Attribution Theory & Person Perception

Social psychology

scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the behaviors or characteristics of others

Attribution theory

theory that addresses the question of how people make judgments about the motives of behavior, particularly
whether these motives are either internal and personal (dispositional) or external and circumstantial (situational)

Dispositional Attributions

ascription of one's own or another's actions, an event, or an outcome to internal or psychological causes specific to the person concerned, such as traits, moods, attitudes, decisions and judgments, abilities, or effort

Situational Attributions

ascription of one's own or another's behavior, an event, or an outcome to causes outside the person concerned, such as luck, pressure from other people, or external circumstances

Explanatory Styles

an individual's unique way of describing and explaining some phenomenon, event, or personal history

Optimistic

hopefulness: the attitude that good things will happen and that people's wishes or aims will ultimately be
fulfilled

Pessimistic

the attitude that things will go wrong and that people's wishes or aims are unlikely to be fulfilled

Actor-Observer Bias

an attribution error, the tendency for individuals acting in a situation to attribute the causes of their behavior
to external or situational factors, such as social pressure, but for observers to attribute the same behavior to internal or dispositional factors, such as personality (For example, someone might blame a slippery pavement for tripping and falling while walking, but attribute a strangers fall to clumsiness or inattentiveness)

Person Perception

the processes by which people think about, appraise, and evaluate other people, especially about their motives

Fundamental Attribution Error

tendency of people to overemphasize personal causes for other people's behavior and to underemphasize personal causes for their own behavior (For example, someone might blame a coworker for being late because they are unreliable, instead of considering that they might have been stuck in traffic)

Self-serving Bias

the tendency to overstate one's role in a positive venture and underestimate it in a failure

Locus of Control

a construct that is used to categorize people's basic motivational orientations and perceptions of how much
control they have over the conditions of their lives

Internal LOC

perceive life outcomes as arising from the exercise of their own abilities

External LOC

perceive life outcomes as arising from factors out of their control

Mere exposure effect

the greater the exposure one has to another person, the more one generally comes to like that person

Self-fulfilling prophecy

process in which a person's expectation about another elicits behavior from the second person that
confirms the expectation

Social Comparison Theory

making judgements about ourselves through comparison with others

Upward Comparison

comparing oneself with someone judged to be better than oneself (e.g., by having more wealth or material goods, higher social standing, greater physical attractiveness)

Downward Comparison

comparing oneself with someone judged to be not as good as oneself

Relative Deprivation

the belief that a person will feel deprived or entitled to something based on the comparison to someone else

Mirror-Image Perceptions

the reciprocal views of one another often held by parties in conflict; for example, each may view itself
as moral and peace-loving and the other as evil and aggressive