Chapter Sixteen: Social Behavior

B. Attribution Processes: Explaining Behavior

If I leave this section blank, will you attribute it to my laziness? I'll probably attribute it to not having any sleep in the last four nights. Inferring cause to someone else's behavior has some interesting biases.

1. Attributions: What? Why? When?
2. Internal Versus External Attributions
3. Kelly's Covariation Model
4. Attributions for Success and Failure
5. Bias in Attributions
6. Culture and Attributional Tendencies

Contents

Attributions: What? Why? When?

What is an attribution?:

Why do People make attributions?

Because they have a need to understand their experience.

When are people likely to make attributions?

• An unusual event grabs your attention
• Events have personal consequences
• Others behave in unexpected ways
• You are suspicious about the motives underlying someone's behavior

Internal Versus External Attributions

Internal attribution
External attribution

Kelly's Covariation Model

Synopsis: When people attempt to infer the causes of another's behavior, they consider three types of information:

• Consistency of behavior over time

• Distinctiveness - Is it unique to this entity?

• Consensus - Do others respond the same way?

Text's example of an argumentative student: Figure 16.2

Attributions for Success and Failure

Synopsis: The dimensions of "stability" and "controllability" have been added to the internal-external dimension to better understand how we explain personal success and failure in life.

Adding the stability dimension --> see Figure 16.3

to discussion of attributions and depression in the Psychological Disorders Chapter (14).

Bias in Attributions

Synopsis: Attributions are ultimately guesswork about the causes of events, and people often come up with inaccurate explanations events because of certain attributional biases.


Actor-Observer Bias

You interpret the causes of your own behavior quite differently than the behavior of others.

Funadamental attribution error

In general, actors favor external attributions for their behavior, while observers are likely to explain the same behavior with internal attributions.

Defensive Attribution

We sometimes blame the victim so that we can continue to believe we live in a just world and avoid the disturbing fact that the calamity can happen to us too.

Self-Serving Bias

Explaining failure:

• The actor makes external attributions.
• The observers makes internal attributions.

Explaining success

• Actor makes internal attributions.
• Obsevers make external attributions.

Culture and Attributional Tendencies

Synopsis: The pattern of attributions vary from culture to culture.Some of the most striking differences are between indivdualistic cultures versus collectivist cultures.

Definitions:

Individualism
Collectivism

Cultural differences:

• Collective societies less prone to fundamental attribution error.

• Individualistic societies more prone to self-serving bias.

• Japanese culture more prone to self-effacing bias.

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