Human social interaction is fundamentally mediated by our intuitive inferences regarding the internal states, beliefs, and dispositions of those around us. However, social perceivers routinely circumvent the cognitively demanding task of deciphering others by projecting their own mental landscapes outward, giving rise to the pervasive cognitive distortion known as assumed similarity bias. Understanding how and why individuals presume interpersonal congruence illuminates the complex mechanics of empathy, prejudice, conflict resolution, and collaborative decision-making.
Assumed Similarity Bias
1. Concise Definition
Assumed similarity bias refers to the systematic cognitive tendency wherein an individual perceives another person or social group as sharing their own attitudes, personality traits, preferences, moral judgments, and behavioral proclivities, irrespective of empirical evidence supporting such congruence. In psychological science, it denotes a perceptual distortion where the subjective self serves as an uncritical heuristic template for modeling the psychology of target social actors.
This cognitive distortion operates across diverse evaluative domains, ranging from trivial stylistic choices and mundane recreational preferences to deeply entrenched political ideologies and core moral imperatives. Rather than emerging solely from rational deliberation, assumed similarity represents a default mode of intuitive mental modeling that bridges social ambiguity by substituting self-knowledge in place of unknown social data.
While assumed similarity can facilitate interpersonal rapport, perceived intimacy, and social cohesion when congruence is genuine, it frequently precipitates communication failures, diagnostic errors in clinical settings, and interpersonal friction when significant disparities between the perceiver and the target are obscured.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term assumed similarity originated in mid-twentieth-century American psychological literature, developing out of psychometric investigations into interpersonal perception, social judgment, and the measurement of empathy. The constituent lexeme assumed traces its lineage to the Latin verb assūmere, formed by the prefix ad- (meaning ‘toward’ or ‘to’) and sūmere (meaning ‘to take up’, ‘adopt’, or ‘presume without direct proof’). In vernacular and scientific usage, it designates a proposition taken for granted as true prior to definitive empirical demonstration.
The companion noun similarity stems from the Middle English similitude and the classical Latin similis, meaning ‘like’, ‘resembling’, or ‘of the same nature’. In philosophical and semantic traditions, similarity implies a relation of partial or total correspondence between distinct entities across specified dimensional attributes.
When psychometrician Lee Cronbach and social psychologists in the 1950s operationalized the study of interpersonal accuracy, they formally coupled these lexical roots into the construct of “assumed similarity” to isolate an observer’s subjective projection of their own profile onto others from genuine, veridical concordance, establishing it as a cornerstone concept in quantitative social perception.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
Pronunciation: The standard International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representation is /əˈsjuːmd ˌsɪməˈlærəti ˈbaɪəs/ in British Received Pronunciation, and /əˈsuːmd ˌsɪməˈlɛrəti ˈbaɪəs/ in General American English.
Grammatical Form: Grammatically, assumed similarity bias operates as a compound noun phrase. The participial adjective assumed modifies the abstract nominal similarity, which in turn acts as a noun adjunct qualifying the primary head noun bias. In scientific and clinical literature, the term frequently appears as a mass or non-count noun (e.g., “the observer exhibited significant assumed similarity bias”), though it may also be instantiated in countable contexts when contrasting particular empirical manifestations.
Related morphological derivations include the verbal phrase to assume similarity, the operationalized metric assumed similarity score, and the adjectival descriptor assumed-similar, utilized when categorizing experimental dyads or targets who are perceived through this distortive inferential lens.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
At its core, assumed similarity bias represents a foundational manifestation of egocentric cognitive processing. Human social cognition requires continuous, high-speed inferences regarding the hidden mental states of conspecifics—a theoretical capacity broadly termed mentalizing or theory of mind. Because another individual’s phenomenological experiences, beliefs, and emotional valences are inherently unobservable, the perceiver faces an ill-structured cognitive problem characterized by incomplete social data. To resolve this epistemic gap, human cognitive architecture relies heavily on heuristics, employing self-referential simulation as an anchor point.
