W4: Social Attribution

Question 1

What is causal attribution?

Answer 1

Construal process that people use to explain both their own and others’ behaviours:
Linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for behaviour.

Question 2

What are the two types of causal attribution?

Answer 2

1. Internal/Dispositional: something about the person caused the behaviour
2. External/Situational: something about the environment caused the behaviour

Question 3

What are the processes of causal attribution?

Answer 3

1. Covariation Principle
2. Imagining Alternatives
   - Discounting Principle
   - Augmentation Principle
   - Counterfactual Principle

Question 4

How does the covariation principle work?

Answer 4

In determining what caused a behaviour (person or situation), people systematically associate the behaviour with “causal factors” that are present with that behaviour.

1. Consensus (do most people do this in this situation?)
2. Distinctiveness (does the target person do this only in this particular situation?)
3. Consistency (does the target person always do this, or was this a one-time occurrence?)

People tend to rely more on consistency/distinctiveness rather than consensus
FAE: people tend to overweight disposition rather than environment

Question 5

What is the discounting principle?

Answer 5

People assign less weight to a particular cause of behaviour if there are also other plausible causes (weight to the situation)

Our confidence that a particular cause is responsible for a given outcome will be reduced if there are other plausible causes.

Question 6

What is the augmentation principle?

Answer 6

People assign more weight to a particular dispositional cause of behaviour if there are other causes present that would have produced the opposite outcome. (weight to disposition)
e.g. if someone advocates being in a position despite being threatened with torture, we can conclude that the person truly believes in that position.

Question 7

What are counterfactual thoughts?

Answer 7

Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had gone differently

• Emotional Amplification: Emotional reactions to counterfactuals are proportional to how easy it is to imagine the alternatives (2 min vs 2 hours of missing plane)
• Silver Medal Syndrome
• Exceptions vs Routines (avoidable vs unavoidable, man severely injured experiment)

Question 8

What are the errors/biases in attribution?

Answer 8

1. Self-serving attributional bias

2. Fundamental attribution error

Question 9

What is the self-serving attributional bias?

Answer 9

The tendency to attribute failures to external causes and successes to internal causes

• This usually occurs because people want to maintain a positive image of themselves
• Example: CEOs taking credit for success, blaming failure on external causes
• Example: professional sports game

Question 10

What is the fundamental attribution error bias?

Answer 10

Attributing certain behaviours to a person’s disposition rather than the situational causes (e.g. Bill Gate’s talent or background?)

• we often fail to correct for the situation
• may be obvious but we still do it!

Question 11

What are the causes of FAE?

Answer 11

1. Perceptual Salience (People are usually much more attention-grabbing than the context or the situation)
2. Conceptual Salience (Information about situational cues is often unavailable, ambiguous, or not of interest
   - If the situation is what we’re interested in, the FAE actually reverses! We make automatic situational attributions, and then correct for the person)
3. Belief in a Just World
   - a form of attributional belief that “people get what they deserve”
   - often used to explain random actions/luck because they are uncontrollable (e.g. accidents, natural disasters)
   - rationalise fairness: the more evenly distributed a nation’s wealth is, the less its citizens believe in the just world hypothesis

Question 12

Actor-Observer Bias

Answer 12

1. Different information is perceptually salient (actors focus on the situation, observers focus on the actors)
2. Different assumptions about what needs explaining (actors want to understand the situation, observers want to understand the actors)
3. They have access to different kinds of information (actors know more about themselves than anyone else)

Question 13

What are the cultural differences in FAE?

Answer 13

Interdependent/collectivist cultures assign an equal weight to situation and disposition (paying attention to consensus information)

Question 14

Fixed or flexible?

Answer 14

Fixed –> usually attribute to disposition (Americans)

Flexible –> usually attribute to situation (Asians)