Announcements

Exam 1 one week from today (Feb 03)

Sections 002-007 here in 1324 East Hall

Sections 008-013 in 1202 SEB (School of Education)

bring #2 pencil and eraser

Exam review sheets available today in class and on the website

Coffee Talk next Tuesday after class

Attribution: an explanation for behavior or events. Also called an "inference".

Attribution Theory

The study of peceived causes of one's own and other's behavior

different factors can influence how we perceive the causes of behavior

these perceived causes have an influence on our reaction to the person or event

When are we likely to form attributions?

When negative events occur

When an event is surprising

Some evidence suggests that we spontaneously engage in causal analysis of other people's behavior

Winter & Uleman (1980)

Participants read a series of behaviors

"The plumber tucked an extra $20 into his wife's purse"

"The successful filmmaker refused to loan his mother the money"

Subjects later asked to recall behaviors; given a recall cue

semantic cue

trait cue

Results

Fritz Heider (1958)

"The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations"

internal and external attributions

internal

external

Heider as the "Father of Attribution Theory"

1. People have a preference for internal attributions

2. "Naive Scientist": Many of our attributions are the result of complex process of logical operations, e.g., weighing evidence, and integrating different types of information to come to an accurate conclusion

1. People have a preference for internal attributions

Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of the situation in explaining behavior

Why do we commit the FAE?

A. perceptual salience (Storms, 1973)

2 groups

1. see video from original point of view

2. see video from opposite point of view

Actors make ratings of self, and observer makes ratings of the actor, while watching one video or another.

Results

B. failure to correct for situation

Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull (1988)

 

Female subjects watch silent videotapes of a woman discussing several topics

Topics are either mundane or anxiety provoking

One group under cognitive load, other group not

Experimental Design

How dispositionally anxious is she?

The FAE occurs because

when forming self-attributions, our situations are perceptually salient; when forming other-attributions, the person is perceptually salient

correction for the situation is not an automatic but a controlled process

How do we make dispositional attributions?

How do we decide which trait the behavior implies?

Correspondent Inference Theory(Jones & Davis, 1965)

The theory that we make internal attributions about a person when there are

few noncommon effects of the behavior

when the behavior is unexpected

Noncommon effects: effects produced by a particular course of action that could not be produced by alternative courses of action

Many Noncommon Effects

Few Noncommon Effects

Behavior is Unexpected(Jones, Davis, & Gergen, 1961)

Participant listens to taped interview of target applying for astronaut or submariner job

Given descriptions of personality desired for each job

Target acted either in-line or out-of-line with expectations

Results of Jones, Davis, & Gergen (1961)