Social Cognition and Attributions Flashcards
Heider, 1958:
People are motivated by two primary needs
1.
2.
- form a coherent view of the world
2. gain control over the environment
What is attribution theory?
attributing causes to effects
Why do people do what they do?
Why do things happen the way they do?
Based of the locus of causality what are the two types of attributions?
Internal: Any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person e.g. personality, mood, abilities, attitude and effort
External: Any explanation that locates the cause as being external to the person (action of others, nature of situtation, social pressures, luck)
What are other words used to describe external and internal locuses of control?
Internal or dispositional attribution or controllable
External or situational attribution or uncontrollable
What is meant by Kelley’s convariation theory?:
Causality is ascribed to the cause that co-varies with the behaviour
Every time the cause it there, the event occurs
What are the 3 factors in Kelley’s theory?
Consensus: do other people do the same in this situation?
Consistency: does the behaviour occur in the same way on different occasions?
Distinctiveness: does the behaviour occur in the same way in other situations?
What are the 3 main types of attributional biases?
- fundamental attribution error
- actor-observer bias
- self serving bias
Which type of attributional bias is being described?
- all things being equal, people have a general tendency to make internal rather than external attributions, particularly with rest to others’s behaviours
fundamental attribution error
Which type of attributional bias is being described?
- we are more likely to make internal attributions to our success and external attributrions to our failures
- protects and maintains our self-esteem
self serving bias
Which type of attributional bias is being described?
- tendency to attribute other people’s behaviour to internal causes and our behaviour to external causes
- e.g. my friend can’t give-up smoking because he is weak-willed, whereas I can’t give up because people around me smoke
actor-observer bias
What is the every day term for heuristics? What are they?
rules of thumb, time saving mental shortcuts that reduces complex judgement to simple rules of thumb
What are the 4 types of heuristic?
- representative heuristic
- availability heuristic
- the false consensus effect
- the anchoring heuristic
Which type of heuristic is being described?
- tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of that event e.g. plane crash yesterday, think about it on flight today
availability heuristic
Which type of heuristic is being described?
- tendency to exaggerate how common one’s own opinions are in the general population
false consensus effect
Which type of heuristic is being described?
- tendency to be biased towards the starting value in making quantitative judgements
- tendency to start with an implicitly suggested reference point and make adjustments to reach their adjustment
anchoring heuristic
