Leakage Beliefs and the Correspondence Bias

The correspondence bias involves attributing an actor's behavior to his or her disposition, even when the actor's behavior was constrained. The bias occurs in part because perceivers believe that an actor behaves in ways that reflect both the constraint and the actor's true traits or attitudes, which "leak "from the constrained behavior Students in three studies demonstrated significant leakage beliefs in their expectations for constrained essay writers' true traits and attitudes. The greater an individual's leakage beliefs (in Study 3), the greater that individual's correspondence bias. The results support previous conceptual analyses of the correspondence bias and emphasize the importance of individual differences to understanding the phenomenon.

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