The self functions as the richest, most accessible, and most chronically activated knowledge structure within human semantic and autobiographical memory. Consequently, when an individual attempts to evaluate how a coworker might respond to corporate restructuring, or whether a partner shares a nuanced ethical conviction, the cognitive system activates self-descriptive representations first. Unless deliberate cognitive resources are recruited to adjust for perceived demographic, ideological, or temperamental divergences, these self-referent representations are projected directly onto the mental representation of the other person.
Crucially, the scope of assumed similarity extends beyond explicit conscious declarations; it operates implicitly across nonverbal expectations, affective forecasts, and interpersonal attributions. Perceivers do not merely declare that another person shares their views; they organize their entire communicative behavior, conversational subtext, and behavioral coordination around this false consensus. The boundary conditions of the bias depend largely on target categorization: perceived in-group status, emotional affinity, and physical attractiveness reliably elevate assumed similarity, whereas explicit out-group classification, adversarial dynamics, or conspicuous ideological opposition typically suppress the effect or induce its inverse, known as contrastive dissimilarity.
Furthermore, assumed similarity bias must be conceptually untangled from actual interpersonal concordance. True congruence reflects shared variance attributable to real-world commonalities such as shared culture, demographic overlap, and mutual socialization. Assumed similarity reflects the variance within the observer’s subjective rating of the target that is predicted exclusively by the observer’s self-ratings, over and above any veridical alignment between the two actors. Thus, an individual may exhibit profound assumed similarity toward a target with whom they possess virtually zero objective compatibility.
5. Historical Development
The academic lineage of assumed similarity traces back to classical psychoanalytic theory, most notably Sigmund Freud’s early twentieth-century formulation of psychological projection. Freud conceptualized projection primarily as a defensive mechanism whereby unacceptable unconscious impulses, aggressive drives, and guilt-inducing wishes are repudiated by attributing them to external figures. However, as experimental psychology shifted toward social cognitive paradigms in the mid-twentieth century, researchers began stripping the construct of its solely neurotic or defensive connotations, framing it as a generalized cognitive process typical of normative perception.
A critical methodological revolution occurred in 1955 with the publication of Lee Cronbach’s seminal critique, Processes Affecting Scores on ‘Understanding of Others’ and ‘Assumed Similarity’. Before Cronbach’s intervention, social and clinical psychologists measured empathy and interpersonal perceptual accuracy by simply calculating the difference score between a perceiver’s rating of a target and the target’s self-rating. Cronbach mathematically demonstrated that these raw accuracy indices were heavily confounded by artifactual components, particularly “elevation,” “differential elevation,” “stereotype accuracy,” and “assumed similarity.” He illustrated that an observer could achieve an artificially high “accuracy” score simply by projecting their own traits onto a target who coincidentally resembled them, without engaging in any genuine perceptual discrimination.
Cronbach’s methodological decomposition led to decades of refined psychometric research throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During this era, social psychologist Donald T. Campbell and his contemporaries investigated how interpersonal attraction and assumed similarity formed a bidirectional feedback loop, showing that people not only like those whom they assume to be similar, but systematically attribute their own characteristics to those they find likable. In 1977, Lee Ross and colleagues broadened this paradigm by formalizing the false consensus effect, establishing that people consistently overestimate the relative commonality of their own behaviors, beliefs, and behavioral decisions within the broader population.
In the 1990s and 2000s, David A. Kenny revolutionized interpersonal perception research by introducing the Social Relations Model (SRM). The SRM provided sophisticated statistical methodologies to isolate perceiver variance, target variance, and relationship-specific dyadic variance, allowing assumed similarity to be modeled precisely as an individual-difference perceptual tendency independent of target characteristics. In contemporary cognitive neuroscience, functional neuroimaging investigations have explored the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), demonstrating shared neural substrates during self-evaluation and the evaluation of similar, familiar others, providing a biological foundation for assumed similarity.
