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Attributions Attributions

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Attributions - PPT Presentation

Chapter 5 Introduction to Attributions Things happen Cars break down people fail exams sports teams win and lose people fall in love marriages end in divorce people lose their jobs loved ones die people fight in the streets people kill others in war ethnic groups try to eliminate ot ID: 217449

attributions social attributional attribution social attributions attribution attributional behavior people cognition biases amp explanations theory events dispositional actor representations situational causal cognitive

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Slide1

Attributions

Chapter 5Slide2

Introduction to Attributions

Things happen…

Cars break down, people fail exams, sports teams win and lose, people fall in love, marriages end in divorce, people lose their jobs, loved ones die, people fight in the streets, people kill others in war, ethnic groups try to eliminate other groups

Most people, most of the time, do not accept that the world we live in is random, unpredictable, and unreliable

For most people, most of the time, things happen for a reason

Events are

caused

by something…

For life to be orderly and predictable, people attribute causes and explanations to events and try to understand why people behave the way they do

The ways in which people do this, the reasons why they attribute, how they attribute, the conditions under which they do and don’t attribute, all constitute the subject matter of

attribution theory Slide3

Introduction to Attributions

Like chapter 4 on attitudes, we will review the study of attributions from 3 perspectives

Social cognition, social identity, and social representations

As with most social psychological topics, the study of attributions has largely been dominated by the social cognitive tradition

Which reflects the mainstream view of how people attribute causes to everyday events and behavior

But, the other approaches have attempted to provide a more social and contextual account of attributing causality in everyday life Slide4

Social Cognition and Attributions

Attribution theory dominated social psychology during the 1970s and 1980s and in that time a massive body of research was generated

During the 1970s over 900 attribution studies had been published

By 1994 it was estimated that this number had quadrupled (3,600… wow)

Today a search for attribution studies turns up 27,700 articles

More recently, research on causal attributions has slowed down

Although much of this tradition has come to be subsumed under the field of “ordinary

personology

Ordinary

personology

– the processes by which ordinary people come to understand others by inferring their temporary states and feelings and other stable enduring traits and characteristics

However, this focus on understanding others shares many of the central concerns of the attribution theory Slide5

Social Cognition and Attributions

Despite the enormous attention devoted to the study of attribution, social psychology has failed to develop a single, unifying, integrating theory of attribution

Rather, there are several “mini-theories” of attributional processes

Historically, 3 of these are considered central

Heider’s

(1958) Naïve Psychology

Jones and Davis’ (1965) Corresponding Inference Theory

Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

These mini-theories are not seen as competing with each other or describing the same phenomena

Rather, these mini-theories are seen as complementing one another

They could be integrated into a single over-arching theory, but this has yet to be done Slide6

Social Cognition and Attributions:

Heider’s

(1958) Naïve Psychology

Fritz

Heider

was an Austrian Jew who fled to the United States during WWII

His most important work is his 1958 book

The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations

Set the stage for most of the work on attributions that followed

Described a “common sense psychology or a naïve psychology of action”

This common sense psychology views people as naïve scientists (remember from chapter 2?)

People in an intuitive way, or in a common-sense way, infer or deduce the causes of events around them

They naturally view the world as sets of cause and effect relations, even when there is no causal relationship at allSlide7

Social Cognition and Attributions:

Heider’s

(1958) Naïve Psychology

The arrangement of objects and events into cause and effect relations constitutes a

causal system

in our cognitive structure

The question of which objects and events will be seen as cause and which will be seen as effect is crucial

It almost defines the attributional process

Heider

claimed that we tend to perceive a cause and its effect as a perceptual unit

Some objects and events combine more easily than others to form a causal unit

Especially when the object or cause is a human actor and the event or effect is a social behavior Slide8

Social Cognition and Attributions:

Heider’s

(1958) Naïve Psychology

Two prime determinants of “unit perception” are

similarity

and

proximity

In our causal systems, two events are more likely to be seen as causally related if they are proximal rather than distal

Temporal proximity

(being close in time) is especially potent in influencing causality

Greater similarity between two events makes them more likely to be perceived as a causal unit than dissimilar events

