Social Psych Chapter 4

attribution theory

a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior

Internal attribution

the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality - an explanation that assigns the causes of his behavior internally

for example, why a father has just yelled at his young daughter, we might decide that the father has poor parenting skills or is an impatient person.

External attribution

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation

for example, why a father has just yelled at his young daughter, if we conclude that he yelled because his daughter had just stepped into the street without looking, we would be making an external attribution for his behavior.

This internal/external attribution dichotomy plays an extraordinarily important role in even the most intimate parts of our lives. Indeed, spouses in happy, satisfied marriages make very different attributions about their partners than spouses in troubled, distressed marriages. Satisfied spouses tend to make internal attributions for their partners' positive behaviors (e.g., "She helped me because she's such a generous person") and external attributions for their partners' negative behaviors (e.g., "He said something mean because he's so stressed at work right now"). In contrast, spouses in distressed marriages tend to display the opposite pattern: Their partners' positive behaviors are chalked up to external causes (e.g., "She helped me because she wanted to impress our friends"), while negative behaviors are attributed to internal causes (e.g., "He said something mean because he's a self-centered jerk").

Harold Kelley

put forth a theory that explains the kind of attributions people make based on three kinds of information: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus

major contribution to attribution theory was the idea that we notice and think about more than one piece of information when making this decision

covariation model

a theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we note the pattern between when the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors

Ex. let's say you ask your friend to lend you their car, and they say no. Naturally, you wonder why. Has your friend refused to lend you their car in the past? Do they lend it to other people? Do they normally lend you things when you ask them?

Harold Kelleys theory: assumed that when we are in the process of forming an attribution, we gather information, or data. The data we use, according to Kelley, are about how a person's behavior "covaries," or changes, across time and place and depending on the target of the behavior.

consensus information

the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

for example: Suppose that you are working at your part-time job at a store and you observe your boss yelling at another employee, Hannah. Automatically, you ask that attributional question about your boss: "Why is he yelling at Hannah and being so critical? Is it something about him as a person, something about what is going on around him (perhaps something about Hannah), or something else entirely?"

Do other people at work also yell at or criticize Hannah? In other words, is there consensus to how various people respond to Hannah? If so, if the behavior is high in consensus, perhaps something about Hannah's job performance is responsible for the interaction you witnessed. But if not, if the behavior is low in consensus, you would become more confident that your boss's behavior is more unique and, therefore, he is to blame.

distinctiveness information

the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli

for example: Suppose that you are working at your part-time job at a store and you observe your boss yelling at another employee, Hannah. Automatically, you ask that attributional question about your boss: "Why is he yelling at Hannah and being so critical? Is it something about him as a person, something about what is going on around him (perhaps something about Hannah), or something else entirely?" - in this case, everything other than Hannah. Is Hannah the only employee whom your boss criticizes publicly? That is, does your boss only react this way to Hannah and no one else? If so, if the behavior is high in distinctiveness, we wonder what it is about her that seems to set him off, and we begin to think she's to blame. If, however, your boss reacts this way with multiple people, meaning that his behavior is low in distinctiveness, we might think that he's probably the one responsible for the confrontation.

consistency information

the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

for example: Suppose that you are working at your part-time job at a store and you observe your boss yelling at another employee, Hannah. Automatically, you ask that attributional question about your boss: "Why is he yelling at Hannah and being so critical? Is it something about him as a person, something about what is going on around him (perhaps something about Hannah), or something else entirely?" - Does your boss criticize Hannah regularly and frequently, whether the store is filled with customers or empty, whether it's Monday morning or Saturday evening? In other words, is yelling consistently the outcome when the boss and Hannah are together? According to Kelley's theory, it is difficult to make any sort of straightforward attribution when consistency is low

Jones and Harris (1967)

Fidel Castro = communist leader of Cuba

Aim: to investigate the hypothesis of whether people would attribute behavior which people had a choice in to dispositional, and behaviors that are due to chance, situational fators

Students read poli-sci essays, either pro- or anti- Castro. They were told that some writers -chose- pro or anti, and some were determined by chance. Participants were asked to rate how pro or anti the writers attitudes were.