6. Theoretical Foundations
The phenomenon of assumed similarity is illuminated by multiple intersecting theoretical frameworks spanning social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology. The primary explanatory paradigms include:
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Formulated within behavioral economics and cognitive psychology by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the anchoring-and-adjustment paradigm posits that human judgment under uncertainty begins with an initial accessible value (the anchor), followed by sequential adjustments to incorporate target-specific information. In social perception, the perceiver’s own internal mental state serves as the immediate cognitive anchor. Because cognitive adjustment requires substantial executive effort, working memory capacity, and time, it is frequently incomplete, leaving the terminal estimate heavily biased toward the initial self-anchor.
Simulation Theory: Within the philosophy of mind and neurocognitive theory, simulation theory posits that social perceivers comprehend the minds of others not by querying a detached, rule-based database of human behavior (as argued by rival “Theory-Theory” frameworks), but by using their own cognitive and emotional machinery as an offline model. An individual mentally simulates the target’s circumstances using their own perceptual systems, mapping the output directly onto the observed entity. While computationally efficient, simulation theory explicitly predicts assumed similarity as an inevitable systematic vulnerability whenever the target’s psychological constitution differs from that of the simulating observer.
Social Identity and Self-Categorization Theories: Developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, self-categorization theory explains assumed similarity through the lens of group dynamics. When an individual categorizes another person as an in-group member, depersonalization processes occur: both the self and the other are mentally assimilated into the collective in-group prototype. Consequently, assumed similarity surges when interacting with in-group targets, serving to reinforce social cohesion, reciprocal altruism, and collective identity, whereas out-group targets undergo deliberate differentiation.
Social Projection and Information Availability: Contemporary models advanced by Joachim Krueger emphasize that assumed similarity is not necessarily irrational from a Bayesian perspective. Given that the self is the single data point an individual observes with complete intimacy and temporal stability, it is mathematically defensible for a rational observer to use the self as a baseline prior probability distribution when encountering an ambiguous target, provided no superior population statistics are readily available.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
Assumed similarity bias is not a monolithic construct; it comprises distinct conceptual dimensions, operational variants, and psychological channels:
- Trait-Based Assumed Similarity: The projection of broad, enduring personality dimensions (such as the Big Five personality traits—Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) onto a target, expecting their baseline disposition to mirror one’s own.
- Attitudinal Assumed Similarity: The assumption that others share one’s socio-political opinions, moral valuations, aesthetic judgments, or ideological affiliations, frequently resulting in conversational over-disclosure.
- Affective and Emotional Assumed Similarity: The egocentric projection of one’s immediate visceral, somatic, or emotional states onto others, such as assuming that a presentation topic one finds exhilarating is equally fascinating to a disengaged audience.
- Perceiver-Level (Generalized) Assumed Similarity: A stable, cross-situational individual-difference trait wherein a particular perceiver exhibits a chronic tendency to view virtually all social targets as highly similar to themselves, regardless of target variation.
- Dyad-Specific (Relationship-Level) Assumed Similarity: Variance in assumed similarity that emerges exclusively within specific interpersonal relationships, driven by emotional intimacy, perceived kinship, or romantic attachment, exceeding the perceiver’s generalized baseline.
- Direct vs. Indirect Assumed Similarity: Direct assumed similarity entails explicitly rating a target as identical to oneself on an absolute scale, whereas indirect assumed similarity is psychometrically derived by correlating separate, independent ratings of the self and the target across a battery of items.
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
To understand how assumed similarity bias manifests in daily human life, consider the following illustrative ecological scenarios:
The Organizational Negotiation: In a high-stakes corporate negotiation, an executive who possesses high intrinsic risk tolerance and an analytical, task-oriented communication style assumes that their counterpart operates from identical priorities. The executive prepares a proposal centered on aggressive speculative gains, dismissing conservative contingency protections. Unbeknownst to the executive, the counterpart is deeply risk-averse and prioritizes organizational continuity and employee retention. Blinded by assumed similarity, the executive misinterprets the counterpart’s deliberate, cautious inquiries as manipulative bargaining tactics, resulting in an avoidable impasse.