Two more important principles of causal inference

People tend to attribute behavior to a single cause rather than to multiple causes

Causes of behavior can be thought of as residing either within the actor or outside the actor somewhere in the situation

Dispositional causes

– causes within the actor

Ex. Personality characteristics, motivation, ability, and effort

Situational causes

– causes outside the actor

Ex. Social context and role obligations

According to

Heider

, the

more

one of these causes is favored as an explanation of a particular behavior, the

less

likely the other will also be used

Heider

also noticed that people tend to emphasize dispositional or internal causes and tend to overlook situational causes when explaining behavior

Which has become known as the “fundamental attribution error”Slide9

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

Edward Jones and Keith Davis’ theory of correspondent inferences (1965)

First systematic theory of

Heider’s

earlier ideas

The basic premise is that, under certain conditions, people tend to

infer

that people’s actions

correspond

to their intentions and dispositions

That is, people like to infer that a person’s behavior matches an underlying stable quality in the person

Ex.

Correspondent inference

would be to attribute someone’s aggressive behavior to an internal stable trait, such as “aggressiveness”

Jones and Davis argued that such inferences are motivated by our need to view people’s behavior as intentional and predictable, reflecting their underlying character

This in turn, enhances our sense of being able to predict and control other people’s behavior and thus our social interactions more generally Slide10

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

In everyday life, however, making such correspondent inferences may not be straightforward

The information needed to make such inferences may be ambiguous, requiring us to draw upon cues that are maximally informative

i.e. that reduce uncertainty about the causes of those behaviors

Jones and Davis outline 3 major factors affecting the process of making correspondent inferences:

The social desirability of the behavior

A person’s choice in the behavior

The motivational variables of hedonic relevance and

personalism

We will discuss each of these factors in more detail Slide11

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

Behaviors judged to be

socially desirable

are less informative

than behaviors judged to be socially undesirable

When a behavior is socially desirable in the context in which it occurs, it is normal or expected

Observing such behavior is not informative to the perceiver because there are several alternative, equally probable, reasons why the behavior occurred

Maybe because the actor is intrinsically a good person, chronically prone to commit socially desirable behaviors (dispositional attribution)

But, the behavior may also have occurred because it was expected; it was the right thing to do (situational or external attribution)

Either explanation is equally likely

The behavior is uninformative because it does not help the perceiver decide between the two competing explanations of the good, desirable, expected, normative behavior Slide12

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

This is not the case for socially undesirable behavior

These behaviors are counter-normative; they are not what is expected

For this reason they are more informative than socially desirable behavior

For socially desirable behaviors, dispositional and situational explanations are equally likely

For socially undesirable behaviors, the situational explanation is eliminated (because the behavior is not expected); therefore, it is less likely than the dispositional explanation

Thus, the perceiver, the intuitive scientist, has data that reduce uncertainty, which helps in deciding between competing explanations

Undesirable behaviors are more informative than desirable behaviors, and allow the perceiver to make a dispositional attribution about the actor with more confidence

The attribution about the actor’s disposition is likely to be as negative as the observed behavior Slide13

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

The second important factor in determining correspondent inferences is

whether the actor freely chose the behavior

:

the principle of non-common effects

This principle applies particularly when an actor has, or at least is perceived to have, free choice in action between several behavioral alternatives

Again, this principle works because when someone is believed to have freely chosen this behavior it is informative

It reduces uncertainty by implicitly favoring one explanation for the behavior over other, competing explanations Slide14

Social Cognition and Attributions: Jones & Davis (1965) Correspondent Inference Theory

The desirability of outcomes and the principle of non-common effects are both

cognitive

factors influencing the attributional process

The third factor is

motivational

Includes 2 related constructs:

hedonic relevance

and

personalism

An action is said to be

hedonically relevant

for a perceiver if the consequences of the action affect the perceiver

The welfare of the perceiver is either harmed or benefited by the action

Personalistic

actions are a subset of hedonically relevant actions, and are characterized by the

intention

of an actor for the action to have hedonic relevance for the perceiver

Does the perceiver think the actor is intentionally trying to affect his/her welfare

Actions that are perceived to be hedonically relevant or

personalistic

are more likely to produce a correspondent inference (the action matches some underlying trait in the actor) about the actor than are other actions Slide15

