Perspective Differences

Perspective Differences

The coordination of the norms that apply to an effect and to a proposed cause is illustrated in an example discussed by the legal philosophers Hart and Honore in their classic book, Causation in the Law (1959c, p. 33):

A woman married to a man who suffers from an ulcerated condition of the stomach might identify eating parsnips as the cause of his indigestion. The doctor might identify the ulcerated condition as the cause and the meal as a mere occasion.

The causes chosen by his wife and by the physician refer to the same event, but explain different effects. It is evident from her answer that the wife is concerned with an exception to an intrapersonal norm: “Why does he have indigestion today but not on other days?” The physician, however, is concerned with an interpersonal norm: “Why does this patient suffer from indigestion when others do not?” The difference could reflect the role of availability in the recruitment of norm elements: The wife is likely to retrieve many memories of recent days on which her husband, although known to have an ulcer, did not suffer indigestion. These memories, which resemble the present occasion in most respects, define a norm for it. The physician, of course, is unlikely to have had the same amount of exposure to the patient. According to the rule that coordinates causes to effects (and explanations to questions), the wife chooses as a cause a property that distinguishes this particular day from other days, and the physician selects a feature that distinguishes this patient from other patients.

The situational attribution made by the wife and the dispositional attribution made by the physician in Hart and Honore’s example recall the actor–observer differences described by Jones and Nisbett (1971). Actors often explain their actions and attitudes by reference to eliciting properties of situations, whereas observers of the same actions and attitudes attribute them to the actor’s distinctive characteristics. As in Hart and Honore’s example, the situational attribution corresponds to an intrapersonal norm, whereas a dispositional attribution of the same behavior relates it to an interpersonal norm. The intuitions about differential availability that make the indigestion example so compelling apply as well to the case of actors and observers. The question, “Why do you like this particular girl?” appears to favor the recruitment of thoughts about the respondent’s attitude toward other girls. The question, “Why does he like this particular girl?” is more likely to evoke in an observer thoughts of the attitudes of other people toward that girl (Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Maracek, 1973). The different elements that are evoked produce quite different questions: “Why do you like this girl more than most other girls?” and “Why does he like this girl more than most others do?” Each question, in turn, constrains appropriate answers to factors that vary among the elements of the evoked set – other girls for the actor, other individuals for the observer.

The intuitions about the wife–physician example cannot be reduced to the accounts commonly offered for actor–observer differences. The contrast could not be explained by difference of knowledge (Jones & Nisbett, 1971) or of perceptual salience (Arkin & Duval, 1975; Storms, 1973). It is not explained by the distinction between a state of self-consciousness and other states of consciousness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). Nor is it compatible with the hypothesis that the focus of attention is assigned a dominant causal role (Fiske, Kenny, & Taylor, 1982; Ross, 1977; Taylor & Fiske, 1978), inasmuch as the husband surely plays a more focal emotional role for the wife than for the physician.

The hypothesis of the present treatment is that the same event evokes different norms in the wife and the physician of the example, and in actors and observers in other situations. Different descriptions of the same event can appear to provide conflicting answers to the same question, when in fact they are concerned with different questions. This proposal can be subjected to a simple test: Do the observers actually disagree? A negative answer is suggested by several studies. Nisbett et al. (1973) found that subjects easily adopt a typical observer perspective in reporting how their choice of a girlfriend would be described by a close friend. Other data confirm the ability of actors to mimic observers (Miller, Baer, & Schenberg, 1979). However, observers instructed to empathize with one of the participants in a dialogue tend to adopt an actor perspective in explaining that person’s behavior (Regan & Totten, 1975).

In summary, we contend that there are a number of advantages to viewing the process of causal reasoning from the perspective of norms. First, our analysis provides an account of the antecedents of causal reasoning. A search for explanation may occur spontaneously when a significant event violates a norm it evokes (see also Hastie, 1984; Weiner, 1985). Causal search can also be prompted by a question that presupposes a violated norm (see Lalljee & Abelson, 1983). Second, the present approach draws attention to the difficulty of assessing the accuracy of attributers who differ in their perspectives (Funder, 1982; Monson & Snyder, 1977). It is important to distinguish real disagreements in causal attributions from specious disagreements that arise when people answer different questions. Finally, the present analysis identifies a necessary feature of any factor that is considered a possible cause of a surprising event: A cause cannot be a default value of the norm that the consequence has evoked.