Interpersonal Relationships and Marital Conflict: Within an intimate partnership, Partner A, who requires solitude and quiet introspection to recover from acute sensory fatigue, presumes that Partner B requires the exact same restorative mechanism following a grueling workday. Consequently, Partner A isolates Partner B, leaving the room and withholding conversational contact. However, Partner B possesses an extraverted coping architecture that relies upon verbal debriefing, physical proximity, and active dialogue to decompress. Partner B interprets Partner A’s withdrawal as punitive emotional rejection, escalating relational conflict from an empathetic gesture distorted by assumed similarity.
The Educational Environment: A university professor with a natural pedagogical preference for abstract, highly theoretical paradigms assumes that undergraduate students will intuit foundational statistics most effectively through formal mathematical proofs rather than applied visual examples. Because the abstract methodology is self-evident and satisfying to the professor, the instructor projects this cognitive preference onto the classroom, failing to diagnose why students are struggling until course evaluations highlight a profound pedagogical disconnect.
9. Measurement & Assessment
The empirical assessment of assumed similarity bias requires specialized psychometric methodologies designed to untangle genuine congruence from egocentric projection. The historical error identified by Cronbach led to the development of several rigorous quantitative protocols:
Profile Similarity Metric: The traditional approach involves administering identical multi-item inventories (e.g., assessing values, personality traits, or workplace behaviors) under two distinct experimental instructions: first, “Rate yourself on these dimensions,” and second, “Rate how Target X would respond to these dimensions.” The researcher calculates a within-person correlation coefficient (Pearson r or intra-class correlation) between the self-profile vector and the target-profile vector. A positive correlation indicates assumed similarity.
Kenny’s Social Relations Model (SRM): In contemporary interpersonal perception research, researchers use round-robin or block-dyadic designs where multiple participants rate both themselves and every other member of the group. Using structural equation modeling and variance partitioning, the Social Relations Model isolates:
- Perceiver Effect: How a perceiver generally views others (e.g., viewing others as consistently conscientiousness).
- Target Effect: How a target is consistently viewed by others (e.g., being universally recognized as extraverted).
- Relationship Effect: The unique dyadic perception above and beyond perceiver and target baseline tendencies.
- Assumed Similarity Variance: The precise covariance between an individual’s unique self-perception and their unique perception of specific partners, adjusted for actual congruence and stereotypical normative profiles.
Dyadic Interaction Paradigms: In behavioral laboratories, assumed similarity is frequently measured by recording spontaneous interaction tasks (e.g., the Ickes Unstructured Dyadic Interaction Paradigm). Observers continuously rate the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of their conversational partner, which are subsequently juxtaposed with the partner’s actual recorded stream of consciousness to calculate accuracy versus egocentric intrusion.
10. Applications & Practical Significance
Assumed similarity bias exerts profound systemic consequences across diverse professional and institutional domains:
Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy: Mental health clinicians are trained to maintain empathetic attunement with patients; however, assumed similarity represents a severe countertransference hazard. If a therapist assumes that a client shares their cognitive schema, cultural values, or affective coping strategies, the therapist may misattribute clinical symptoms, establish incongruent treatment goals, or misunderstand the patient’s phenomenological distress. Unchecked assumed similarity in therapy can compromise the therapeutic alliance, particularly across socioeconomic and racial divides.
Human Resource Management and Leadership: In corporate performance appraisals, managers routinely succumb to assumed similarity bias, evaluating subordinates who possess similar personality profiles, working rhythms, and communication preferences more favorably than those with divergent behavioral traits. This evaluative bias directly undermines objective meritocracy, skewing succession planning, promotion paths, and compensation distributions. Conversely, effective leadership training trains executives to acknowledge their own cognitive profile as merely one operational style among many, actively mitigating projection.
Diplomacy and Strategic Intelligence: In geopolitical analysis, assumed similarity is often termed “mirror-imaging.” Intelligence analysts who assume foreign state actors operate under identical institutional logic, ethical constraints, and rational-choice calculus routinely miscalculate international crises. Historic intelligence failures, such as underestimating ideological resistance or misinterpreting strategic brinkmanship, frequently trace back to analysts projecting their own institutional frameworks onto disparate foreign leadership structures.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
Decades of empirical investigation have established the boundary conditions, neurobiological correlates, and social moderators of assumed similarity bias:
The Influence of In-Group Favoritism: Empirical studies by social psychologists such as Joachim Krueger and colleagues have demonstrated that assumed similarity is heavily moderated by social categorization. Perceivers project their attitudes and behavioral intentions onto in-group targets at rates approaching three to four times the magnitude observed with out-group targets. When evaluating an out-group member, perceivers frequently engage in “contrastive projection,” actively assuming the target possesses beliefs diametrically opposed to their own.