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

The analogy between the professional scientist and the everyday perceiver, is emphasized in Kelley’s covariation model of attribution

The model rests on the

principle of covariation

Asserts that before two events can be accepted as causally linked they must covary with one another

If two events do not covary, they cannot be causally connected Slide16

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

The principle of covariation was used by Kelley as an analogy for the way people infer causation in their everyday lives

Kelley suggested there are 3 factors crucial in assessing covariation

And that different combinations of positions of these 3 factors lead to different types of causal conclusions regarding the specific behavior in question

Consistency

,

distinctiveness

, and

consensus

The general context in which these 3 dimensions are applied is one where a perceiver attributes a cause to a person’s response to a particular stimulus as a particular time

Consistency

– whether that person responds in the same way to the same stimulus or similar stimuli at different times

Distinctiveness

– whether the actor acts in the same way to other, different stimuli, or whether the actor’s response distinguishes between different stimuli

Consensus

– is not a feature of the actor’s behavior, but of the behavior of others: is there consensus across actors in response to the same stimulus, or do people vary in response?Slide17

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

According to the covariation model, perceivers will decide, almost in a dichotomous way:

That the actor acts either in the same way at different times (consistency is high) or in different ways (consistency is low)

That the actor either shows similar responses to different stimuli (distinctiveness is low) or acts this way only in response to this particular stimulus (distinctiveness is high)

That the actor either acts in the same way as most other people (consensus is high) or acts differently (consensus is low)

Different combinations of positions on the 3 dimensions lead to different attributions

An internal or dispositional attribution is most likely when consistency is high, distinctiveness is low, and consensus is low

An external or situational attribution is most likely when consistency is high, distinctiveness is high, and consensus is low

Other combinations lead to less clear attributions Slide18

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

2 important factors were added to the covariation model by Kelley five years after his original formulation:

discounting

and

augmentation

An event can have many causes

It sometimes happens that several plausible causes co-occur

But some would be expected to augment the given effect, or make it more likely

And some would be expected to inhibit the given effect, or make it less likely

If the effect occurs even in the presence of inhibitory causes, the augmenting cause will be judged as stronger than if the augmenting cause and its effect had occurred without the inhibitory cause

Ex. If you have the opportunity to help an elderly lady get her shopping bags in her car but there are several inhibitory factors involved (ex. Its raining heavily and you are running late and in a hurry) but you have been raised to help the elderly (augmenting factor) and you end up helping the elderly lady, the augmenting factor will be seen as stronger

But if it wasn’t raining and you weren’t in a hurry, this factor may not be perceived to be as strong Slide19

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

Kelley’s model has one requirement that is not included in either

Heider’s

model or Jones and Davis’ model

Perceivers use information across times, situations, and actors

Without this information it is not possible to make consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus judgments

In contrast, perceiver in the naïve scientist model or in the correspondent inference model makes causal attributions based on a single action performed by a single actor on a single instance

This is an important point when we try to evaluate how well the theory relates to everyday life

People don’t assign cause to an action as though they are unaware or ignorant of the likelihood that other people would perform the same action in response to the same stimulus, or the same person would repeat the behavior, or how that actor would perform in response to other stimuli

People do not consider each event as if it were new

On the other hand, people don’t engage in the complex mental calculations described by Kelley’s covariation model every time they assign a cause to an actionSlide20

Social Cognition and Attributions: Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model

A resolution to this dilemma is offered by the concept of

causal schemas

Kelley’s concept can be taken to refer to a set of stored knowledge about the relations between causes and effects

We each acquire an implicit causal theory of events through our socialization

This implicit theory gives us ready-made attributional accounts of most events we encounter from one day to the next

It allows us to run on default most of the time, and we only have to devote attention to unusual, exceptional or important cases Slide21

Social Cognition and Attributions: Sum of the 3 Theories

All three of the theories just discussed view people as naïve scientists that systematically seek the causes of events

A consequence of this is that it views the human perceiver as rational, as going about the attributional process in a fairly systematic, logical fashion

However, we all know that people do not typically act in this way, not even scientists

