PSYC1001 Lecture 12: Social Psychology
12 Jun 2018
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ATTRIBUTIONS
Process of figuring out why people act in a particular way.
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Heider, 1958 --> father of attribution theory.
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We credit others' behaviours to either internal dispositions or external situations or some combination of the two.
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Extent to which other people react to the same stimulus or event in the same way as the person that we
are considering e.g. "do others regularly behave this way in this situation?"
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Consensus
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Extent to which the person in question reacts to the stimulus or event in the same way on different
occasions (i.e. across time) e.g. "does this person regularly behave this way in this situation?"
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Consistency
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Consensus (low) --> Consistency (High) --> Distinctiveness (low) = internal/dispositional attribution
Consensus (high) --> Consistency (high) --> Distinctiveness (high) = external/dispositional attribution?
Extent to which the person in question responds in the same manner to different stimuli or events e.g.
"Does this person behave this way in many other situations?"
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Distinctiveness
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Attribution Information (Kelly, 1967)
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Situation perception --> Behavioral expectation --> Behaviours perception --> Attribution
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Attribution Process
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Occurs when infer dispositions from situationally induced behaviours
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Correspondence Bias/Fundamental Attribution Error and the Observer Bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995)
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Attributional errors
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People lack awareness of the actor's objective or subjective situation
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People have inappropriate expectations for how a person will behave in such a situation
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People's awareness of the actor's situation can lead to an inaccurate perception of the actor's behaviour
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People lack the motivation or capacity to correct for the trait inferences that may have arisen.
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Correspondence bias arises because…
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Each stage corresponds to each fault
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But if dispositional attributions has errors, why do we still have it?
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Economical --> can explain behaviour and sum up the reason rather than tally all their factors, is more
convenient
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Not likely to have drastically bad outcomes
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Satisfy the need for control (to understand and predict the world)
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Attributions matter because…
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Types of information we consider when making internal/dispositional or external/situation attributions:
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Students recalled a time when they had a disagreement or difference of opinion with an instructor
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Participants rated their external vs internal attributions of the instructor's behaviour e.g. was it due to the fault of a
bad question or was it because of the tutor's fault because they were running late
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Expressive dissent - complaining to others about my rant
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Rhetorical dissent - I want my instructor to remedy my concerns
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Vengeful dissent - hoping to ruin instructor's reputation
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Participants then rated their dissent behaviours:
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The more internal the attributions for the instructor's behaviour in the disagreement, the more students
engaged in all three types of dissent behaviour
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Strongest correlation between attributions and vengeful dissent
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Findings
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Experiment
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STEREOTYPES!
Attributions
Stereotypes and Attributions
Self-fulfilling prophecies
5A - Social Psychology (Williams)
Monday, March 26, 2018
12:56 AM
PSYCH 1001 Page 1