Neuroimaging Correlates: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies conducted by Jason Mitchell and colleagues have provided direct neurobiological evidence for assumed similarity. When participants evaluate the mental states of targets perceived as fundamentally similar to themselves, robust activation is observed in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—a region strongly implicated in self-referential cognition. In contrast, when evaluating targets explicitly characterized as dissimilar, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is recruited instead, suggesting that perceived dissimilarity forces the brain to disengage self-referential simulation and switch to more abstract, effortful semantic analysis.
Relationship Longevity and Satisfaction: Research by Sandra Murray and John Holmes into romantic relationships has yielded a counterintuitive finding: assumed similarity, even when mathematically inaccurate, can serve as a potent protective factor for romantic relationship satisfaction. Couples who perceive greater congruence than objectively exists report higher marital stability, diminished conflict escalation, and greater perceived intimacy. This has been termed the “positive illusion of similarity,” demonstrating that in hedonic interpersonal contexts, subjective projection can sometimes fulfill functional psychological needs even when it diverges from objective reality.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
The manifestations of assumed similarity bias exhibit significant variation across cultural matrices, particularly along the individualism-collectivism spectrum and relational mobility dimensions:
Individualistic Cultures: In individualistic Western societies (e.g., the United States, Western Europe), the self is conceptualized as an independent, autonomous entity characterized by distinctive, stable internal traits. Perceivers in these cultural contexts tend to assume similarity along self-focused dimensions, projecting their specific internal opinions, unique emotional reactions, and idiosyncratic preferences onto others. Because individual autonomy is prized, perceived dissimilarity is often accepted without moral condemnation, except in hyper-polarized political environments.
Collectivistic Cultures: In collectivistic societies (e.g., East Asia, parts of Latin America), where the self is fundamentally interdependent and embedded within relational hierarchies, assumed similarity operates through institutional and normative roles. Individuals are far less likely to project unique, idiosyncratic personal preferences onto others. Instead, assumed similarity is directed toward collective normative expectations: perceivers assume that group members share the same adherence to filial duty, social harmony, and institutional obligation. However, the psychological boundary between the in-group and the out-group is markedly sharper in collectivistic settings, meaning that assumed similarity toward out-group members is often heavily suppressed.
Linguistic Modulations: The linguistic structure of a culture also modulates self-referential projection. Languages that emphasize context-dependent honorifics and relational pronouns compel speakers to continuously represent the social status and perspective of their interlocutor, cognitively inhibiting egocentric projection. Conversely, languages with robust, non-relational first-person singular pronouns allow the cognitive self-anchor to remain chronically accessible, subtly facilitating assumed similarity.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
Despite its widespread recognition, assumed similarity bias remains a focus of ongoing methodological controversies and conceptual debates within psychological science:
The Rationality Debate (Bayesian Priors): A prominent theoretical controversy concerns whether assumed similarity constitutes an irrational cognitive distortion or an optimal rational decision-making strategy under uncertainty. Cognitive psychologists arguing from a Bayesian perspective, such as Robyn Dawes and Joachim Krueger, contend that using oneself as a sample of size one ($N=1$) is mathematically sound when an observer has no other empirical data about a population. From this perspective, labeling the phenomenon a “bias” inappropriately pathologizes an efficient and statistically coherent inductive heuristic.
Methodological Confounds in Difference Scores: Decades after Lee Cronbach’s foundational paper, researchers continue to debate the measurement artifacts inherent in studying assumed similarity. High correlation between self-ratings and target-ratings can frequently be driven by normative stereotypes rather than idiosyncratic projection. For example, if a perceiver and a target both rate themselves as highly conscientious simply because conscientious behavior is universally socially desirable, traditional statistical models may erroneously identify assumed similarity when the perceiver is merely attributing universally desirable characteristics to a fellow human being.