It is reasonable to think of attribution theory as being prescriptive

It describes how attribution perhaps should be made

Empirical research has found that people do not make attributions in such a systematic and calculated way

Rather, social perceivers demonstrate persistent biases when attributing causality to events and behavior Slide22

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases

When an attribution deviates from the prescribed model, it is thought of as a biased attribution

Some attribution researchers refer to biases as

errors

This implies that researchers know the

true

causes of behavior

But, in all probability, they don’t

There are no validity benchmarks for assessing the authenticity of an attribution

It is better, then, to refer simply to attributional biases, rather than errors Slide23

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Fundamental Attribution Error

Original conception

[The

fundamental

attribution error] is the tendency for attributers to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behavior

More recently, Gilbert has referred to this phenomenon as the “correspondence bias”

The earliest empirical demonstration of the

fundamental attribution error (FAE)

was produced by Jones and Harris (1967)

Participants were shown to make correspondent inferences about an actor’s attitudes based on the actor’s statements about an issue

These inferences occurred even when the participants knew the actor had no choice in making the statementSlide24

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Fundamental Attribution Error

1

st

experiment (conducted in NORTH CAROLINA!!!)

Participants read a short essay on Castro’s Cuba and then indicated what they thought the essay writers true attitude was

Each participant only read one essay, but half of the essays were pro-Castro and the other half were anti-Castro

Manipulation 1

At the time, there were not many pro-Castro advocates in NC

Thus, the direction of the essay (pro- or anti-) constituted a manipulation of the probability of the behavior

Meaning that the pro-Castro essay was improbable and therefore more informative behavior

Manipulation 2

Participants were led to believe that the essay’s position had been either assigned (no choice, uninformative) or chosen by the writer (choice, informative)

After reading the 200-word essay participants answered questions about what they thought the essay writer’s

TRUE

attitude was towards Castro’s Cuba

And then indicated their own attitude Slide25

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Fundamental Attribution Error

If the

informativeness

of the behavior was the most important factor in determining whether or not a correspondent inference was made by the observer

Then such an inference should be most evident among those who read a pro-Castro essay written by someone who could have chosen to write an essay criticizing or defending Castro’s Cuba

Meaning that this condition should lead participants to believe the essay truly reflected the attitude of the essay writer

And should be least evident among those participants who read the anti-Castro essay written by someone who was instructed what to write

Meaning this condition should lead participants to believe the essay did not reflect the true attitude of the essay writer Slide26

The mean “attributed attitude scores,” the attitudes participants attributed to the essay writers

Range from 10 (anti-Castro) to 70 (pro-Castro)

There is indeed evidence that participants made correspondent inferences

The inferred attitude matched the essay direction

Inferences are stronger in the choice conditions than in the no-choice conditions

But, importantly for the FAE

Correspondent inferences are still evident in the no-choice condition

Even when participants were told that the essay writer was instructed to write either a pro- or and anti-Castro essay, they still infer that the essay writer has an attitude consistent with the views expressed in the essay

This is the FAE: attributers (participants in the experiment) have apparently underestimated the impact of situational factors and over estimated the role of dispositional factors in determining behavior

Mean attributed

attitude scores (and variances in parentheses), according to essay direction and degree of choice

Essay Direction

Choice Condition

Pro-Castro

Anti-Castro

Choice

59.62 (13.59)

17.38 (8.92)

No choice

44.10 (147.65)

22.87 (17.55)Slide27

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Fundamental Attribution Error

Further, in a second experiment

Demonstrated that emphasizing the choice manipulation did not diminish the attitude attribution effect

Even under no-choice conditions participants were correctly aware of the essay writer’s choice or lack of choiceSlide28

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Dispositional Attributions are Spontaneous & Automatic

Recent research has drawn upon the work on automaticity in social perception

Suggesting that making correspondent inferences is so pervasive that dispositional attributions are made spontaneously and without conscious awareness

In the view of social cognition

Dispositional attributions are the “default option”

Perceivers spontaneously attributed behavior to people’s traits because these attributions are fast and require little effort Slide29

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Dispositional Attributions are Spontaneous & Automatic

