Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Fundamental Attribution Error, Fidel Castro, Fritz Heider
13 May 2018
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SOCIAL THINKING AND PERCEPTION - Attribution: Perceiving the
Causes of Behaviour!
•In everyday life, we often make attributions, judgments about the causes of our own and
other people's behaviour and outcomes !
•Was my A on the mid-term because of hard work and ability, or was it just an easy test?
Did Bill criticize Carl because he is a rude person, or was he provoked? !
•Attributions influence our subsequent behaviour and emotions. If I attribute my A to
hard work and ability, I will feel greater pride and continue to exert more effort !
Personal versus Situational Attributions
•Fritz Heider maintained that our attempts to understand why people behave as they do
typically involve either personal attributions or situational attributions !
•Personal (internal) attributions infer that people's behaviour is caused by their
characteristics: Bill insulted Carl because Bill is a rude person; my A on an exam reflects
my high ability. Situational (external) attributions infer that aspects of the situation cause a
behaviour: Bill was provoked into insulting Carl; I received an A because the test was easy.!
•According to Harold Kelley (1973), three types of information determine the attribution we
make: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus. !
•First, is Kim's response consistent over time? !
•If you ask Kim again two weeks later and she still says that Art 391 is
terrible, then consistency is high. !
•Second, is her response distinctive? If Kim dislikes only Art 391, then
distinctiveness is high. !
•If she thinks that most of her courses are terrible, then distinctiveness is low. !
•Finally, how do other people respond? !
•If other students agree with Kim that Art 391 is terrible, then consensus is
high. But if they disagree with her, then consensus is low.!
•When consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus are all high, we are likely to make a
situational attribution: The course is terrible. !
•But, when consistency is high and the other two factors are low, we make a
personal attribution: Perhaps Kim is overly critical or just doesn't like university.!
Attributional Biases
•fundamental attribution error: We underestimate the impact of the situation and
overestimate the role of personal factors when explaining other people's behaviour !
•In a classic experiment, university students read either a favourable or unfavourable speech
about Cuban president Fidel Castro, presumably written by a member of a university
debating team. !
•They then estimated the writer's attitude toward Castro. !
•Half the students were told that the debate team member freely chose the
favourable or unfavourable position. !
•The others were told that the favourable or unfavourable viewpoint had been
assigned by the debate coach!
•When the speech was freely chosen, students logically assumed that the debater
had a correspondingly positive or negative attitude about Castro. !
•Yet, when told that the role was assigned, students paid insufficient attention
to this situational factor and still perceived that the pro-Castro and anti-
Castro debaters had different personal beliefs.!
•People make the fundamental attribution error on the basis of actors'
professional roles: They expect TV and movie stars to have the same
personal traits as the characters they play!
•The fundamental attribution error applies to how we perceive other people's behaviour
rather than our own. !
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•As comedian George Carlin once noted, the slow driver ahead of us is a “moron,”
and the fast driver trying to pass us is a “maniac.” !
•Yet we do not think of ourselves as a “moron” or a “maniac” when we are driving
slowly or trying to pass another driver. !
•One reason for this is that we have more information about the present
situation when making judgments about ourselves, as when we are driving
slowly to follow unfamiliar directions. !
•Second, the perceptual principle of figure-ground relations comes into play.
When you watch others behave, they are the “figure” that stands out against
the background. !
•But when we behave, we are not “watching” ourselves. We are part
of the background, and the situation that we are in stands out. If you
watch yourself on a videotape, you now become the figure, and are
more likely to make personal attributions about your own behaviour!
•When it comes to explaining our own behaviour, we tend to protect our self-esteem by
displaying a self-serving bias: making relatively more personal attributions for successes
and more situational attributions for failures. !
•In one study of athletes' post-game statements, successes tended to be attributed
to personal factors, such as “We played great defence and hung in there,” whereas
losses were more frequently attributed to external causes, such as poor officiating
or “Everything they shot was going in”!
•Depressed people, for example, often display the opposite attributional pattern—taking too
little credit for successes and too much credit for failures—a pattern that helps to keep
them depressed.!
Culture and Attribution
•Just as culture influences how we perceive the physical world it also affects how we
perceive the social world. !
