Self Perception Theory
What is Self Perception Theory?
Self-Perception Theory describes the human tendency to understand our attitudes through observing our own behavior. Uncertainty often causes us to make inferences about our feelings based on how we respond in a given situation.
The Basic Idea
We typically view the interaction between attitudes and behaviors as a causal sequence that progresses linearly from attitude to behavior. We might have an attitude towards work ethic, for example, which would translate into some behavior, like working overtime to get the job done. To assume a reversal in the sequence of causation; for example, behavior leading to attitude would seem counterintuitive. It can certainly seem backwards to presume working overtime causes a belief in work ethic, rather than work ethic causes hard work.
Self perception theory proposes such a causal link. This is the case when internal cues such as sentiment are unclear, and the individual attributes their attitude or belief to some form of self perception around their behavior. It is a similar process to how we would infer another individual’s inner state by observing their behavior.
Consider Dave, a carpenter who works 50 hours a week. Dave has never really stopped to think about how he feels towards standardized work weeks and labor regulations, or work ethic in general. One evening, at the bar with some friends, someone mentions the 35-hour work week in France and an article she read about increased productivity gains at companies who introduced four-day work weeks. Dave has never heard such talk and doesn’t have any preexisting attitudes towards the concept. When someone asks what he thinks, he supposes that 40 hours isn’t that much, after all, he tends to work 50.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
– Lionel Robbins describing economic science in terms of scarcity in Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932).
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