Quattrone

(1982) was the first to propose a sequential model of attribution

Once a behavior is identified, dispositional attributions are always made first, spontaneously and without conscious deliberation

But, these can be subsequently corrected by situational attributions if perceivers are motivated and have time to consider alternative explanations

Thus, trait attributions are easy and effortless, and situational attributions are corrections that require more effort and cognitive resources

Identification

Attribution

Automatic dispositional inference

Attribution

Effortful situational correctionSlide30

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Dispositional Attributions are Spontaneous & Automatic

A review by Trope and Gaunt (2003) concludes that situational attributions are more likely to be made if perceivers:

1) are made accountable for their inferences

2) are not cognitively busy or distracted by pursuing other goals; or

3) when situational attributions are made salient, accessible and relevant

But why should dispositional attributions be so effortless and less cognitively demanding than situational attributions?Slide31

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the FAE

Explanations of FAE tend to belong to one of two types

Explanations based on psychological or cognitive processes

Explanations which seek the origins of the bias in social, cultural, and ideological processes

Heider

was the first to suggest a cognitive explanation

Arguing that “behavior in particular has such salient properties it tends to engulf the total (

perceputal

) field”

Fiske and Taylor support this cognitive explanation

Describing situational factors that give rise to behavior, such as social context or situational pressures, are relatively less salient and unlikely to be noticed when compared with the dynamic behavior of the actor

Thus, the fundamental attribution error has primarily been explained by the dominance of the actor in the perceptual field Slide32

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the FAE

Another explanation is a motivational one

Emphasizes the degree to which attributions about a person give us a sense of predictive control of other people’s behavior

Jones and Davis (1965) stressed this aspect of correspondent inferences:

That such inferences are motivated by our need to view people’s behavior as intentional and reflecting their underlying personality traits

The main point being:

If we believed that people’s behavior was unstable and fluctuated according to the situations people are in, then this makes predicting their behavior and controlling our environment more difficult

Thus, dispositional attributions or correspondent inferences enhance our sense of prediction and control in everyday life

This is why we prefer themSlide33

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the FAE

Others have suggested that this bias toward dispositional attributions is not a universal law of cognitive functioning

But, rather, reflects the dominant ideology of individualism in European and American culture

The tendency to favor personal over situational causation was first noted by

Ichheiser

(1949)

Instead of viewing this phenomenon as an individual “error” or bias in cognitive judgment, he viewed it as an explanation grounded in American society’s collective and cultural consciousness

The dominant representation of the person in western liberal democracies is that of an important causative agent, over and above situational and contextual forces

The FAE, then, may not be a cognitive or perceptual bias alone

Rather, it may largely be a product of western, industrialized constructions of the “individual” as the source of behaviorSlide34

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of FAE

If attributions and explanations are grounded in cultural representations of the person

Then cross-cultural differences should be evident in the prevalence of person attributions

Indeed, this has been largely confirmed by studies comparing the prevalence of dispositional attributions in individualist as compared to collectivist cultures

The “person” does not seem to enjoy the same degree of perceptual dominance among non-western people living in

collectivist societies Slide35

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Actor-Observer Effect

“There is a pervasive tendency for actors to attribute their actions to situational requirements, whereas observers tend to attribute the same actions to stable personal dispositions.” (Jones &

Nisbett

, 1972, p. 80)

Heider

noted that actors and observers have different views of behavior, of the situation, and of the causes of behaviors in situations

“The person tends to attribute his own reactions to the object world, and those of another, when they differ from his own, to personal characteristics in [the other]” (1958, p. 157)

Think of how easy it is for us to explain our own socially undesirable behavior (e.g., being rude or impolite to a fast food worker) in terms of extenuating, stressful circumstances (we’re having a bad day)

But we are less sympathetic when others behave in this way (the teller at the bank was rude to you), and attribute the behavior to the person’s character (the teller was just a mean person)

Heider

referred to this as a “polar tendency in attribution”

Jones and

Nisbett

called it the

“actor-observer effect” (AOE)Slide36

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Actor-Observer Effect

Classic AOE experiment Ross,

Amabile

, and

Steinmez

(1977)

Setup was a quiz game, involving pairs of same-sex participants

One member of the pair was randomly assigned the role of questioner, the other the role of contestant (participants were aware the roles were assigned randomly)

