Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A parallel distributed processing model was used to simulate a central bias in social reasoning, the correspondence bias (Jones & Harris, 1967). This bias is the tendency to overattribute social behavior to the actor's personality and to underestimate the impact of situations. Simulations indicate that the extent of the correspondence bias can be understood as due to differences in the accessibility of explanatory concepts and the strength of causal links between potential explanations and behavior.