The Art of Attribution: Are women just bad drivers?

Saransh Ahuja | Ashoka University

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Have you ever experienced a situation in which you, being a female, have had your driving skills targeted by the chauvinistic stereotype of women being ‘bad drivers’ or less skilled drivers? Or have you, as a male, passed any such comments while feeling frustrated in the driver’s seat? Well, even if you haven’t been in any of these situations, it should not come as a surprise to you that such a stereotype does exist and has existed for quite some time now. So much so, the arms of this stereotype have spread so wide that its expression on roads has become a mere platitude. This deep-seated stereotype owes its expression to flawed social perception.

Social perception is an integral part of human existence and human interaction. Social perception has survival value and evolutionary importance. During social interactions or in social situations, our brain cognises and organises the incoming information and attributes certain properties to the estimated source of that information. Fritz Heider, in 1958, developed the Attribution Theory which helped explain a lot about how humans make sense of the world and its social beings. Understanding the process of attribution can give us deep insights into our own thought processes and how we can consciously make better attributions and more rational choices.

Imagine a situation where you are driving your car through a busy market area behind a car which is being driven by a female. Suddenly the car in front of you brakes without any apparent reason and you’re able to push your brake just in time. You somehow avoid a collision and a possible accident. Why did this lady driving the car in front of you brake so suddenly? Attribution theory seeks to answer these “why” questions. It is a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviour. Heider called people amateur scientists as he theorized that all of us put together pieces of information to arrive at the most reasonable explanation for themselves (Weiner, 2008). He suggested a simple dichotomy of the attributional pathways: external attribution and internal attribution. Either of the two pathways lead us to form an impression about the person whose behaviour we’re assessing. 

Internal attribution makes us attribute the behaviour of another person to their disposition, attitude or personality and makes us believe that this person behaved in a certain way because of the kind of person she/he is. You are free to assume that this woman driving her car ahead of you is a terrible driver and she doesn’t know that it is dangerous to brake abruptly in the middle of the road like this. This internal attribution also reinforces the negative stereotype about women in general being careless and less-skilled drivers as compared to men. 

External attribution is when we infer that a person is behaving a certain way because of the situation she/he finds herself/himself in and most people in a similar situation would respond in similar ways. Suppose you get out of your car in an attempt to analyse why the lady driver halted so suddenly and dangerously, only to find a whimpering little puppy crouched a feet away from the bumper of the lady’s car. You learn that the lady had braked abruptly in an attempt to save the little puppy which had jumped onto the street in front of her car. You’re now aware of the situational factor which elicited the behaviour in question and thus, make an external attribution, not discrediting the lady’s driving abilities.

Now, the biggest hurdle in our ‘rational’ processing of information and making an accurate attribution is the Fundamental Attribution Error. It is the tendency of humans to overestimate the dispositional contribution to people’s behaviour and make internal attributions for their actions (Gawronski, 2003). We tend to assume that people do what they do because of the kind of people they are and not because of the situation they find themselves in. This is the Fundamental Attribution Error, an idea that suggests that we continue to make internal attributions about others even though empirical evidence indicates that social situations can strongly influence our behaviour (Jones & Harris, 1967). 

But why do we fall for this trap? Heider (1958) hypothesized that ‘perceptual salience’ is the key factor tipping our scale in the direction of a dispositional, internal attribution. Perceptual salience is the ‘seeming importance’ of information that is the focus of people’s attention. To avoid the jargon, we must understand that when we observe a person’s behaviour, we usually are focusing our attention on the person and not on her/his surrounding situation. Sometimes we’re completely oblivious to the situational causes of the behaviour of a person, and sometimes the situational causes are difficult to interpret accurately or are unavailable (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Here, our mind relies on the person for information about her/his behaviour and attributes the causes of that behaviour to that person’s personality and attitude, thus making an internal attribution. The person in focus becomes ‘perceptually prominent’, not the situation she/he is in, and perceptual salience drives us to see this person as the sole cause of the behaviour (Heider, 1958). 

To make this concept more comprehensive, we’’ll take the example of Ponzo Illusion from Cognitive Psychology. The picture below depicts two red lines at two different positions. We perceive the one on the right to be longer than the one on the left. Spoiler Alert: They both are of the exact same lengths. Here, I will use this example to look at this illusion from a different lens.

Now that I have told you that these red lines are equal in length, look at the picture again. Your first impression will still be that the red line on the right is longer. Maybe after a more careful examination and after understanding the reason behind this faulty perception, you will be able to see them as equal. This is exactly what happens in social situations. The red lines are ‘perceptually salient’ in this case and your brain automatically tells you something about their characteristics, that is, the difference between their lengths. So, you automatically understand the situation in a certain way, but this understanding can be changed if you analyse the situation more deeply and intuitively. The automatic internal attribution can then be changed through a more rational approach to an external attribution, which shifts our focus to the relevant background details about the situational factors. 

This two-step process of attribution was first explained by Gilbert (1989) where initially an automatic internal attribution is followed by the consideration of all possible situational factors and ultimately our internal attributions may be adjusted if not accurate. Integrating this approach with our earlier example gives us a sense of how this two-step process of attribution pans out in real life and can improve our attributions. The problem arises when we employ mental shortcuts like our biases and heuristics to arrive at quick conclusions. By consciously applying some mental effort, we can make accurate and rational attributions. This would not only make our decisions better in the long-run but will also keep our biases in check. 

Circling back to the issue of women being perceived as less skilled at driving in comparison to men, the empirical evidence from multiple studies has something else to offer. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), and other organizations all have records of men causing more road accidents than women and twice as many men dying in car crashes than women (Sunderland, 2017). In the US, 71 percent of all the road fatalities are caused by men, a figure which has remained constant since 1975 even after factoring in the greater number of miles (62 percent) driven by men (Stossel, 2007). In England too, a whopping 79% of the motoring offences are committed by men, that too, after controlling for the miles covered by both sexes (Gibbs, 2019). So, it is safe to say that women are not inherently bad drivers and a man is equally susceptible to making a mistake as any woman of equivalent driving skills. It is your skill that defines you driving, not your sex.

References 

1. Gibbs, J. (2019, November 8). Women are safer behind the wheel than men, new data reveals. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://www.confused.com/on-the-road/cost-of-motoring/women-really-are-safer-drivers

2. Gilbert, D. T. (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process. In J.S. Uleman & J.A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp.189-211). New York: Guilford Press.

3. Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 21-38. 

4. Gwronski, B. (2003). On difficult questions and evident answers: Dispositional inference fromrole-constrained behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 1459-1475.

5. Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

6. Jones, E. E., & Harris, V.A. (1967). The Attribution of Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1-24.

7. Stossel, J. (2007, May 10). Are Women Worse Drivers Than Men? Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3148281

8. Sunderland, M. (2017, January 14). People Think Women Are Worse Drivers Than Men-Statistics Say Otherwise. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvdpgv/people-think-women-are-worse-drivers-than-menstatistics-say-otherwise

9. Weiner, B. (2008). Reflections on the history of attribution theory and research. Social Psychology, 39, 151–156.