12 pairs of participants were in the experimental condition

Questioners were told to make up 10 “challenging but not impossible” general knowledge questions to ask to the contestant

While the questioner did this, the contestant was told to compose 10 easy general knowledge questions, “just to get into the spirit of the study”

6 pairs of participants were in the control condition

The questioner and participant both made up 10 easy questions

During the quiz game itself, participants were told the questioner would ask the contestant 10 questions made up before the study by someone else

During the quiz game

Experimental condition: questioners asked the contestants the 10 “challenging but not impossible” questions they themselves had made up

Control condition: questioners asked 10 questions given to them by the experimenterSlide37

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Actor-Observer Effect

In the experimental condition the average number of correct answers in the quiz game was 4

After the quiz game

Questioners and contestants rated themselves and their partner on a number of dimensions, most importantly “general knowledge compared to the average Stanford student” (experiment was conducted at Stanford)

Participants rated self and other on a scale from 0 to 100, with 50 being “the average Stanford student”Slide38

Results

Control condition: questioners and contestants didn’t really distinguish between self and other in terms of general knowledge relative to the average Stanford student

Everyone rated self and other as about average

Experimental condition: there are big differences in how each member of the pair sees self and other

The questioner doesn’t really distinguish between self and other

The contestant devalues self relative to average and increases the rating of the questioner relative to average

Presumably because the contestant only got 4 out of 10 answers right on average and also because they acknowledged the difficulty of the general knowledge questions produced by the questioner

Mean ratings

of self and others’ general knowledge by questioners and contestants

Ratings

of

Ratings

by

Self

Other

Experimental

Condition

Questioner

53.5

50.6

Contestant

41.3

66.8

Control Condition

Questioner

54.1

52.5

Contestant

47.0

50.3Slide39

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Actor-Observer Effect

What makes these results so cool?

ROLE ASSIGNMENT WAS RANDOM (and the participants knew it was)

So presumably, if the roles were reversed, the contestant would have made up 10 difficult questions and the former questioner would have got about 4 of them right

There is an asymmetry between the roles in terms of opportunity to express “smart” behavior

The questioner gets to call the shots and the contestant has to play along

The role of questioner implies an advantage over the contestant

Questioners apparently recognized this

They elevate neither their own status nor lower the contestants’ status

But contestants appear to be unaware of, or to under-correct for, the advantage of the questionerSlide40

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, The Actor-Observer Effect

In a 2

nd

experiment

Confederates re-enacted some of the questioner-contestant performances from study 1

Real participants watched these interactions, believing they were authentic

Participants then rated both the questioner and the contestant on general knowledge ability, relative to other Stanford students (on the same rating scale used in experiment 1)

Results

Participants, acting as observers, apparently saw the quiz game through the eyes of the contestant

The average rating of the questioners was 82.08

The average rating of the contestants was 48.92

Thus, these results mirrored the ratings given in experiment 1, by the contestants themselves Slide41

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

Of course, there are competing explanations of the AOE

Like the FAE, one explanation is perceptual

Essentially argues that actors and observers literally have “different points of view”

Actors cannot see themselves acting

From an actor’s perspective what is most salient and available are the situational influences on their behavior (the objects, the people, the role requirements, and the social setting)

From an observer’s point of view, the actor’s behavior is more perceptually salient than the situation or context

These different “vantage points” for actors and observers lead to different attributional tendencies

Situational attributions for actors

Dispositional attributions for observers Slide42

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

Taylor and Fiske (1975) attempted to test the perceptual salience hypothesis

2 male confederates were seated opposite one another, and conversed for 5 minutes

A participant sat behind confederate A, so that they could only see confederate B

A participant sat behind confederate B, so that they could only see confederate A

A participant sat at the table between confederates A and B and could see them both

Blah

Blah

C

C

O

O

O

A

BSlide43

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

After watching A and B interact for 5 minutes all observers rated each confederate on the dimensions of:

Friendliness

Talkativeness

Nervousness

The extent to which each confederates behavior was caused by dispositional qualities and by situational factors

