This is just a brief anecdote of a single life experience. Are there any systematic effects that we know of that work counter to Correspondence Bias?
Given that you haven't asked him yet, you don't even have an anecdote. You have exactly half a data point!
Prediction: When you ask him it will turn out that he does have a brilliant study method, or has previous experience, or some other non-innate explanation.
Oh, I forgot to mention this. The idea occurred to ask him occurred to me during class today, but I wasn't able to corner him after class. The question about correspondence bias didn't occur to me until some time afterwards. If I were to post something tomorrow, after I'd already asked him, comments would be affected by hindsight bias. I'm rather curious as to what people here consider likely.
Additionally, no matter what his answer turns out to be, it's still interesting no note that other people are attributing differences between themselves and him not to some innate tendency, but to a situational effect. I have my own guess as to why my classmates made that conclusion, but I want to know what other people come up with, or what research there has been on the topic.
I'm rather curious as to what people here consider likely.
Most likely: experience with Russian itself or a related language (e.g. Ukrainian).
(If it's the former, there must be some reason why he's in your intro class. Aside from deliberate sandbagging, it could be something like having been exposed to Russian as a child, but then not using it for a while. As for the latter, that happened when I took Russian in high school for 4 years - we had a Ukrainian speaker who had a very easy time but still had to learn the differences.)
Not very likely: innate language acquisition talent. Those guys exist (e.g. UN translators who speak N different languages fluently and can pick up new ones rapidly), they just aren't common.
Extremely unlikely: magical studying tricks.
Additionally, no matter what his answer turns out to be, it's still interesting no note that other people are attributing differences between themselves and him not to some innate tendency, but to a situational effect.
"Studying lots" isn't a purely situational effect, it requires a hard working personality. It's more situational than "Innate brilliance" but less so than "Previous exposure".
This still sounds like you (and your classmates) are attributing his success at Russian to the person rather than the situation. You believe that he's getting these things right because of his knowledge of the material, you just think that the knowledge comes from his studying rather than an innate ability. But effort, like ability, is an internal attribute. It's just less fixed / more changeable.
From the psych wiki: Heider (1958) made the distinction between internal (person) and external (situation) attributions. Then Weiner (1971)
proposed that the stability of the cause is also included in individual’s explanations of outcomes. The distinction between stable, non-variable causes (such as innate ability for internal attributions and inherent task difficulty for external attributions) and unstable, variable causes (such as effort and luck respectively) was combined with Heider’s internal/external dimension to form a basis for classifying the performance attributions made by individuals
Funny, in my own bygone days of taking language classes, the assumption tended to be that anyone who was obviously much better at it than the rest of the class had had some previous exposure (or a lot of previous exposure) to the language beforehand, and was for whatever reason taking a language class that was too easy for them.
Which goes right along with your idea -- not only would we assume that the standout no more gifted in language acquisition than we were, we'd also assume that the standout was too lazy to do any more studying than we felt like doing ourselves.
Then again, in the vast majority of cases the hypothesis was true.
Dear Cthulhu, that actually did happen. I did not mean to do that, but it must have become a habit at some point to type "sequence_reruns" in the tags box. That is freaky.
I'm going to go remove that.
I don't have much to add to the general question of anti-correspondence bias, but I can speak to this from personal experience to the specific question of that annoying guy in language class who seems to be breaking the curve (if you will allow some generalizing from one example) -- in another class, some years ago, that guy was me. I am very good at language acquisition. When I was studying other languages, I am confident that I also put more effort into them than my fellow students. These effects are difficult to disentangle. It is enjoyable to be good at something, so people tend to be willing to put more effort into things they have a lot of innate ability for. I was also motivated to hire a tutor to make up time for having started as an adult (let me note that one summer with a good tutor twice a week launched me far ahead of the students I had started out with -- it is far more effective than class time).
Most of my progress owed to ability and to putting a lot of time into it, not to secret language-fu techniques. There is one exception, however. After picking up the rudiments of the language (after the first semester, in other words) I tried to excise native-language thinking from the process as much as possible. So I used to draw pages of drawings of nouns and verbs, grouped thematically, and put the Russian words with the pictures rather than with English words. I found this to be helpful in developing the ability to think in Russian, rather than have a running translation going in my head. Additionally, after I spoke Russian fluently, and I moved on to another language, I took my class notes for the next language in Russian, not English. The point again being to to remove the use of English from the thought process as quickly as possible to force direct thought in the new language rather than internal translation.
I also found immersion programs to be well worth the investment.
I'm currently taking an introductory Russian class. I have been using Anki to memorize the vocabulary, and I do appear to know more vocabulary than anyone else in the class1 except for one other individual. This individual has far surpassed everyone else in the class, in every area (grammar, vocabulary, etc). Several other students have made comments along the lines of "Geez, do you spend all your time studying?", and it had occurred to me that I should ask him what sort of study techniques he's using, and possibly try them out myself.
At this point, it occurred to me that this may be a reversal of Correspondence Bias. The other students and I assumed that his superior abilities were due to his own particular methods of studying, and not to any sort of innate language ability. And yet, I think it is at least likely that there are more people in the world with a natural talent for languages, than there are people who have found some kind of spectacular studying technique.
This is just a brief anecdote of a single life experience. Are there any systematic effects that we know of that work counter to Correspondence Bias?
1 Data supporting this claim: in activities that we conduct inside the classroom, I have consistently remembered words that other members of the class do not, and it is very rare that a fellow student remembers a word from previous classes that I did not recall independently. Exceptions seem to have occurred mostly when a) it was not a word I put into Anki after class, or b) the other student is the individual I mentioned in the post.