Results contradicted hypothesis! When participants believed writers chose positions, they rated those who were pro as having more positive attitudes (dispositional). However, when told choice was random, they -still- rated pro writers higher than anti

--participants were unable to see the influence of the situational constraints placed on writers - they couldn't reefrain from attributing sincere belief (disp. factors) to the writers, even though they knew they were randomly assigned

**Classic FAE Study

perceptual salience

the seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention

Why do people fall victim to the fundamental attribution error? One reason is that when we try to explain someone else's behavior, our focus of attention is usually on the person, not on the surrounding situation In fact, the situational causes of another person's behavior are practically invisible to us. If we don't know what happened to someone earlier in the day (e.g., they received an F on their midterm), we can't use that situational information to help us understand their current behavior. And even when we know their situation, we still don't know how they interpret it

Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1975)

In this study, two male students engaged in a "get acquainted" conversation. (They were actually both accomplices of the experimenters and followed a script during their conversation.) At each session, six actual research participants also took part. They sat in assigned seats, surrounding the two conversationalists. Two sat on each side of the actors; they had a clear, profile view of both individuals. Two observers sat behind each actor; they could see the back of one actor's head but the face of the other. Thus, the conversationalist who was visually salient—that is, the individual the participants could see better—was cleverly manipulated. After the conversation, participants were asked questions about the two men—for example, Who had taken the lead in the conversation? Who had chosen the topics to be discussed? What happened? The person they could see better was the person they thought had more impact on the conversation. Even though all the observers heard the same conversation, those who faced student A thought he had taken the lead and chosen the topics, whereas those who faced student B thought he had taken the lead and chosen the topics. In comparison, those who could see both students equally well thought both were equally influential.

Two-Step Attribution Process

analyzing behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior

We make an internal attribution, assuming that a person's behavior was due to something about that person. We then sometimes attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in. It's just that we often don't make enough of an adjustment in this second step. Indeed, when we are distracted or preoccupied, we often skip the second step altogether, making an internal attribution in the extreme

Self serving attributions

explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors

Ex. Imagine that Imani goes to her chemistry class one day feeling anxious because she's getting her midterm grade back. The professor returns her exam. Imani turns it over and sees that she has received an A. What will Imani think explains her grade? As you might guess, people tend to take personal credit for their successes: Imani is likely to think that her success was due to the fact that she's good at chemistry and just plain smart. But what if she got a bad grade? Here, she is more likely to blame external events beyond her control, such as the professor giving an unfair test.

Most people try to maintain their self-esteem whenever possible, even if that means distorting reality by changing a thought or belief.

We are particularly likely to engage in self-serving attributions when we fail at something and we feel we can't improve at it. The external attribution protects our self-esteem, as there is little hope we can do better in the future. But if we believe we can improve, we're more likely to attribute our current failure to internal causes and then work on improving

Belief in a just world

A defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people, coined by Melvin Lerner—the assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get

One example is the belief that bad things happen only to bad people—or, at least, only to people who make mistakes or poor choices. This allows us to rest assured that bad things won't happen to us because we won't be that careless.

Another example of a defensive attribution process: For example, consider the terrible hypothetical of a student on your campus being sexually assaulted. How do you think you and your friends would react? Would you wonder if the student had done something to trigger the attack? Would you ask if the victim had invited the perpetrator into their room? Problematic questions like these assign blame in the wrong place—they are examples of a defensive attribution process by which people might try to make themselves feel better about a disturbing attack by placing some of the blame onto the victim. By using this attributional bias, the perceiver does not have to acknowledge that there is a certain randomness to becoming a victim, that accidents or crimes happen to good and careful people as well

bias blind spot

the tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are

we realize that attributionally biased thinking can occur in other people, but we're not so good at spotting it in ourselves. Our own thoughts seem rational and sensible, but other people, hey, they're susceptible to biases! These findings suggest that we often need to reflect more carefully on our judgment processes, check our conclusions, and remind ourselves that a bias blind spot may be lurking.

Analytic thinking style

This style involves focusing on the properties of objects (or people) while paying much less attention to the context or situation that surrounds that object - more common in western cultures

For example, imagine that you are talking to a group of friends. The expression on one friend's face catches your attention. She's frowning, and her mouth is set in a tight line. What is she feeling? The analytic thinking style suggests that you would focus on her face alone and reach a decision. The holistic thinking style suggests that you would scan the faces of the others in the group, compare them to hers, and then reach a decision.