The Egocentric Illusion vs. Empathetic Accuracy Paradox: A tension persists between the assumed similarity literature and research on empathetic accuracy. While interpersonal perception research emphasizes that people are heavily egocentric and chronically project their own traits, developmental and evolutionary psychologists argue that humans are remarkably adept social mentalizers capable of fine-grained perspective-taking. Critics argue that assumed similarity studies often employ artificial, decontextualized laboratory questionnaires that artificially inflate projection by depriving participants of the rich behavioral, nonverbal, and situational cues that facilitate accurate interpersonal discernment in real-world contexts.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
Assumed similarity bias is closely connected to, but distinct from, several other cognitive biases and interpersonal phenomena:
- False Consensus Effect: A specialized manifestation of social projection focused specifically on estimating the prevalence of one’s own beliefs, behaviors, and choices within a broad, generalized population. Whereas assumed similarity often targets specific individuals or dyads, the false consensus effect involves aggregate percentage estimates across an entire demographic.
- Psychological Projection: A psychodynamic defense mechanism wherein unwanted, morally threatening, or anxiety-provoking internal impulses are unconsciously attributed to others to protect self-esteem. Assumed similarity is a broader, normative cognitive heuristic that applies equally to positive, neutral, and trivial traits without defensive motivation.
- In-Group Favoritism: The preferential allocation of trust, resources, and positive evaluations to members of one’s own social group. While in-group favoritism frequently co-occurs with assumed similarity, the former denotes an evaluative preference, whereas the latter describes an informational, descriptive assumption of psychological congruence.
- Mirror-Imaging: An analytical vulnerability, predominantly identified within political science and intelligence analysis, wherein an analyst assumes that foreign adversaries share the same operational frameworks, institutional constraints, and strategic values as their own government.
- Empathetic Accuracy: The objective, veridical ability to accurately infer another individual’s specific thoughts, emotions, and internal states. Empathetic accuracy represents objective perceptual success, whereas assumed similarity describes an egocentric inferential process that may inadvertently match or completely undermine genuine accuracy.
15. Summary / Key Takeaways
Assumed similarity bias constitutes an endemic cognitive tendency whereby individuals use their own personality, values, and emotional states as default templates for understanding others. First formalized psychometrically by Lee Cronbach in 1955, the construct has evolved from an assumed measurement artifact into an extensively documented social cognitive phenomenon grounded in simulation theory and cognitive heuristics.
The bias is amplified by perceived in-group status, relational intimacy, and cognitive load, and its neurological signature is reflected in shared prefrontal cortical activation during self- and other-evaluations. While it facilitates romantic satisfaction and social bonding in situations of actual congruence, it creates systemic blind spots in cross-cultural diplomacy, corporate appraisal, pedagogical design, and clinical diagnosis.
Ultimately, recognizing the power of assumed similarity reveals that human empathy is fundamentally a double-edged sword: the very cognitive mechanisms that permit us to intuitively connect with others can systematically blind us to their unique individuality. Overcoming this pervasive distortion requires the deliberate suspension of our own egocentric reference points, replacing reflexive projection with humble, evidence-based inquiry.
References
- Campbell, D. T. (1955). The informant in quantitative study of social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 60(4), 339–342.
- Cronbach, L. J. (1955). Processes affecting scores on “understanding of others” and “assumed similarity.” Psychological Bulletin, 52(3), 177–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044919
- Kenny, D. A. (1994). Interpersonal perception: A social relations analysis. Guilford Press.
- Krueger, J. I. (2000). The projective perception of the social world: A building block of social comparison and social categorization. The Psychology of Social Comparison, 323–351.
- Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to knowledge about like-minded and unlike-minded others. Neuron, 50(4), 655–663. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2006.04.017
- Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., Bellavia, G., & Griffin, D. W. (2002). Self-esteem and the quest for connection: The promise and perils of looking for love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 563–577. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.4.563
- Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-X