deal of research has brought out this personal bias. The actor-observer effect is understood as the method a person uses to understand their own actions and those of others. The bias is demonstrated by the empirical fact that people tend to believe that their own behavior is situational while the behavior of others is personal or dispositional. This means that the individual who is the actor believes that they react to the circumstances presented to them because of the particular situation that they are in. Whereas, when that same individual is asked to observe another's behavior, while they are in the same situation, will ascribe the action chosen to a personal characteristic rather than to the situation with which they are presented.

Purpose

The researchers state that "Attributions for risky driving behavior would seem to potentially involve many of the conditions under which the actor-observer effect appears" (808). This means that risky driving is both a socially undesirable action and the questions in the survey are being asked of a society that is prone to making "dispositional attributions" (808). Thus, the purpose of the study is to discover if the actor-observer effect will show up stronger if the action being studied contains the attributions that have been shown to make it stronger in the past. This is not a study which is concerned with how young people view risky driving behavior, either their own or that of their peers, but it does concern the strength of the actor-observer effect.

Materials and Methods

The participants in the study were "70 (39 males and 31 females) Year 12 (aged 16 to 17 years) students from a coeducational high school in Auckland" (811). This group was chosen to demonstrate one o the premises of the study which is that teens are much more likely to have a self-other bias. All of the participants were drivers in good standing.

The tool used for this study was a questionnaire that had questions that assessed the students' driving attitudes, risk perception, and the perceived social desirability of certain actions (811). The specific questions asked the students whether they thought their driving actions could be considered risky, and how often they drive that way. A follow up question asked them to make the same judgment of their friends' driving acuity or lack thereof. The students were invited to fill out the questionnaire, then handed it back to the researcher without any discussion.

Since the responses to the questions were open-ended, they had to be coded in some way. The researchers separated the responses from the students, these were then broken down into six categories: fun, adrenalin buzz; showing off/acting cool; angry, upset or impatient; not paying attention/inexperience; in a hurry/late; peer pressure (812). The responses were then entered by the two researchers, and, if there was a disagreement, this was mediated by a third, impartial, researcher. In this way, the responses were given interrater reliability. The responses were also coded into situational or dispositional by relating the questions back to 51 of the original respondents two months later and seeing what their belief was as to the intent of the respondent. This data, along with that of the researchers, was used to code the responses into the two categories. This follow up was done with a Likert scale to see where the response likely fell. Four of the categories were judged dispositional and two were seen as situational.

Results

* Insert Mean/SD table from the article here.

The mean/standard deviation table shows the two categories, situational and dispositional, and whether the observer believed that these correlated to their friends or to themselves. The researchers stated that the means that they received were in the range that they expected. As can be seen from the table, the observer rated themselves more toward the situational attribution than to the dispositional. However, the difference seems to be relatively small across the board with the means only ranging from 2.46 to 2.89. The observer actually did see their own actions as slightly dispositional. However, the means for the friends behavior is seen as dispositional to a much greater degree as the researchers believed that it would be. The not situational mean of 3.24, to the not dispositional mean of 2.50 is a large variance.

For the table, a 2X2 between factor ANOVA was completed using SPSS version 18 on the dependent variable. This analysis found that there was a significant main effect for DRIVING (F (1,69) = 23.88, p>.001) because of the significance of the interaction effect. The observers believed that their friends did exhibit more risky behaviors than they did to a significant extent.

Discussion

This article examined whether youthful drives believed that they exhibited more risky driving behaviors than their peers or not. The actor-observer effect would be satisfied if the observers did believe that there was a difference between their own actions and those of others. This self-others bias was supposed to be greater in this case because of the social undesirability of the attribute and the belief that self has a better excuse because of the situation than others have because of their personal issues. The results revealed that the hypothesis was correct.

The youth thought, in general, that there were excuses for their own behaviors because they were either late, under some sort of peer pressure, or some other situationally-related reason under which they were under. They also believed that the same risky behavior was the result of some dispositional attribute in friends, such as wanting to show off, more often than not. These results confirm that given a highly socially unacceptable premise the actor-observer effect does show up more starkly than it does in other studies that have a more ambiguous or more socially acceptable question. The research suggests that "young drivers make markedly different attributions for their friends' risky driving than for their own risky driving and that they consider themselves to engage in less risky driving than their friends" (821). This, again, supports the main point.