Social T2 Flashcards
attribution theory
the study of how people explain events
Availability Heuristic
making decisions based upon how easy it is to bring something to mind likely judging these outcomes as being more common or frequently occurring.
Experiments testing correspondent inference theory/FAE?
Jones & Harris 1967
familiarity heuristic
people tend to have more favorable opinions of things, people, or places they’ve experienced before as opposed to new ones
Hindsight bias
The tendency for people to see an outcome as inevitable once the actual outcome is known.
How might Bem’s self-perception theory offer a better explanation
Attitudes may be changed through a self-attributional process when the behaviour falls within a range of personally acceptable conduct. So when someone acts outside of this range of acceptable behaviour cognitive dissonance resolution accont better for attitude change
How’s the above-average effect a self-serving bias?
act of attributing behaviour in a distorted way to either enhance or protect our self-esteem (e.g. taking credit for success but explaining away failures). one inflates their own ability or performance in the above-average effect related to one’s self-esteem and self-image that the self-serving bias is protecting/enhancing.
Manu watches all the “Jaws” movies, in which sharks attack people at sea. Manu decides she will never swim in the sea again, because she worries about the possibility of getting attacked by a shark-> heuristic?
availability heuristic
Optimism Bias
People believing that good things are more likely to happen to them than bad things
Representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971)
- compare aspects of the individual incident to other mental examples
- likelihood of an event depends on the similarity/ representativeness of said event -> stereotype
Schwartz et al. (1991) conducted a compelling research study to show how a certain heuristic influences an individual’s thinking. Participants were asked to recall 6 or 12 times when they had been assertive or unassertive in their lives. What was the study’s conclusion?
Attributional processes underpin the availability heuristics
Study relating FAE and Culture
Miller 1984
Study to Illustrate the Implications of the Availability Bias
Schwartz 1991
Trial and error heuristic
people use a number of different strategies to solve something until they find what works -> video gaming, driving
What are three problems of nudges (Sugden, 2009)?
- finding out what would make people better off, as judged by themselves.
- Policies do not correct reasoning failure (quality of decision-making) but use reasoning failure as an attempt to correct the outcomes of that failure.
- Infringement on autonomy (Refute: simple adjustment of the context in which one can continue to exercise one’s autonomy)
What does FAE not help us with?
- doesn’t help us understand the relative strength of dispositional vs. external factors that lead to observable behaviours
- we cannot know the true influence of someone’s disposition vs. their situation and to what degree they each played a role in the displayed behaviour. However, we can predict the FAE of others
What does the Behavioural theory of rational choice claim?
bounded rationality => limited computational ability + short-term memory and selective perception Homo Sapiens= settle for satisficing methods instead of maximum utility or optimisation
What is a bias
They result from heuristics that cause incorrect judgments which we consequently become drawn to under certain circumstances
What is a heuristic?
“…a simple procedure (cognitive shortcut) that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.” (Kahneman, 2011)
Ultimate Attribution Bias was proposed by?
Pettigrew (1979)
What do attribution theories describe?
Describe how we attribute causes to our own or other’s behaviour
By whom was Fundamental Attribution Error proposed?
Ross (1977)
Who proposed the Actor-Observer Effect, and what is it an extension of?
Jones and Nisbett (1972) proposed it as an extension of correspondence bias
By whom was confirmation bias coined?
Trope & Thompson, 1997
What did Jones and Harris (1967) find?
What are the dimensions in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?
Whether Control or Lack of control are internal/external and stable/unstable
In Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution/ Attributional Theory (1979), what happens if someone deems something permanently within their control?
They show typical effort towards it
In Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution/ Attributional Theory (1979), what happens if someone deems something changing and outside their control?
They rely on luck
Ultimate Attribution Bias proposes that
negative outgroup behaviour is dispositionally attributed, while positive outgroup behaviour is externally attributed to the preservation of an outgroup image.
What are the seven main theories of attribution?
- Naive Psychology Theory
- Correspondent Inference
- Attributional Style
- Covariation Theory
- Self-Perception Theory
- Attributional Theory
- Intergroup Attribution
Who’s the theorist behind Intergroup Attribution and what do they propose?
Deschamp (1983) suggests that we assign cause of one’s own or others’ behaviour to group membership
Who’s the theorist behind Attributional Theory and what do they propose?
Weiner (1979,1985) proposes that attribution is based on how well people perform on a task
Who’s the theorist behind Self-Perception Theory and what do they propose?
Daryl Bem (1967, 1972) suggests we make self-attributions to gain knowledge about ourselves
Who’s the theorist behind Covariation Theory and what do they propose?
Harold Kelley (1967) suggests that assigning a cause to behaviour depends on the factor that seemingly covaries the most, to make an internal/dispositional or external/environmental attribution (consistency, distinctiveness, consensus)
Who’s the theorist behind Attributional Style and what do they propose?
Rotter (1966) claims the existence of personal pre-dispositions to make a certain type of attribution (Internal vs. External) -> locus of control}}
Who’s the theorist behind Correspondence Inference and what do they propose?
Jones and Davis (1965) propose the idea that behaviour corresponds with personality traits, which is how we can infer about it so we can maintain the idea of control and a predictable world
Who’s the theorist behind Naive Psychology Theory and what do they propose?
Heider (1958) suggests people use cause-effect analyses in order to understand the world
What does fundamental attribution error describe?
tendency to attribute more internally dispositional causes to other’s behaviour than externally situational causes in others
What is fundamental attributon error the basis for?
Ultimate Attribution Bias Pettigrew (1979) focused on outgroup behaviour
What does the Covariation model describe?
What does the Actor-Observer Effect describe?
tendency to attribute others’ behaviour internally to dispositional factors (observer) and one’s own to external factors (actor)
What is the role of perceptual focus in the Actor-Observer Effect?
Actors can’t see themselves behaving
What is the role of informational difference in the Actor-Observer Effect?
actors tend to have a wealth of information enabling them to make external attributions
What are biases (Fiske & Taylor 2013)?
systematic errors in our rational thinking, perception and attitudes
What is a different way to define biases?
adaptive characteristics of ordinary, everyday social perception
What is confirmation bias?
the tendency to seek, interpret, create information that confirms existing ideas, explanations for the cause of an event
What does stability mean in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?
is the internal/external cause stable/unstable?
What does locus mean in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?
performance is caused (internally) by the actor or (externally) by the situation
