, following this both the actor and his observer were asked to rate the actors' friendliness, talkativeness, nervousness, and dominance, as well as stating to what degree the behaviour was determined by personal traits and the situation. It was found that actors placed greater importance on situational factors than did observers, and observers placed greater importance on personal dispositions. An explanation for this effect is that actors in most situations are interested in protecting their self-esteem and so give themselves the benefit of the doubt and attribute the situation but are not so lenient with others.
             A second explanation is that attributions in a situation are a function of our focus of attention; an actor's focus of attention is on the situation, and the observers' is on the actor, dues to these different perspectives during an interaction situation, actors and observers make divergent attributions (Kimble, 1990). This notion has been supported by Storms (1973, cited in Kimble, 1990), in an experiment participants were showed a video of an earlier conversation they partook, forcing actors to view the situation from the observers' perspective and vice versa. The results showed that by shifting people to a new visual perspective, the actor observer bias could be reversed. This suggests that we will make dispositional attributions to whoever is our focus of attention in any situation.
             Knobe and Malle (2002) argue that the distinction between reasons and other person factors is not properly addressed, casting doubt on the view that there is a general tendency for observers to give more person attributions than actors do. It is unclear on precise definitions of the distinguished attributions proposed by Jones and Nisbett, for example 'dispositional' might be used to refer any factor that lies within the person such as emotions, or it might be used to refer to specific rel
             ...