PSYC 332 Chapter Notes -Dispositional Attribution

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 332
• Professor: Richard Koestner

Document Summary

Attribution theories describe what psychological operations take place that lead people to embrace situational or dispositional interpretations of other people"s behavior, but not why these happened. The logic of attribution: attributional equation core: behavior = situation + disposition. Decision rule discounting principle: an observer should not conclude that a person has a unique predisposition to behave when the person does exactly what the situation demands. An observer shouldn"t assume that d is positive or negative when s and b are equal. Nondiagnostic behavior: the sort of behavior that the situation demands. It tells us nothing about the person"s dispositional tendencies to behave. The correspondence bias: people sort of obey the discounting principle. Right: when the essayist was free to write, subjects took his essay as direct evidence of his opinion. Wrong: when the essayist was following, subjects still took his essay as direct evidence of his opinion.