Cognitive Biases and Attribution Theories

Vocabulary flashcards covering key cognitive biases, attribution theories, cross-cultural psychological studies, and landmark social psychology experiments.

Cognitive Biases

Systematic errors in thinking that affect judgment and decision making.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to seek out, interpret, and remember information that confirms our beliefs, while minimizing, discounting, or ignoring information that disconfirms them.

Wason's Rule Discovery Task

A study using a $2-4-6$ number sequence task showing that people test hypotheses by trying to confirm them rather than attempting to falsify them.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A process whereby one's expectations about oneself or others lead to behaviors that confirm those initial expectations.

Pygmalion Effect

A self-fulfilling prophecy where high expectations (e.g., from teachers or leaders) lead to an improvement in performance, while low expectations lead to poorer performance.

Belief Perseverance Error

The tendency to retain one's initial beliefs despite facing clear empirical evidence to the contrary.

Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard (1975) Study

A study demonstrating belief perseverance by showing that participants continued to over- or under-estimate their abilities even after being debriefed that their performance feedback was completely fake.

Overconfidence Effect

The cognitive bias characterized by the tendency to be more confident than correct, overestimating the accuracy of one's beliefs, predictions, ability, and knowledge.

Attribution Theories

A group of social psychology theories describing the cognitive processes by which people explain the causes of behavior and events.

Naïve Psychology

Fritz Heider's (1958) concept that individuals act as amateur scientists making attributions to fulfill a basic need to understand, predict, and control their environment.

Dispositional Attribution

Explaining behavior by attributing it to internal traits, personality characteristics, attitudes, or enduring personal states.

Situational Attribution

Explaining behavior by attributing it to external environmental factors, social context, or actions of others.

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

The tendency to overestimate the role of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors when explaining the behavior of others.

Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz (1977) Quiz Show Study

A study demonstrating the FAE where observers and contestants rated quiz show questioners as significantly more knowledgeable than contestants, ignoring the questioner's situational advantage of creating the questions.

Taylor & Fiske (1975) Experiment

A perceptual salience study demonstrating that observers rated whichever actor was directly in their line of sight as having a more dominant causal role in a conversation.

Jones & Harris (1967) Study

A classic experiment showing that participants made internal attributions regarding essay writers' true attitudes toward Fidel Castro even when explicitly told the authors were assigned their position without choice.

Miller (1984) Cross-Cultural Study

A study showing cultural differences in the FAE, where European American participants increasingly relied on dispositional attributions with age, while South Asian (Indian) participants increasingly relied on situational attributions.

Choi & Nisbett (1998) Study

An experiment showing that Korean participants made much less extreme dispositional inferences than American participants when assigned to explicit no-choice conditions.

Actor-Observer Bias

The tendency to attribute other people's behaviors to dispositional factors while attributing one's own behaviors to situational factors.

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

The tendency to attribute personal successes to internal traits and talents, while attributing personal failures to external factors beyond one's control.

Self-Enhancing Bias

Attributing personal success to internal traits in order to boost confidence and self-esteem.

Self-Protecting Bias

Attributing personal failure to external situational factors to absolve oneself from personal responsibility and protect self-esteem.

Self-Serving Blindness

The tendency to recognize external biases or influences in other people's behavior while failing to perceive the impact of those same influences on one's own actions.

Hindsight Bias

The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one could have foreseen or predicted it all along.

Three Levels of Hindsight Bias

Memory Distortion ('I told you it would happen…'), Inevitability ('It just had to happen…'), and Foreseeability ('I just had a feeling it would happen…').

Choi & Nisbett (2000) Hindsight Bias Study

A study showing that Korean participants exhibited greater hindsight bias (were less surprised by unexpected outcomes) than American participants due to a greater orientation toward complex contextual factors.

False Consensus Effect

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people share our personal beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors.

"Eat at Joe's" Study (Ross et al., 1977)

A landmark false consensus study where $62\%$ of students who agreed to wear a sandwich board estimated their peers would also agree, whereas $67\%$ of those who refused estimated their peers would also refuse.

False Uniqueness Effect

The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one's desirable traits, unique abilities, or successful behaviors.