L4 - Attributions Flashcards
What causes our and others behaviour?
Causal attribution is construal = your representation of what happens = has individual differences
How do we predict how people behave and control behaviours and situations?
- Knowledge of the person’s past
- Socialisation of context
- Anticipate the future
- Influence outcome
What do attributions do?
- Assign praise/blame
- Positive/negative behaviours
- Un/Desirable outcomes for ourselves or others
- Reward or punishment behaviour
What are internal attributions?
- Disposition
- Mood
- Choice
What are external attributions?
- Pressures of the situation
- We need to assess the relative contribution of internal/external factors in our behaviour
What is an explanatory style with attributions?
- Habitual way of explaining events
- Internal/external cause and locus of control
- Stable/unstable in time: is it present in the past or likely in the future
- Global/specific across context
What are the negative explanatory style?
- Pessimistic style
- Where it is internal, stable and global
What are the optimistic style?
External, unstable and specific
What is the explanatory process?
- Process for explaining explaining behaviours
- Is behaviour specific to the person and is it dispositonal
- If most people behave like that = situational
What is the covariation principle?
- What is present when behaviour occurs
- What is absent when behaviour does not occur?
- Consensus, distinctiveness and consistency
What is consensus?
- Are most people’s behaviours similar in certain situations
- Or is the person’s behaviour different
What is distinctiveness?
- What does this person do in most situations
- Is this behaviour unique to a given situation or common to all situations
What is consistency?
What does the person most often do in this situation? Is it typical of them
What is the discounting principle?
- Multiple plausible causes of same behaviour diminishes attribution to given cause
- Any number of factors to describe someone’s behaviour (because of)
What is augmenting principle?
- Multiple plausible causes of different behaviour enhances attribution to one cause (in spite of)
What is the self-serving attribution bias?
- Maintain a sense of self-worth and efficacy
- In spite of failed successes, guilt, shame, failure
What do we do with our successes?
- Internalise successes and laudable behaviours
- Externalise our failures and shameful behaviours
What was the study on self-serving bias?
- Newspaper accounts of athletes attributions after victory/defeat
- Coded for internal/external attributions
- Victory = more internal, Loss = more external
What is the fundamental attribution error?
- Problem of social cognition
- Where we attribute behaviour to internal qualities e.g personality and choice
- In spite of obvious situational forces
What was a study for fundamental attribution error?
- Assigned to questioner or contestant
- Questioner makes up questions that they know the answer to and contestants answer
- You rate the participants ‘knowledge’
- Only the questioner takes the situation into account
What is the Just World Hypothesis?
- People get what they deserve where you assign praise and blame
- Outcomes are due to internal qualities where you blame and derogate victims even with past life karma
What is the role of system 1 in fundamental attribution error?
- Perceptual silence: people capture our attention
- Is simpler and more salient than surroundings
- Customs and norms are invisible
What is an example of the role of system 1 in fundamental attribution error?
- Ppts viewed video of anxious woman
- Assigned to anxiety inducing condition or innocuous topics
- Assigned to Cognitive load or no cognitive load
- Asked is she an anxious person?
- Load enforced FAE
What is the Actor-observer effect?
- Actors: see the situation and generally make situational attributions for behaviours
- Observers: see the person - make internal attributions for behaviour
- Blame: who is responsible for marital fights
- No blame: Why did one pick a psychology major?
- Cant take their internal factors for granted
What is differential knowledge between actors and observers?
- Actors know their internal intentions and can take them for granted
- They know how typical their behaviour was and how distinctive they are when making that attribution.
