week 3 Flashcards
What is attribution
Ordinary people continually engaged in the process of explaining human behaviour
Heider 1958- Naive psychology
Heider argued that people have two primary needs:
To form a coherent view of the world
To gain control over the environment
We therefore look for stable and enduring features
Personal, internal, dispositional factors
Vs
Environmental, external, situational factors
Moving shapes like this
34 participants
33 described the movements as social planning and interaction
1 described it as moving triangles and a circle
Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones & Davis, 1965)
Correspondent inference
What does a behaviour tell me about a person?
We prefer to attribute to underlying dispositions of person
Renders the world stable, understandable and predictable
5 (or 3) relevant factors in drawing a correspondent inference:
1. Was the behaviour freely chosen?
2. Did it produce unique consequences? (also called non-common effects)
3. Was the behaviour socially desirable?
4. What are its consequences for me? (hedonic relevance)
5. Was it INTENDED to benefit or harm me? (personalism)
Problems with Correspondent Inference Theory
Intention – Disposition
Is intention necessary to infer disposition?
e.g., Clumsiness
e.g., Carelessness
Overly focussed on personal factors?
Group-level information can also be used in attributions
e.g., stereotypes used to explain behaviour
Only limited empirical support
e.g., people don’t routinely take into account non-occurring behaviours, and so it is difficult to see how they could assess non-common effects (see Hogg & Vaughan, 2008, Chapter 3)
Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Covariation (or co-occurrence) of behaviour with other factors – a systematic approach.
3 types of information:
Consistency
Does this person always do this in this situation?
Distinctiveness
Does this person do this in other situations?
Consensus
Do other people do this in the same situation?
When consistency is high, and distinctiveness and consensus low, we tend to make internal attributions.
Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Consistency low -> distinctiveness n/a -> consensus n/a-> attribution external
Consistency high-> distinctiveness high-> consensus high-> attribution external
Consistency high-> distinctiveness low-> consensus low-> attribution internal
problems with Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Evidence shows people can use specially prepared consistency, distinctiveness & consensus information, but does this mean they do so in ‘real life’?
How good are people at assessing covariation?
Are they always so systematic?
Covariation ≠ causality (so it is not a fool proof system, even if people do use it)
Covariation theory assumes we have access to information on multiple occurrences. What about one-off events?
Configuration (Kelley, 1972)
Causal schema (pl. schemata)
‘a general conception that a person has about how certain kinds of causes interact to produce a specific kind of effect.’ Kelley (1972)
Causal schemata kick in when information missing or not worth collecting.
So when we see someone fall over in the street, what might be relevant?
Wet pavement
Shoes untied
Crooked paving stones
Person was staggering (drunk?)
In the absence of these, perhaps we’ll conclude that the person is clumsy (i.e., internal attribution)
Attribution biases
Attribution theories often assume ideal inferences/conclusions are drawn.
But there is plenty of research showing that attribution is biased in several ways.
3 most important biases (Hewstone, 1989):
Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer effect
Self-serving bias
Fundamental Attribution Error
Tendency to attribute to internal, dispositional causes rather than situational causes
e.g., Jones & Harris (1967): pro- & anti-Castro speeches
Even when participants were aware that speakers had no choice over whether they made a pro- or anti-Castro speech, internal attributions were made (see next slide)
Cognitive or cultural?
e.g., Miller (1984)
Americans: Internal attributions increase with age
Indians: External attributions increase with age
Fidel Castro was the Communist leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.
In the study, one group of US students wrote essays expressing pro- or anti-Castro views (writers)
Another group (readers) were either informed that writers:
Freely chose the arguments they put forward, OR
Were explicitly asked for pro- or anti-Castro arguments
They then rated the writers’ positive attitude towards Castro’s regime for both types of essays:
Correspondence Bias
Jones and Harris ran follow-up experiments
The bias only went away when participants were told that the writer had copied out the essay verbatim from a pre-written essay
But perspective changes THINGS
Videos of prisoner confessions (Lassiter and Irvine 1986)
Three viewpoints of camera:
On Suspect
On Police Interrogator
On Both
Prisoner’s confession seen to be:
Least coerced when watching the prisoner
Most coerced when watching the police officer
Actor-observer effect
More likely to attribute others’ behaviour to internal causes, and own behaviour to external causes (Jones & Nisbett, 1972)
For example:
Someone else fails their driving test
They’re probably not a very good driver (i.e., internal, personal)
You fail your driving test
Rubbish car, bad instructor, dodgy examiner, other drivers (i.e., external, situational)
Self-serving bias(olson & Ross, 1988)
This is the tendency to:
Attribute own success to internal factors
Self-enhancing bias
Attribute own failure to external factors
Self-protective bias
Attribution biases
Fundamental attribution error / correspondence bias
Internal causes for behaviour are easiest explanation
Actor-observer effect: own behaviour external, other’s behaviour internal
Perceptual focus and informational differences
Self-serving biases:
Self-enhancing:
attributing internally & taking credit for success
Self-protecting:
attribute externally & deny responsibility for failure
Self-handicapping:
publicly making advance external attributions for anticipated failure
