Perceptions of situational variability: Redefining its role in trait attributions

A basic difference between the perspectives of actors and observers is the amount of information each has to make attributional inferences. Jones and Nisbett (1971) suggested these informational differences lead to an inverse relationship between trait and situational attributions, such that better-known others receive more situational attributions while lesser-known others receive more trait attributions. We hypothesized that attributors typically ignore their perceptions of situational variability when constructing their trait attributions as these perceptions are biased by the number of available observations. Subjects were given two or eight samples of behavior for a series of different targets and asked to independently make both trait and situational attributions. Subjects with access to eight observations perceived more behavioral variability and made more trait attributions than those with access to two observations. Furthermore, attributors' perceptions of situational variability were more closely related to measures of biased "sample variances" than to measures of "estimated population variances."