Imagine sitting down and watching a popular sitcom- Seinfeld, for instance. If you are like the majority of Americans, you probably imagine to some degree that your favorite characters resemble the true personalities of their actors. Despite the fact that sitcom viewers know that actors are performing written scripts, they often come to believe that the personas presented by an actor or actress is real.
One interview with a group of actors from a well-known soap opera verifies this finding:
"Someone once told me: 'you are so disgusting, you are so nasty, you pushed her from the roof, how did you dare do such a thing?'"
"Someone once wrote 'bitch' on my car. I started to be afraid of opening my door."
Or, on a more positive note:
"There are those people who just run to me and hug me powerfully."
What this phenomenon boils down to is an issue of how human beings attribute the causes of one another's behaviors. When it comes to one's own behaviors, an overwhelming majority of individuals tend to exhibit self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for success and deny blame for failure. When it comes to other people's behavior, there is a wide range of attributions that may take place.
Several theories and principles have been investigated by social psychologists with respect to attribution. For instance, the actor/observer bias applies whenever one individual is observing another’s behavior. The actor will tend to make external attributions for their actions, whereas the observer tends to make internal attributions. A theory by researcher Harold Kelley suggests that people make attributions using the covariation principle. This principle states that people associate a specific cause with a specific behavior if the behavior is present when the cause is present, and absent when the cause is absent. A particularly influential theory focuses only on the observer side of the actor/observer bias, called the fundamental attribution error. This refers to the “the tendency for others to attribute other people’s behavior to internal or dispositional causes and to downplay situational causes.” People often attribute behavior more readily to internal causes because it is more blatantly obvious, and situational aspects are downplayed from the point of the viewer.
Recently, researchers have implicated the fundamental attribution error when investigating the common habit for people to associate characters with their real-life personalities. It is possible that the sitcom itself inadvertently fuels this common mistake, since external environments and situations are usually designed to be unobtrusive to direct attention exclusively towards the characters. Another interesting idea is that the fundamental attribution error is explained by Transportation Theory- the notion that viewers may become so focused and absorbed with the narrative that it begins to take the place of present reality. A study using high school students that manipulated the level of transportation showed that the attribution error was more prevalent when the viewer felt more highly transported into the narrative. Another study showed that the tendency for people to make internal attributions about others is so strong that it prevails even when a viewer watches the same actor play two distinct roles. These findings tie together theories developed with regard to real-life behaviors and an individual’s actions when engaging in audiovisual fiction.
So, if Kramer were to walk in your front door, what do you think he would do? Where might that idea have come from?
Tal-Or, Nurit. and Papirman, Yael. "The Fundamental Attribution Error in Attributing Fictional Figures' Characteristics to the Actors" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY,
Baumeister, R. F., & Bushman, B. J. (2008). Social psychology and human nature. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
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