A Reexamination of the Empathic Observers Paradigm for the Study of Divergent Attributions

In previous research using an observer-only paradigm to study the role of information processing in producing divergences in attributions of actors and observers, empathy instructions have been confounded with cues regarding role playing. The present experiment (N = 82 female college students) replicated the study of Gould and Sigall of observers' attributions for an actor's successful or unsuccessful outcomes and included a purified empathy condition that removed role-playing cues. Results show that observers who were given standard empathy instructions to share the actor's feelings and reactions to the situation made dispositional attributions for the actor's successful outcomes and situational attributions for his unsuccessful ones. These differential attributions did not occur in either the nonempathy or purified empathy conditions. The results suggest that the empathie observer paradigm cannot discriminate between the information processing and motivational explanations of the self-serving bias.