PSYC 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Explanatory Style
Document Summary
Observer: is inclined to attribute actions, especially highly distinctive ones to properties of the actor. (such as personality traits and abilities) Actor: inclined to attribute actions to situational factors. People make causal attributions because they need to draw infrences about others (and themselves) in order to make predictions about future behavior. Attribution theory: the study of how people understand the causes of events. Explanatory style: refers to a person"s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed across three dimensions: Internal/external: due to other people/circumstances: stable/unstable: will be present again in the future or not, global/specific: is something that influences other areas in their life or just one. Internal: an explanation the mentions an internal cause implicates the self ( there i go again ) External: an external cause does not. ( that was the pickiest set of questions i"ve ever seen ) Stable: implies that something will never change. ( i"m just not good at this )
