Social Attribution

Question 1

Situational causes

Answer 1

External attribution

Question 2

Dispositional causes- something inside decision maker

Answer 2

Internal attribution

Question 3

Does a behavior correspond to a personality trait?
Can I make an inference about who someone is as a person based on what they do?

Is the behavior freely chosen?
Is the behavior inconsistent with your social role?
Is the behavior socially undesirable?

If yes to all of the above: dispositional attribution
If not, situational attribution or ambiguous

Answer 3

Correspondence inference theory

Question 4

People don’t only focus on single situations
Instead, integrate lots of info across situations to make sense of people’s behavior
Consensus: do others do this?
Distinctiveness: does this person usually behave this way?

Answer 4

Kelley’s Theory of Covariation

Question 5

Others aren’t interested in Matt (consensus is low)
Simon will marry anyone (distinctiveness is low)
Simon has proposed every day this week (consistency is high)
Internal attribution: Simon is desperate

Answer 5

Example of Kelley’s Theory of Covariation: Simon proposes to Matt

Question 6

Three dimensions of causality:

Locus of causality: is the cause internal or external?
Stability: is the cause permanent or not?
Controllability: does the person have control over the outcome?

Answer 6

Weiner’s Theory of Attributions

Question 7

A person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific

Answer 7

Explanatory style

Question 8

Tendency for people (in Western cultures) to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on others’ behavior

Answer 8

Fundamental attribution error

Question 9

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention

Answer 9

Perceptual salience

Question 10

The belief that people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get

Answer 10

Just-world hypothesis

Question 11

Tendency to attribute one’s own behavior to situational causes and others’ behavior to personal causes

Answer 11

Actor-observer bias

Question 12

Perceiving oneself favorably

Answer 12

Self-serving bias

Question 13

Arousal from one experience carries over to a new experience

Emotional response comes from our attribution about the cause of an event

Answer 13

Misattribution of arousal

Question 14

There are marked cultural differences in susceptibility to the fundamental attribution error

Interdependent people are less likely to make the error than independent people, in part because their tendency to pay attention to context encourages them to look to the situation confronting the actor

Answer 14

Culture and causal attribution

Question 15

The idea that people should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced it

Answer 15

Discounting principle

Question 16

The idea that people should assign greater weight to a particular cause of behavior if other causes are present that normally would produce a different outcome

Answer 16

Augmentation principle

Question 17

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been

Answer 17

Counterfactual thinking

Question 18

Emotional reactions to counterfactual thinking increase depending on how easy it is to imagine the alternative

Answer 18

Emotional amplification