Attribution
Common Sense/Naive Psychology
Heider, 1958
His idea is based on 3 Principles
We construct casual theories in order to be able to predict and control the environment
We distinguish between personal and environmental factors when attributing causality of behaviour
Motivated, not random
Correspondent Inference
Jones & Davis, 1965
Explains how people infer that a person's behaviour corresponds to an underlying disposition or personality trait
e.g. how we infer that a friendly action is due to an underlying disposition to be friendly.
Why do people make correspondent inferences?
A dispositional cause is a stable cause that renders people's behaviour predictable and thus increases our own sense of control over our world
There are 5 cues for making a correspondent inference
Behaviour that is chosen freely is more indicative of a disposition than is behaviour that is clearly under the control of external threats, inducements or constraints
Actions which go against the social norm is generally counter-normative and is thus a better basis for making a correspondent inference
Hedonic relevance: tendency to attribute a behaviour to the dispositional factor rather than the situational factor.
Personalism: When an action impacts us, we tend to think that the behaviour was personal and intended, even if it was an accident.
Covariation Model
Non-Common Effects: Comparing the decision that a person made by looking at the consequences of the possible alternatives. e.g. Someone chooses to go to the Caribbean instead of Brazil. Both are sunny and have beaches so it's difficult to infer why their dispositional attributes lead them to choose the Caribbean. But, if they chose the Caribbean over Nepal, where there are mountains, it can be concluded that they prefer beaches.
Supporting Studies
Jones and Harris (1967)
Students wrote speeches for/against Fidel Castro. Inferences about those students were made by American students. Students tended to make more correspondent inferences for freely chosen socially unpopular positions, i.e. freely choosing to make a speech in support for Castro.
Jones, Davis, and Gergen (1961)
More correspondent inferences were made for out-of-role behaviour, i.e. quiet, reserved, introverted person who was applying to be a nursery teacher, which the required attributes favour a friendly, outer-directed behaviour
Limitations
Hewstone (1989)
Theory holds that correspondent inference depend to a great extent on the attribution of intentionality, yet unintentional behaviour (e.g. careless behaviour) can be a strong basis for a correspondent inference (e.g. they're a careless person)
In other words, dispositional attributions
Kelley (1967)
Covariation simply means that a person has information from multiple observations, at different times and situations, and can perceive the covariation of an observed effect and its causes
Naive psychologist is a model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world
The naive psychologist/scientist is the part of a human that seeks to understand and explain the actions of others, which is the basis of attribution theory
Central to attribution theory is the notion of disposition, understood as a stable individual quality
Therefore, attribution theory is a theory which explains the way in which we assign dispositions to people around us
There are 3 classes of information associated with the co-occurrence of a certain action (e.g. laughter) by a specific person (e.g. Simon) with a potential cause (e.g. a comedian)
Consistency information: does Simon always laugh at this comedian (high consistency) or only sometimes laughs at this comedian (low consistency)
Distinctiveness information: does Simon always laugh at everything (low distinctiveness) or only at the comedian (high distinctiveness)
Consensus information: does everyone laugh at the comedian (high consensus) or only Simon who laughs (low consensus)
This covariation principle is often used to decide whether to attribute a behaviour to internal dispositions (e.g. personality) or external factors (e.g. social pressure)
When there is low consensus, people discount the potential cause and search for an alternative. So, if Simon sometimes laughs and sometimes doesn't, the cause for laughter is neither the comedian nor Simon but some other cause
Relevant Studies
Issues
Supporting Studies
Scherer (1978)
Found that people made assumptions about the stable personality traits of complete strangers simply on the basis of hearing their voices on the telephone (supports 3rd principle)
Consistency, distinctiveness and consensus information require multiple observations. Sometimes we have this information. At other times, we may have, at best, incomplete information or even no information from multiple observations. How do we attribute causality under these circumstances?
Fundamental Attribution Error
Originally identified by Ross (1977) refers to a tendency for people to make dispositional attributions for others' behaviour, even when there are clear situational causes.
Use the example of Jones and Harris' (1967) study (Fidel Castro)
Self-Serving Bias
Attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-esteem or the self-concept. We explain away our negative behaviours and failures as being due to coercion, normative constraints and other situational factors that do not reflect who we 'really' are.
Miller and Ross (1975) suggest that there is a cognitive component, especially for the self-enhancing aspect. People generally expect to succeed and therefore accept responsibility for success. If they tried and succeeded, they associate the success to their own effort and exaggerate the amount of control they had over their performance
Supporting Study
Johnson et al (1964) investigated the effect of pupils' learning on teachers' self-serving bias. Educational psychology students had to teach arithmetic concepts to fourth-grade boys via an intercom. (In reality, there were no pupils, the feedback was automated)
Each teacher explained to 2 pupils how to multiply by 10 and saw that pupil A had done well but pupil B had done poorly. The teachers then taught the pupils how to multiply by 20 and this time, pupil A continued to do well but pupil B had either (a) continued to do badly or (b) improved to do as well as pupil A.
When asked to account for the performances of both pupils, the teachers tended to accept responsibility for improved performance but to blame continued low performance on B himself
Continuing on from the study by Johnson et al (1964) in SSB. It's conceivable that as the teacher tried harder or varied her instructional method after B's initial poor performance, the informational pattern available to her would show a strong positive covariation between her own behaviour and the improving student
However, this might not be a demonstration of SSB because it is not obvious why a motivational concept of any description needs to be invoked to explain these data. Since all ppts taught a student who performed consistently well, they knew that their behaviour did not predictably produce low performance. From this it would only be rational to draw the inference that the failures of pupil B was not solely to their influence
Further support for a nonmotivational interpretation comes from the covariation model by Kelley (1967)
But a negative or noncovariance between her own behaviour and that of the consistently poor student. By the covariation model/principle, the former would warrant a self-attribution and the latter would not
Convariation refers to your ability to observe how two or more variables change in relation to each other. The model assumes that you have information from multiple experiences (at different places and times) that you use to determine what variables have changed and what has stayed the same