Usually when you come home from work, you and your romantic partner will hug each other. Imagine that they don't give you a hug when you get back today, how will you explain this?
People Interpret Things in Different Ways
Humans are amazing. We interpret others' behaviors and the causes of events (another term is attribution) in our own style. Individual differences in attributions in social situations exist widely, with some people being more negative and even hostile, some people being more positive and benign.
Are Attributions Always Correct?
Unfortunately, no. Attributions do NOT always accurately reflect reality. Some people are more likely to consistently make certain attributions (it has been known as attribution bias). One common category of attribution bias is negative attribution bias, which refers to negative biases when interpreting social information and distorted judgments in which individuals attribute hostility and blame to others' behaviors.
Who Will Affect Your Attribution Style?
Interestingly, the people close to us can have a significant influence on the way we make attributions. Particularly, the affectional bond between individuals and significant others (from parents in childhood to romantic partners in adulthood) plays an important role in shaping a person's attribution styles in social interactions. The affectional bond is called attachment.
Are There Different Types of Attachment?
Yes! Some attachment is secure but some is insecure. Let's see what people will say!
- Secure people: "I don't worry about being abandoned or getting too close to my partner."
- Anxiously insecure people: "I want to be extremely emotionally close, but I worry that they may abandon me."
- Avoidantly insecure people: "I prefer not to depend on others or have them depend on me."
These are typical thoughts of different attachment types.
Anxious individuals are hyper-sensitive to rejection and they extremely need emotional closeness, but they are always worried about being abandoned by their partners. It's different in avoidance—they prefer to suppress emotions and show more social withdrawal. These two types are both insecure. In contrast, secure individuals regulate emotions optimally and tend to seek support and rely on others when needed, seeing the self as worthy of love and others as trustworthy and available to them.
Insecure Attachment Will Affect Your Attribution Style
My colleagues and I did a large statistical review of all the studies we could find on the relationship between attachment style and negative attribution bias (based on 8,727 participants from North America, Europe, and the Middle East). As we expected, negative attribution bias was associated with attachment insecurity overall, and with attachment anxiety and avoidance looked at separately. In other words, attachment insecurity increased the likelihood that a person tended to have negative attribution biases. This was true for both women and men, and among children, adolescents, and adults.
Why does this happen? According to theory, individuals with insecure attachment have negative views of the self, others, and social relationships, and are more likely to perceive ambiguous information in an aggressive, biased, or negative way. Conversely, secure attachment is characterized by positive views of self, others, and social relationships, and this is associated with less biased, more accurate responses and more positive attributions of others' intentions.
The Associations with Real Life
In childhood, the link between insecure attachment and negative attribution bias plays an important role in aggression in peers, including physical aggression and relationship aggression among children and adolescents. In adulthood, the link between adult insecure attachment and negative attribution bias is associated with lower relationship satisfaction, negative couple communication, or poor marital adjustment. Thus, increasing security in important relationships—whether between parents and children or between romantic partners—can have a meaningful effect on how a person interprets other people's behavior.
For Further Reading
Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children's social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74-101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
Dodge, K. A., Malone, P. S., Lansford, J. E., Sorbring, E., Skinner, A. T., Tapanya, S., ... & Pastorelli, C. (2015). Hostile attributional bias and aggressive behavior in global context. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(30), 9310-9315. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418572112
Li, D., Carnelley, K. B., & Rowe, A. C. (2022). Insecure attachment orientation in adults and children and negative attribution bias: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. doi.org/10.1177/01461672221117690.
Danyang Li is a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Bristol. She studies the ways in which attribution bias influences romantic relationships and other social behaviors.
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