Perceptions of Behavioral Consistency: Are People Aware of the Actor-Observer Effect?

Actors view behavior relevant for personality traits as more variable than observers do This study was designed to replicate this actor-observer effect (AOE) in a common-target paradigm, test whether actors, observers, or both are intuitively aware of the AOE, and examine the effects of social projection on people's awareness of the AOE Within each actor-observer pair, subjects described the actor on a series of trait adjectives and rated the consistency of relevant behavior They then predicted the other person's ratings The AOE emerged, and actors, but not observers, were aware of the effect On average, actors correctly predicted that observers rated actors' behavior as more consistent than actors themselves did Correlational analyses showed that actors and observers were equally prone to project their own ratings to their matched partners