•The tendency to attribute other people's behaviour to personal factors reflects a
Westernized emphasis on individualism. !
•In a study by J.G. Miller (1984), participants of varying ages from India and the
United States attributed causality for several behaviours. !
•With increasing age, participants from India made more situational
attributions and those from the United States made more personal
attributions. !
•Similarly, American university students and British schoolchildren make more
personal attributions for other people's criminal behaviour than do Korean
university students and Nigerian schoolchildren, who come from less
individualistic cultures!
•East Asians, in general, tend to hold a more holistic view of the universe than
Westerners !
•All events are interconnected and therefore cannot be understood in
isolation, leads East Asians to develop more complex views about the
causes of behaviour. !
•Accordingly, Incheol Choi and colleagues (2003) predicted and found that compared with
European-American college students, Korean college students scored higher overall on
measures of holistic thinking and also took a greater amount of information into account
when making causal attributions for other people's behaviour.!
•Those who thought more holistically than their peers took more information into account
when making attributions !
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Forming and Maintaining Impressions!
Primacy versus Recency: Are First Impressions More
Important?
•Try this simple exercise: Tell some people that you know a person who is “intelligent,
industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious.” !
•Tell others that this person is “envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and
intelligent.” !
•Then ask for their impression of this person. Both groups receive the same
information but in reverse order.!
•Solomon Asch (1946) found that the person in the first description was perceived more
positively—as being more sociable and happier—than the person in the second
description. !
•In another experiment, participants read a two-paragraph story about a boy named
Jim. !
•One paragraph described Jim as outgoing, the other as introverted. Participants'
impression of Jim was influenced more strongly by whichever paragraph they read
first !
•The primacy effect refers to our tendency to attach more importance to the initial
information that we learn about a person. New information can change our opinion, but it
has to “work harder” !
•First, we tend to be most alert to information we receive first. !
•Second, initial information may shape how we perceive subsequent information. !
•Primacy is the general rule of thumb in impression formation, especially for people who
dislike ambiguity and uncertainty !
•Primacy effects decrease—and recency effects (giving greater weight to the most recent
information) may occur—when we are asked to avoid making snap judgments, are
reminded to carefully consider the evidence, and are made to feel accountable for our
judgments!
Mental Sets and Schemas: Seeing What We Expect to See
•Whether perceiving objects or people, the same stimulus can be “seen” in different ways. !
•Our mental set, which is a readiness to perceive the world in a particular way,
powerfully shapes how we interpret a stimulus !
•What creates our mental sets? schemas!!
•Mental frameworks that help us organize and interpret information. !
•By telling you that our host is “cold,” “shy,” or “distracted,” I activate a set of
concepts and expectations (your schema) for how such a person is likely to behave. !
•Although the host's behaviour can be interpreted in multiple ways, you “fit” his
behaviour into the particular schema that is already activated.!
•A stereotype, which is a generalized belief about a group or category of people, represents
a powerful type of schema. !
•In one experiment, participants watched a videotape of a nine-year-old girl named
Hannah and were asked to judge her academic potential. !
•Half of the participants were told that Hannah came from an upper-middle-class
environment and that her parents had white-collar careers. Other participants were
told that Hannah came from a poor neighbourhood and that her parents were blue-
collar workers. !
•On the videotape, Hannah performed at an average level, answering some difficult
questions and missing some others. Although all participants saw the same
performance, those who thought Hannah came from an affluent setting rated her
higher in ability than did those who thought she came from a disadvantaged
background!
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Document Summary
Social thinking and perception - attribution: perceiving the. Did bill criticize carl because he is a rude person, or was he provoked: attributions in uence our subsequent behaviour and emotions. If i attribute my a to hard work and ability, i will feel greater pride and continue to exert more e ort. If kim dislikes only art 391, then distinctiveness is high. If she thinks that most of her courses are terrible, then distinctiveness is low. If other students agree with kim that art 391 is terrible, then consensus is high. Attributional biases fundamental attribution error: we underestimate the impact of the situation and overestimate the role of personal factors when explaining other people"s behaviour. In a classic experiment, university students read either a favourable or unfavourable speech about cuban president fidel castro, presumably written by a member of a university debating team.
