Attribution Theory Flashcards
Humans as meaning makers
Humans seek to construct and find meaning in the world and in life - often construct casual explanations
Humans as meaning makers examples
physical phenomena; sometimes people attribute natural disasters to god.
This is the same as life events when we try to interpret them
Human behaviour; make sense of why people do things including ourselves
Humans as meaning makers, why?
Attributions have been argued to be good for psychological functioning - this helps us predict the future in a way and also have a sense of control aswell as anxiety management
Thus giving us that feeling of understanding the world and life
Theory of naive psychology, Heider 1958
People hold common sense theories about behaviour, this is naive psychology. Doesn’t have to be true
Construct casual theories about behaviour
Behaviour is motivated and not random, Heider-Simmel effect (1944);
some shapes bully each other and move around in random ways and just as I had when I said bully we as humans try to make a reason and rhythm for it
Prefer stable and enduring explanations
Helps us develop schemas and patterns in our lives based of past experiences, reinforced when consistent
Distinction between internal (disposition) and external (situational ) factors
Infer internal factors from absence of external causatives
Do we only prefer internal explanations when an external one is absent?
Often focus on internal attributes - personality based on voice (scherer 1978)
Scherer played a 20 second voice note and people infected their personalities on their speech.
Correspondent inference
How we infer dispositions from an individuals behaviour.
Correspondent inference 5 cues
5 sources of information;
Act was freely chosen, autonomy
Act produces a non common effect, not expected
Act was not considered socially desireable
Act had a direct impact on us (hedonic reference)
Act seemed intended to affect us
Cues lead to…
The act reflects some true characteristics of the person
Evidence (Jones & Harris)
Make more inference when stance is freely chosen and socially unpopular (Jones & Harris 1967)
Stance freely chosen had a lot less anti Castro leanings than assigned stances.
Make more inferences when information is socially undesirable (Jones et al 1961)
Extroverted snd introverted responses were different varying on jobs
Limitations of the model
jones and Davis 1965
focus on intentionality to make inferences - but we do make inferences on things that are unintentional (e.g., clumsy; careless)
Limitations of the model (2)
jones and Davis, 1965
Assumption that we attend to non chosen actions to help draw inferences. little evidence for this idea (Ross, 1977)
Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Looks at people as scientists (metaphorical) - we identify what factor most Covaries with a behaviour, and then assign that as the cause of the behaviour. Looks to when we assign a thing to external or internal factor
Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Types
We look at 3 types of behaviour; consistency, distinctiveness (does the person react to all stimuli like this), consensus (do other people react that same way to the same stimuli).
Covariation model; results of types
If the consistency is low we begin discounting and looking for another cause,
If the all types are high we externally attribute it
If the consistency is high but the other 2 types are low, we begin internally attributing it
A03 Covariation model (1)
Support (McArthur 1972)
However distinctiveness> consistency > consensus in terms of approtance
A03 covariant model (2)
Can use these dimensions in theory but in practice we are rational and mechanical in our attributions
A03 covariant model (3)
Not guaranteed people attend to this information, may often attribute causality to the most salient feature (Nisbett & Ross 1980)
A03 covariant model (4)
Might often only have incomplete information e.g consistency and distinctiveness
Attribution model of achievement (weiner, 1979)
When considering achievement, we consider three dimensions
locus; actor (internal) or situational (external) causes)
Stability; is cause stable or unstable.
Controllability; extent to which future performance is within control or outside of control
Attribution model of achievement (weiner, 1979)
Example
Exam performance;
Internal attributes;
controllable = typical effort (stable), unusual effort (unstable) (going above and beyond)
Uncontrollable= ability (stable), mood (unstable )
External;
Controllable =consistent help/hinderance (Stable), unusual help or hinderance (unstable)
Uncontrollable = task difficulty (stable) luck (unstable)
A03 attribution model of achievement (1) MEYER
empirical support for 3 factor structure of attributions for success and failure in relation to hypothetical student outcomes (Meyer 1980)
A03 attribution model of achievement (2) applicability
Applied used to education, work, sport, etc. -achievement motivation (Weiner 1980) approach motivation(motivated to approach goals) , avoidance motivation (fear of failure)
Unbias
A03 attribution model of achievement (3)
Attributional process isn’t as objective or unbiased as they seem. They are not free from error
A03 attribution model of achievement (counter to 3) Fiske Taylor
Are we naive scientists or instead cognitive misers? FISKE and Taylor 2013
Heuristics are rules of thumbs that provide simple and quick adequate answers even if they are not exclusively correct
They are satisfactory and work in interior notices
Correspondence Bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995)
Also known as fundamental attribution error
We underestimate influence of situational stuff and overestimate dispositional factors
Castro study in terms of correspondence bias
People ignored situational context, told stance was assigned, people still disregarded this as they still formed opinions on people based if they agreed or not.
This has applied uses in traffic instances; we presume they’re reckless drivers and ignore other external factors.
Reasons for correspondence bias (1) focus of attention
Focus of attention (Taylor & FISKE 1978
Actor stands out more than background environment, therefore over represented casually in our attributions
Priming situational causes decreases this bias (Rholes & Pryor, 1982)
Reasons for correspondence bias (2) differential forgetting
Situational cues are forgotten more quickly than dispositional ones, so bias occurs and increases with time
- contradictory evidence (Miller & Porter 1980) may depend on focus of information processing that occurs immediately after
Reasons for correspondence bias (3)
Linguistic facilitation Nissbett & Ross 1980)
English language facilitates dispositions inferences (e.g honest person) v situational (e.g “honest situation”) that sounds less correct than the honest person.
Universality of correspondence bias
Perhaps it’s not fundamental? It seems like it may be a result of cultural norms and correspondence bias is a result of individualist cultures. Independent v interdependent self (Chiu & Hong 2007)
Universality of correspondence bias (2)
Evidence suggests there is a slight developmental trajectory as when we get older there is a larger need for individualism especially in NA over somewhere like India (Miller 1986)
Actor observer effect (correspondence bias)
Wether we attribute internally or externally is a result of attributing others behaviours to internal dispositions and external behaviours to own behaviour
Actor observer effect… why?
Perceptual focus(Storms 1973): when observing persons behaviour stands out. When acting, you cannot see how you behave
Actor observer effect… why? (2)
Informational differences (James & Nissbet 1972) we have greater information about how we behave in other contexts, we know we get angry due to certain stimuli and therefore it’s easier to understand causality.
False consensus (attribution error)
A tendency to see our behaviour as typical and common, therefore assume people would generally behave the same way as us.
False consensus example
Ross 1977
Wearing a sign in the name of science
Hypothetical scenario v actual behaviour
Hypothetical
65% wore sign, and thought 31% would not wear it
35% did not and thought 69% would not
Behaviour
60.8% would wear it and thought 43 would not
39.2 did not and thought 57 would not wear it
False consensus error support
Over 100 experiments (Miller 1987)
Stronger in domains and beliefs that are important to us (granberg 1987)