How much each confederate set the conversation’s tone

Determined the kind of information exchanged in the conversation

Caused the other’s behavior

Results

The observers behind A watching B viewed B as more causal than A

The observers behind B watching A viewed A as more causal than B

Observers between A and B viewed A and B as about equally influential

Thus different vantage points do matterSlide44

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

Other individualistic explanations of AOE have been suggested

Jones and

Nisbett

(1972)

Originally suggested that actors and observers may possess different information about events and this is what leads to the different attributions

In this view, actors have access to their own feelings, desires and motivations, as well as to their own cross-situational behavioral history

Which observers are unaware of

This theory of informational differences between actors and observers has been supported by research

Idson

and

Mischel

(2001) found that observers were more likely to make situational inferences and fewer trait attributions about an actor’s behavior if that person is familiar and important to them

Presumably, then, the longer we know someone, the more knowledge we are likely to have about their behavior across different situationsSlide45

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

Another individualistic (although more social and interactive) explanation is based on the linguistic practices of actors and observers

Different linguistic categories convey different information about an event

Semin

and Fielder (1988) suggest there are 4 linguistic categories referring to interpersonal relations

Descriptive action verbs

Ex. Sally is talking to Bob

Interpretive action verbs

Ex. Sally is helping Bob

State verbs

Ex. Sally likes Bob

Adjectives

Ex. Sally is an extroverted person Slide46

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Explanations of the AOE

Adjectives convey more information about a person than do verbs

And therefore lead to more dispositional inferences

Ex. It’s hard to imagine making a dispositional correspondent inference based on the statement “Sally is talking to Bob”

Ex. But it’s hard not to make a dispositional correspondent inference with the information “Sally is an extroverted person”

Because this presumes a disposition in itself

Semin

and Fiedler (1989)

Found that actors tended to use the more concrete linguistic forms (descriptive and interpretative verbs)

i.e. “Sally is talking to Bob,” and “Sally is helping Bob”

Observers tended to use the abstract forms (state verbs and adjectives)

i.e. “Sally likes Bob,” and “Sally is an extroverted person”

In contrast to purely cognitive models of attribution, this work emphasizes how language itself can shape attributionsSlide47

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional

Biases

Both the actor-observer effect and the fundamental attribution error are two of the most widely investigated attributional biases

Actors and observers differ, sometimes drastically, in the inferences they draw from and the attributions they make about presumably the same event

But, the evidence we have discussed here cannot support a strong form of either the AOE or the FAE

It appears that attributers do not make

either

a dispositional

or

a situational attribution

Rather, a weak form of the AOE and the FAE is more

c

onsistent with research as a whole

Attributers use

both

dispositional

and

situational factors in constructing causal sense of events surrounding them

But, they tend to rely on one relatively more than the other depending on their perspective of

events Slide48

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases

While there is evidence that changing people’s point of view alters their attributional accounts of events in that view, this does not imply that there are hard-wired, innate cognitive attributional mechanisms

Developmental and cross-cultural research suggests that people learn the attributional accounts favored by their social environment

Ex. European and North American’s tend towards dispositional attributions and people from more collectivist societies tend towards situational attributions

This learning is likely to be so efficient that particular attributional accounts become automatic and unconscious Slide49

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional

Biases, Self-Serving Biases

Theories of attribution tend to view the attributer as a uninvolved bystander observing events around them

But, as we all know, this is far removed from the heat of normal human interaction

People

are

involved, passionately or not, in the events around them

People, and their attributions, affect and are affected by others and by events

People often make attributions that reflect

self-serving biases

Designed consciously or unconsciously to enhance their self-esteem in their own eyes and in the eyes of others Slide50

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving

Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

It is an all too common phenomenon that people accept credit for success and deny responsibility for failure

Students do it after passing for failing a course

Athletes do it after winning or losing an event

Even academics do it after having a manuscript accepted or rejected for publication

Although the strength of the effect varies across cultures, the attributional asymmetry following success or failure has been noted in cultures around the globe

Again, both cognitive and motivational explanations have been formulated to account for the attributional difference Slide51

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

Example of cognitive explanation

Weary (1981) suggested that focus of attention towards self or away from self and informational availability may be 2 strong cognitive mechanisms involved in this phenomenon

However, most researchers advocate a motivational explanation related to an almost self-evident, common-sense explanation

People accept credit for success and deflect responsibility for failure because doing so makes them feel good and look good

Basically, it serves a self-enhancement motive

Ex. Miller (1976)

Found that the attributional difference is greater when the task participants succeed or fail at is important to themSlide52

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

Attributing egocentrically not only bolsters self-esteem, but also influences the impressions others have of the attributer

Evidence for the impressions of others is clearer than bolstering one’s own self-esteem

Ex.

