Advanced Social Psychology: Attributions

Attribution

The naïve scientist-we are able to solve complex mathematical problems, and use sophisticated logic to construct arguments, we are cogent, balanced and analytical. we apply this to everyday social thought and action. Heider argued that people are motivated by two primary needs.

1. The need to form a coherent view of the world

2. He need to gain control over the environment.

Heider believed that this desire for consistency and stability, the ability to predict and control makes everyone like a naïve scientist, the need to attribute cause to effects and to create a meaningful, stable world where things makes sense, highly influential for social psychologists, called attribution theory

Attribution theory

Heider believed that we have a basic need to attribute casually because this ascribes meanings to our world, making it clear, definable and predictable thereby reducing uncertainty.

Types of attribution;

Internal attribution- Any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person such as personality, mood abilities, attitudes and effort

External attributions- Any explanation that locates the cause as being external to the person, such as actions of others, social pressures or luck.

two main theory's of the making attribution processes came from research in 1970's;

Correspondent inference theory

When making social inferences people try to infer that the action of an actor corresponds to, or is  a indicator of a stable personality characteristic. People believe its because people prefer internal attributions over external attributions because its more valuable when predicting behaviour for example some just being 'rude' is a internal attribution which will predict more future behaviour because they genuinely are however a external attribution such as they are having a bad day will not apply to the future therefore less predictions will be able to be made.

According to Jonas and Davies we assess whether there is a correspondence between behaviour and personality by processing three key types of information: social desirability, choice and non-common effects. We are likely to attach attributions to a person when they do a socially undesirable action and when someone does something against the majority, this may well be because of  a underlying personality trait because the person is not conforming with the rest of the majority like usual, same for when the action is seen as freely chosen. When a behaviour has a unique consequence its seen as non common consequence and this behaviour is usually given a dispositional attribution, for example a punch. Limitations also include a lot of people make external attributions as well and we often put people’s behaviour down to having a ‘bad day’ and this theory only focuses on internal attributions.

The Co-variation Model

Kelley’s model accounts for multiple behaviours, external as well as internal, she believes that causality (relationship between cause and effect) is attributed using the co-variation principle. This principle states that for something to be the cause of a particular behaviour it must be present when the behaviour is present and absent when the behaviour is absent. Three types of information are needed for arriving at an attribution whether it be internal or external: Consensus, consistency and distinctiveness information, when observing someone’s behaviour in a social context the combined impact will determine what attribution is made.

Consensus information is the extent of which other people in the scene act the same as the target person

Consistency information is the extent to which the target person acts the same way on numerous occasions

Distinctive information is the extent to which the target person reacts in the same way in different social contexts.

The presence or absence of each of these types of information has implications for whether a dispositional or situational attribution will be more likely. Presence of consensus information implies a situational cause, whereas a absence would imply a dispositional cause, the presence of consistency implies a dispositional cause whereas the absence would be a situational cause, the presence of distinctiveness information implies a dispositional cause but the absence implies a situational. Pattern of presence or absence across the three is not always as clear cut as certain examples, the way the information is combined is not simply additive, but depends on the interacts of the different elements, people are acting like naive scientists if they attribute causally this way, seeking out and assessing these three types of information then weighting it up to either a internal or external attribution, there is evidence that people can make attribution decisions in the way outlined by this model. However it is far from universally applicable, while people use all three of these information, they are not equally attended too (Chen, Yates and Mcginnies) people pay more attention to the target persons information than other peoples in the contexts information (Windschild and wells). Perhaps more importantly, although people follow these rules and deduce causality logically in some circumstances, these only appear when all the information is laid out for the participants to see clearly  and when people have the time to work out a likely cause in the complex way above, however when some information is missing people can still make attributions. This implies there are alternate ways in which people can make these sorts of judgements.

Attributional biases- Kelley's model does to some extent explain judgements, people can look for and combine three types of information however its rare that that all of us routinely do this complex process required by the co variation model, rather than being logical and rational people often go on their gut feeling, we don’t spend much time on creating these impressions about people we meet day to day. Researchers started to believe we take shortcuts in social judgement after people were making a number of 'systematic errors' when they were asked to make assessments of causality in experiments. The errors were not random which suggests alternative psychological strategies being made which came from the shortcomings of the naïve scientist approach.

The Fundamental Attribution Error: People tend to make more internal attributions rather than external even when the situational cause is clear. This is shown by Jones and Harris (1967) in their study were two groups of participants who read essays and one group were told it was the writers own choice for the topic and another where they were told the writer had no choice and the pp's ignored the situational attribution and still used the internal attribution that it reflected the writers own opinion. The reason why this Fundamental attribution error occurs is because of perpetual salience. The person being observed is the most perpetual salient aspect of the situation (moving and talking) so an internal attribution is more accessible (Taylor and Fiske). Something much simpler (what appears to capture the attention the most) determines the social judgement, not a complex naïve scientist-like thought process, the idea that people use simple processing ways such as PS is reinforced by the observation of another attribution bias, the actor-observer bias.

FAE  is not as universal as suggested, cross cultural researchers realized that in non-western cultures the tendency to use dispositional attributions wasn’t so fundamental because of differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures. Individualistic cultures tend to focus on the individual therefore more of a tendency to see internal attributions however collectivist focus on a bigger social world and focuses on those around them therefore more external attributions may be made however culture is not the only thing which can affect FAE.

The Actor-Observer Bias- The tendency to attribute other people's behaviour to internal causes and our own behaviour to external causes. Storms: in a apparent 'conversion' task two pps were allocated to observer roles and two as actors and simply had a 5 minute chat with each other, in a subsequent phase they were required to attribute causality (judge whether opinions expressed reflected the speaker ‘stable personality or some contextual determinant). He found that observers emphasized dispositional factors when explaining actor’s behaviours and actors emphasized contextual factors when explaining their own behaviour, explanation again is perceptual salience. Actor’s attention was directed away from themselves and looking at that situation and this made it more accessible to them and the observer’s attention was on the actor making dispositional explanations more accessible to them. Further support it was PS is when the actors were shown videotapes of their opposite perspective before making attributions and when actors saw their own faces their attention shifted to themselves causing them to make more internal attributions.

Self-Serving Attributions- as well as cognitive perceptual processes providing an inferential shortcut in attribution judgements, motivations can also bias attributions . Olson and Ross  argue that we are more likely to make internal attributions for our own successes and external for failures because this protects our self esteem, internal boosts our self worth and external protects us from feeling bad. This also works in group level too where groups attribute their success’s to internal and other group success’s to external therefore make us feel good by association.

Ingroup Attributions: we often divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, in the same we make self serving attributions we make group serving attributions e.g. our foot ball team won because of skills etc but if the others win they had a bad referee which is external. These group-focused explanations are called intergroup attributions, these can lead to propagate prejudice and discrimination against minority groups in society, if minority’s positive behaviour is often due to external and negative due to internal it is easy to see how a negative stereotype is held against some groups.

Social Representations: Moscovici theory of SR refers to shared belief and understanding between a broad group of people, these include culturally held and transmitted knowledge about causal relations. This theory says that causality is transformed and communicated through informal discussion to form a common place, consensually held belief. SR are shared beliefs ranging from social to politics, they can be derived from formal theories that are then transformed into popular consciousness through discussions between people e.g. Freuds theory and people saying there being ‘anal’. These tend to be studied using qualitive measures so it shows how causality is shown through a more broad social level, providing common sense theories that help us make sense of our social worlds, this can be related to naive scientists where we attempt to make sense of the world around us