Chapter 1: The Science of Social Psych
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The Roots of Psychology and the 4 Core Assumptions
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42 Terms
Correspondent inference
The tendency to attribute to the actor an attitude, desire, or trait that corresponds to the action.
Edward Jones and Keith Davis (1965)
Correspondent inferences are most likely under three conditions:
1. The individual seems to have a choice in taking an action.
2. A person has a choice between two courses of action, and there is only one difference between one choice and the other.
3. A correspondent inference is more likely when someone acts inconsistently with a particular social role.
(Jones 1990)
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)
The tendency to attribute behavior to internal or dispositional qualities of the actor and consequently underestimate the causal role of situational factors.
Ned Jones and Victor Harris (1967)
Actor-observer effect
The tendency to make internal attributions for the behavior of others and external attributions for our own behavior.
(Jones & Nisbett, 1971)
Nisbett and colleagues (1973) asked people either why their roommates had chosen their majors or why they had chosen their own.
Participants made internal attributions for the roommate’s choice: “Chris chose psychology because she loves analyzing people.” But when explaining their own choice, they emphasized attributes of the major.
the actor-observer effect can be reversed by shifting the individual’s visual perspective. - Storms (1973)
Around the globe, when the goal is to judge a person, we judge people by their behavior. But when the goal is to judge the cause of a behavior…
there is cultural variation in how much the behavior is attributed to the person or the situation.
Dan Gilbert and colleagues (1988) proposed a model in which the attribution process occurs in a temporal sequence of three stages:
A behavior is observed and labeled (“That was a pro-Castro statement” or “That was helpful behavior”).
Observers automatically make a correspondent dispositional inference.
If observers have sufficient accuracy motivation and cognitive resources available, they modify their attributions to take salient situational factors into account.
Skitka and colleagues (2002) found that liberals generally are less likely than conservatives to view an AIDS victim as an irresponsible person. However, when cognitively busy,
the liberals viewed the AIDS patient as just as irresponsible as conservatives did.
Causal Hypothesis Testing
First, we generate a possible causal hypothesis (a possible explanation for the cause of the event). This could be the interpretation we’d prefer to make, the one we fear the most, or one based on a causal schema (a theory we hold about the likely cause of that specific kind of event). The causal hypothesis could also be based on a salient aspect of the event or a factor that is easily accessible from memory. Finally, causal accounts can also be based on close temporal and spatial proximity of a factor to the event, particularly if that co-occurrence happens repeatedly (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986; Michotte, 1963).
Covariation principle
The tendency to see a causal relationship between an event and an outcome when they happen at the same time.
(Kelley, 1973).
Harold Kelley (1967) described three sources of information for arriving at a causal attribution when accuracy is important:
consistency (across time),
distinctiveness (across situations), and
consensus (across people)
The Covariation Model
When an attribution is high in consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness, we attribute the behavior (Reese’s love of the movie) to an external cause (The movie must be great!).