The defensive attribution hypothesis (or defensive attribution bias) is a social psychological term from the attributional approach referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending the individual from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. Commonly, defensive attributions are made when individuals witness or learns of a mishap happening to another person. In these situations, attributions of responsibility to the victim or harm-doer for the mishap will depend upon the severity of the outcomes of the mishap and the level of personal and situational similarity between the individual and victim. More responsibility will be attributed to the harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe, and as personal or situational similarity decreases.
Holding the victim or harm-does more responsible allows the individual to believe that the mishap was controllable and thus, the individual is able to prevent suffering the same mishap in the future.[1] Decreasing attributions of responsibility as similarity increases allows the individual to proactively lay the ground work to protect their own self-esteem. That is, if they would suffer the mishap themselves, they can see themselves as not blameworthy.[2]
The use of defensive attributions is consider a bias because an individual will change their beliefs about a situation based upon motivation to protect their self-esteem rather than being based upon the characteristics of the situation (p. 112).[2]
The original mention of defensive attributions occurred in 1970 in a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article by Kelly Shaver. Shaver eloquently describes the bias as caused by the “perceiver's need to protect himself from capricious negative outcomes (p. 112).” These outcomes, according to Shaver, are more psychological than tangible; “avoidance of blame for an accidental occurrence is more important than avoidance of the outcome itself. (p. 112)."[2] While Shaver coined the term, he based his article on two prior articles by Elaine Walster (1966, & 1967).
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The basis of the defensive attribution bias was developed in studies conducted by Elaine Walster and Kelly Shaver. Walster (1966) hypothesized that as the consequences for an accident increase so do the likelihood of an individual to assign blame to the harm-doer, and presented experimental evidence to support this hypothesis. Walster assumes, when consequences are mild, that it is easy to feel sympathy for a victim or harm-doer and not blame them; but as the severity of the consequences increase, it becomes more unpleasant to believe that such a misfortune could happen to anyone and attributing responsibility helps an individual manage this emotional reaction.[1]
Shaver (1970) recognized that Walster had identified an important concept but did not fully recognize it. Walster(1966) stated that the defensive attribution bias would occur in response to concerns that the accident could befall the perceiver. Thus, the similarity of the perceiver to the victim – in terms of situational similarity or personality similarity – is required for the defensive attributional bias to be activated. Shaver (1970) manipulated the severity of consequences and personal similarity of the target person described in his experiments to his research participants and found support for the defensive attribution bias: as personal similarity increased attributions of responsibility decreased.
The foundational research of Walster (1966) and Shaver (1970) was not as clear-cut as presented above. In a follow up study, Walster (1967) was unable to replicate her findings in two separate experiments. Shaver (1970) found a small negative relationship between the severity of the consequences and the responsibility attributed to the harm-doer.
Clarity to this confusion came in 1981 when Burger [3] published a meta-analysis of 22 published studies on the defensive attribution hypothesis. First, he concluded that there is evidence to suggest that Walster’s hypothesized positive relationship between severity and attributions of responsibility exist. However, the evidence suggests that this relationship, while positive as Walster predicted, was moderate to weak in terms of the strength of the relationship. And secondly, he concluded that there is strong evidence to support Shaver’s hypothesized negative relationship between similarity and responsibility.
The defensive attribution hypothesis has found many applied uses, especially in regards to sexual assault blame attributions.
Researchers examining how individuals make blame attributions to victims (women who are rape victims) and harm-doers (rapists) in sexual assault situations have consistently found that male research participants blamed rapists less than female research participants did, and that male research participants blamed rape victims more than female research participants did.[4] These findings support Shaver’s similarity-responsibility hypothesis: male participants, who are personally similar to (male) rapists, blame rapists less than female participants who are dissimilar to rapists. On the other hand, female participants, who are personally similar to (female) rape victims, blame the victims less than male participants.