Holistic Thinking Style

Here, people focus on the "whole picture"—that is, the object (or person) and the context that surrounds that object as well as the relationships that exist between them - more common in East Asian cultures

For example, imagine that you are talking to a group of friends. The expression on one friend's face catches your attention. She's frowning, and her mouth is set in a tight line. What is she feeling? The analytic thinking style suggests that you would focus on her face alone and reach a decision. The holistic thinking style suggests that you would scan the faces of the others in the group, compare them to hers, and then reach a decision.

Takahiko Masuda and colleagues (2008)

They presented research participants in the United States and Japan with cartoon people in groups. One person in each cartoon was the central figure, and had a facial expression that was happy, sad, angry, or neutral. The other people in the group had facial expressions that either matched the central figure or were different. The participants' task was to judge the central person's emotion on a 10-point scale. The researchers found that the facial expressions of the other group members' faces had little effect on Americans' ratings of the central figure. If the central figure was smiling broadly, he received a high rating for "happy." It didn't matter what the rest of the group was expressing. In comparison, the facial expressions of the other group members had a significant effect on Japanese participants' ratings of the central figure. A broad smile was interpreted as very happy if the group members were also smiling; the same broad smile was interpreted as less happy if the other group members looked sad or angry. In short, the meaning of the cartoon character's facial expression depended on his "context"—what the other cartoon characters standing next to him seemed to be feeling. The researchers also measured the eye-tracking movements of the participants as they looked at the cartoons. The Japanese spent more time looking at the cartoon characters in the background than did the Americans. Both groups began by looking at the central character, but after 1 second, Japanese participants started to scan the other characters significantly more than did American participants

Event related potentials (ERPs)

provide a more fine-grained analysis of the onset and offset of neural firing by measuring electrical activity through sensors placed on the scalp.

In one study, researchers presented participants with a series of simple perceptual tasks that involved visual information about "targets" and context (Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008). In an interesting twist, their participants were all Americans who had grown up in the United States but were of two different ethnic backgrounds: White or East Asian American. The pattern of ERPs indicated that the White Americans paid more attention to the targets, while the East Asian Americans paid more attention to the context surrounding the targets.

fMRI

used in the Masuda and colleagues experiment to examine where in the brain cultural experience predicts perceptual processing

Miller (1984)

Shows that while individuals from Western cultures favour dispositional explanations, individuals from Non-Western cultures tend to favour environmental explanations

children are indistinguishable

fundamental attribution error

overestimating the extent to which an individual's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and underestimating the role of situational factors.

dispositional attribution

assuming that another's behavior is due to personality factors, not situational ones

Ying-Yi Hong and colleagues (2003)

investigated the fundamental attribution error among Hong Kong Chinese college students. These students were bicultural—deriving their identity not only from their Hong Kong Chinese culture but also from Western culture, to which they had had a great deal of exposure. The participants were first shown a series of images and asked brief questions about them. The purpose of the photographs was to activate, or prime, one aspect of their bicultural identity. Half the participants saw images representing American culture, such as the American flag and the U.S. Capitol building. The other half saw Chinese images, such as a Chinese dragon and the Great Wall. Participants in the control condition saw geometric figures, which did not prime either culture. Next, in a supposedly unrelated task, participants were shown a photograph of a fish swimming in front of a school of other fish. They were asked to make an attribution: Why was this fish swimming in front of the others? Their responses were coded for dispositional reasons (e.g., "The fish is leading the other fish") and situational reasons (e.g., "The fish is being chased by the other fish"). The researchers found that about 30% of the control group made situational attributions about the central fish. However, participants primed with thoughts of one culture or the other showed markedly different patterns. Those primed with Chinese cultural images were more likely to make situational attributions about the fish (nearly 50% of the participants), while those primed with American cultural images were less likely to make situational attributions (about 15% of the participants), instead making dispositional attributions. Western cultures think more like personality psychologists Eastern cultures think more like social psychologists, considering the situational causes of behavior

Karma

the notion that good moral behavior is rewarded and bad actions will be punished, whether in this lifetime or others

affect blends

facial expressions in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

belief perseverance

the tendency to stick with an initial judgement even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

decode

to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness

display rules

culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

emblems

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations, such as the OK or thumbs up sign

encode

to express or emit nonverbal behavior, such as smiling or patting someone on the back

nonverbal communication

The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words; nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and movement, the use of touch, and gaze

primacy effect

when it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later