Attribution Flashcards
How we are achieving social interaction?
Many psychological processes that make social interactions possible performed outside conscious awareness
Causal Attributions
The process of assigning a cause to an event or behaviour
How do people explain the events in their lives?
Assign blame or credit- Determine who should be punished/rewarded.- Examine feelings about ourselves & other people
Purpose. To guide behaviour…
… but also to make sense of their everyday lives
… controlling events & behaviours (Försterling and Rudolph, 1988)
Fritz Heider (1958) naïve scientists/psychologists theory
Person’s intentions as an underlying cause that can explain diverse behaviours
Heider’s Theory of Naïve Psychology
Three main principles:
Our own behaviour (and others’) is motivated
Anthropomorphisms (Heider and Simmel, 1944)
We tend to look for stable traits behind people’s behaviour. This aids predictions
Internal (dispositional) versus external (situational) causes
Internal attributions:
Process of assigning the cause of our own behaviour to dispositional factors
External attributions:
Assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to environmental factors
Correspondent inference theory
People attempt to infer whether person’s action caused by internal dispositions and they do so by looking at factors related to the action (Jones and Davis 1965)
Correspondent inference -
The attribution of a personality trait that corresponds to an observed behaviour
Kelley’s Covariation Model
People typically attribute the cause of behaviour to a factor that covaries most clearly with the behaviour.
Covariation principle -
The attribution of events to conditions that tend to be present when the event happens, and absent when the event does not happen.
Kelley’s Covariation Model
Three key component of a social situation:
i. Person who displays a particular behaviour
ii. An object or stimulus towards which the behaviour is directed
iii. A particular time or occasion.
Kelley (1967) Covariation Model
ANOVA model:
attribute causes of behaviour to factor that covaries most closely with behaviour
ANOVA model
Three classes of information:
Consistency
Extent to which a person reacts in the same way to a stimulus on many other occasions
Consensus
extent to which other people react in the same way to a particular stimulus.
Distinctiveness
whether the behaviour happens to this specific stimulus or to all similar stimuli
Covariation Model
Problems with this model
People won’t always use these three dimensions
Some evidence that people are bad at assessing covariation (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984)
Difficult to tell what principals people are using for attributions (Nisbett & Ross, 1980)
This would be naive: covariation is not causation! (Hilton, 1988)
Weiner’s (1979) attribution theory
According to this theory in making an achievement attribution (e.g. why we did well or failed an exam)
Weiner’s (1979) attribution theory
we consider 3 dimensions
Locus – is the performance caused by the actor (internal) or situation (external)?
Stability – is the internal or external cause a stable or unstable one?
Controllability – to what extent is future performance under the actor’s control?
Cognitive misers
Attempts to save on cognitive load
Motivated tacticians
Cognitive strategies available and chosen depending on goal
Biases in Attributions
Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer bias
Self-serving bias
False Consensus effect
False Uniqueness effect
Fundamental attribution error
Criticisms of FAE
Is it actually ‘Fundamental’?
Dependent on these factors:
Culture: Stronger in the West (Nisbett, Peng, Choi and Norenzayan, 2001)
Age: young children explain behaviour in terms of specific factors within the situation (White, 1988)
Distraction: lack cognitive resources to process (Gilbert, 2002)
Is it actually an ‘Error’?
When people have sufficient time, concentration, information and motivation, they do not irrationally overlook situational causes of behaviour (Gilbert and Malone, 1995; McClure, 1998).
Actor-observer bias
AKA Self-other effect (e.g .Jones and Nisbett, 1972)
The tendency for actors to attribute their own behaviours to the situation and for observers to explain behaviours in terms of personality traits (Malle, 2006)
Actor-observer bias
Two key explanations
Perceptual focus (different perspectives)
Informational differences (we know about own behaviour)
Self-serving bias
We tend to attribute our successes to internal factors
We tend to attribute our failures to external factors
Cross cultural finding (e.g. Fletcher & Ward, 1988)
Ego serving (self-enhancing) (e.g Snyder et al, 1978)
Anticipatory attributions (self handicapping)
Illusion of control + “belief in a just world”
False consensus effect
We are very poor at determining consensus information
False uniqueness effect:
We tend to overestimate the uniqueness of our positive characteristics
‘Attributional style’ of people with depression:
negative events to internal, global and stable causes. (Abramson, Metalsky and Alloy, 1989)
e.g. I failed because I am stupid
Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) -
is training people to stop explaining events in their lives in an overly pessimistic, self-defeating way (Beck, Rush, Shaw and Emery
Formation
Facilitate communication and understanding
Maintenance
Stable personalities constructed, so limited attributions
Dissolution
Increase in attributions to regain understanding
Attributional conflict (Horai, 1977)
Divergent interpretations – dissatisfaction
I withdraw because you nag/ I nag because you withdraw
Happily married spouses: partners +ve behaviour =
internal, -ve = external (e.g. Fincham & Bradbury, 1991)
Attribution style has causal impact on…
relationship satisfaction (Sanchak & Leonard, 1993)
The self-serving bias in sport
Table tennis players: winners made more internal, stable and controllable attributions (McAuley &Gross 1983)
Newspaper accounts of football/baseball.
Though not as high as after a win, internal attributions were always above 50% (Lau & Russell 1980)
Internal attributions were 81% following wins, and 58% following losses (Watkins 1986)
When result is expected people tend to make more internal attributions - when unexpected they tend to make more external attributions.
win = positive outcome, loss = negative outcome
Mastery motivation -
Making students more motivated to learn
Performance motivation -
Practicalities
Making them more motivated to achieve high grades (Haynes, Daniels, Stupnisky et al. 2008)
Why we mix dispositions with situations
“When we label someone aggressive we are not concerned that this is merely a description masquerading as an explanation. It furnishes us with a rule: ‘avoid/don’t annoy/placate this person’” (Langdridge and Butt 2004)
Child minder hitting a child = don’t use this childminder
DP:
in real life we often use attributions in talk to ‘do’ something (i.e. to blame someone or to deny responsibility) rather than being disinterested passive perceivers of reality.
Attributions =
= Process of assigning cause to an event/behaviour
Different theories of Attributions:
Heider’s Theory of Naïve Psychology
Jones and Davies’ Correspondent Inference Theory
Kelley’s Covariation Model
Weiner’s Attribution Theory
Biases in this process –
motivation for making self-serving attributions
