Psychology: Key Attribution, Biases, and Emotional Theories

Situational Attribution

Consensus and distinctiveness are both high.

Dispositional Attribution

Consensus and distinctiveness are both low.

Discounting Principle

People are less likely to attribute behavior to a specific cause if other plausible causes are also present.

Counterfactual Thinking

Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened 'if only' something had occurred differently.

Emotional Amplification

People often feel worse about a negative outcome if they believe it was easily preventable.

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

People tend to take credit for successes (internal attributions) and blame external factors for failures.

Actor-Observer Difference

People tend to explain their own behavior with situational factors, but explain others' behavior with personal traits.

Primacy Effect

Primacy effects most often occur when the information is ambiguous.

Framing Effect

The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented.

Construal Level Framing

Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.

Motivated Confirmation Bias

Search for evidence that proves they are right.

Bottom-Up Processing

Take in relevant info from the environment.

Top-Down Processing

'Theory-driven' mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations.

Priming

Exposure to one stimulus influences how you respond to a later stimulus, often without conscious awareness.

Availability Heuristic

People judge how likely something is based on how easily examples come to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

People judge how likely something is based on how much it matches their mental prototype or stereotype, often ignoring actual statistics.

Fluency

Refer to the ease (or difficulty) associated with information processing.

Base-Rate Information

How many members of the category there are in a population.

Illusory Correlation

The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not.

Regression Effect

Extreme or unusual outcomes tend to be followed by more average, typical outcomes due to chance.

Regression Fallacy

People ignore natural fluctuations and assume that movement back toward the average (mean) is caused by something external.

Appraisals

The interpretation an individual gives to a situation that gives rise to the experience of the emotion.

Social-functional theory

Emotions help people communicate, cooperate, and respond to others in ways that support group living and social harmony.

Emotional mimicry

Copying others' emotional expressions.

Broaden and build hypothesis

Positive emotions broaden our patterns of thinking in ways that help us expand our understanding of the world and build our social relationships.

Affective forecasting

Predicting future emotions.

Immune neglect

Tendency to ignore our ability to respond productively to stress and other potential sources of unhappiness.

Focalism

Focus too much on the most central elements of significant events, failing to consider how other aspects of our lives will influence our happiness.

Duration neglect

Tendency for people to ignore how long an experience lasts when evaluating how good or bad it was, focusing instead on the peak and the end of the experience.

Attitude

An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.

Cognitions

Thoughts that typically reinforce a person's feelings.

Response latency

The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.

Implicit attitude measure

An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn't involve a self-report.

Affect

How much someone likes or dislikes an object.

Cognition

Thoughts and knowledge that typically reinforce how a person feels.

System justification theory

People are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable, fair, and legitimate.

Cognitive dissonance theory

People experience discomfort when attitudes and behavior are inconsistent.

Effort justification

When people exert effort toward a goal that turns out to be disappointing, they justify their use of energy by deciding the goal is truly worthwhile.

Induced (forced) compliance

Occurs when a person performs an action that goes against their private beliefs due to external pressure, authority, or reward.

Self-perception theory

Suggests that people infer their own attitudes and emotions by observing their behavior.

Terror management theory

Awareness of our own mortality creates existential anxiety; believing in something bigger than ourselves helps manage the fear of death.