The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [142]
Attribution Bias
Our beliefs are very much grounded in how we attribute the causal explanations for them, and this leads to a fundamental attribution bias, or the tendency to attribute different causes for our own beliefs and actions than that of others. There are several types of attribution bias.14 There is a situational attribution bias, in which we identify the cause of someone’s belief or behavior in the environment (“her success is a result of luck, circumstance, and having connections”) and a dispositional attribution bias, in which we identify the cause of someone’s belief or behavior in the person as an enduring personal trait (“her success is due to her intelligence, creativity, and hard work”). And, thanks to the self-serving bias, we naturally attribute our own success to a positive disposition (“I am hardworking, intelligent, and creative”) and we attribute others’ success to a lucky situation (“he is successful because of circumstance and family connections”).15 The attribution bias is a form of personal spin-doctoring.
My colleague Frank Sulloway and I discovered another form of attribution bias in a research project that we conducted several years ago. Frank and I wanted to know why people believe in God, so we polled ten thousand random Americans. In addition to exploring various demographic and sociological variables, we also directly asked subjects in an essay question why they believed in God and why they thought others believe in God. The top two reasons that people gave for why they believed in God were “the good design of the universe” and “the experience of God in everyday life.” Interestingly, and tellingly, when subjects were asked why they thought other people believed in God, these two answers dropped to sixth and third place, respectively, and the two most common reasons given were that belief is “comforting” and “fear of death.”16 These answers revealed a sharp distinction between an intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, and an emotional attribution bias, in which people see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven.
You can see this attribution bias in political as well as religious beliefs. For example, on the issue of gun control, you will hear someone attribute their own position to reasoned intellectual choice (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases” or “I’m against gun control because studies show that more guns means less crime”), and attribute the other person’s opinion on the same subject to emotional need (“He is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to identify with the victim” or “He is against gun control because he’s a heartless conservative who needs to feel emboldened by a weapon”).17 This was, in fact, what political scientists Lisa Farwell and Bernard Weiner discovered in their study on the attribution bias in political attitudes, with conservatives justifying their beliefs with rational arguments but accusing political liberals of being “bleeding hearts”; liberals, in turn, offered intellectual justifications for their positions, while accusing conservatives of being “heartless.”18
The attribution bias of perceiving intellectual reasons for belief as superior to emotional reasons appears to be a manifestation of a broader form of self-serving bias through which people slant their perceptions of the world, especially the social world, in their favor.
Sunk-Cost Bias
Leo Tolstoy, one of the deepest thinkers on the human condition in the history of literature, made this observation on the power of deeply held and complexly entwined beliefs: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious