Lecture 3 Flashcards
What does attribution of causality mean?
It ascribes meaning to the world, making it clear, definable, and predictable, thereby reducing uncertainty.
What was Heider’s hypothesis?
That people are motivated by two primary needs to understand causality in the world.
What are Heider’s two primary needs to understand causality in the world?
- the need to form a coherent view of the world.
* the need to gain control over the environment
What is the bifference between internal (person) attribution and external (situation) attribution?
- internal is the explanation that located the cause as being internal to a person who is committing an act (personality, mood, attitudes, abilities etc.)
- external is the explanation that located the cause as being externakbto the person (actions of others, the nature of the situation)
What are the two models of attributiom?
- Correspondent inference theory (Jones and Davis, 1965).
2. The co-variance model (Kelley, 1967).
What is the correspondent inference theory?
- people try to infer a correspondent inference- that the action of an actor corresponds to (indicates) a stable personality characteristic
- people prefer disposition attributions because they are more valuable for making predictions about behaviour
What are three ways to process relevant information?
- Social desirability
- Choice
- Noncommon effects
What is the co-variance model?
- This model is limited to using a single instance of behaviour to explain behaviour and focuses on internal attributions
- attributions are made using the covariation principle
What are three factors to assess co-variation?
- Consensus
- Consistency
- Distinctiveness
What is consensus information?
The extent to which others react in the same way to some stimulus. (Target and audience act the same)
What is consistency information?
The extent to which the person reacts to the stimulus in the same way on different occasions. (Target person reacts the same on different occasions)
What is distinctiveness information?
The extent to which the person reacts in the same way to other, different social contexts.
(Target reacts in the same way in other situations)
What is dispositional attribution?
Any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person (personality, mood, attitudes, abilities, effort)
What is situational attribution?
Any explanation that locates the cause as being external to the person (actions of others, the nature of the situation, luck)
What is attribution biases?
- The fundamental attribution error (Ross, (1977)
- The actor- observer bias, (Jones and Nisbett, 1972)
- Self-serving attributions (Olsen and Ross, 1988)
What is the fundamental attribution error?
The tendency to make internal rather than external attributions for people’s behaviour
What is perceptual salience?
• the person being observed is the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation (I.e., moving, talking etc.)
Heider describes this phenomenon as “the person engulfs the field”
This is also reinforced by the actor-observer bias.
What is the name of the tendency for people to attribute their own behaviour to external (situational) causes but that of others internal factors (Jones and Nisbett, 1972)?
The actor-observer bias
What is self-serving attributions?
The pervasive tendency to attribute successes to internal, personal attributions, and failure to external factors outside of our control (Olsen and Ross, 1988).
What is attributions mindset?
Whether we make internal or external attributions can sometimes be determined by the state of mind we are in
What is the third person effect?
People identify the mass media as having an effect upon the behaviour of other people but perceive themselves as being not affected.
What is social representations (Moscovici, 1961)?
Shared beliefs and understandings between broad groups of people.
What is the name for this definition: social cognition describes the way people encode, process, remember, and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of others behaviour?
Social cognition
What is the representativeness heuristic?
The tendency to allocate a set of attributions to someone if they match the prototype of that given category (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973).