Schlenker

and Leary (1982)

Found that audiences were generally most favorably impressed by actors who make “accurate” attributional claims for their success

i.e. actors who were modest about their superior performance were liked more than actors who boasted about their performance

Also, audiences disliked actors who predicted that they would not do well, even when that prediction turned out to be accurate

What is clear here, is that different attributional patterns following success or failure create different impressions on an audience

Some kinds of attributions do seem to make the actor look good in the eyes of others

and others seem to make the actor look less favorable

Whether they also make the actor feel good is another issue Slide53

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

Central to any self-enhancement explanation of attributional biases are these predictions:

Self-esteem will increase following a self-serving attribution

An internal attribution following success or an external attribution following failure

Self-esteem will decrease following a self-deprecating attribution

An external attribution following success or an internal attribution following failure

Research does support this,

Maracek

and

Metee

(1972):

People with chronically high self-esteem make more self-serving attributions

People with chronically low self-esteem make more self-deprecating attributions

This is an important finding with clinical implications for the history and treatment of depression

But, this finding is not quite the same thing as evidence that changes in self-esteem follow particular attributions

Which is the core of any self-enhancement explanationSlide54

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

The absence of studies documenting attribution effects on self-esteem is curious, and perhaps due to 2 factors:

First, many researchers appear to accept such effects as obvious and hence not needing empirical verification or falsification

Second, it is methodologically difficult to design an unconfounded experiment to test the hypothesis Slide55

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Attributions for Success and Failure

A pure, experimental investigation would require the experimenter to:

Assign participants randomly to either an internal or an external attribution condition following either success or failure and to observe consequent effects on self-esteem

The problem is that participants make their own attributions

They cannot be assigned to an internal or external attribution condition in the same way as they can to a success or failure condition

So direction of attribution cannot be experimentally controlled

It can only be investigated by allowing participants to make their own attributions

But, allowing this automatically introduces a confound between participants’ attributional direction and their prior self-esteem

Because we know that people with chronic high self-esteem accept credit for success and deflect blame for failure and people with chronically low self-esteem tend to do the opposite

And who knows if these attributional styles cause or reflect differences in chronic self-esteem

Thus there is no direct test of the central hypothesis of a self-enhancement explanationSlide56

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Depression

Implicit in the self-enhancement account of attributional biases is the notion that it is functional, and biologically adaptive to make

these

biased attributions because they help to create and maintain a positive self-esteem

Weiner’s attributional theory of motivation and emotion

Argues that the kinds of attributions people make for success and failure elicit different emotional consequences

And that these attributions are characterized by 3 underlying dimensions

Locus

: whether we attribute success and failure internally or externally

Stability

: whether the cause is perceived as something fixed and stable (like personality or ability) or something changing and unstable (like motivation and effort)

Control

: whether we feel we have any control over the cause

Locus

Stability

Control

Ability

Internal

Stable

Uncontrollable

Effort

Internal

Unstable

Controllable

Luck

External

Unstable

Uncontrollable

Task difficulty

External

Unstable

Uncontrollable Slide57

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Depression

Consistent with the self-enhancement bias

People who attribute their achievements to internal, stable and controllable factors are more likely to feel good about themselves

Ex. After making an A on an English essay exam, a student attributes success to personal ability and effort (I’m good at writing English essays and I studied hard)

In contrast, attributing negative outcomes to internal, stable and uncontrollable factors is associated with negative emotions such as hopelessness and helplessness

Ex. After failing an English essay exam, a student attributes failure to personal lack of ability (I’m never going to be good at writing English essays because I’m just a dumb student)

This attributional pattern for negative events and outcomes has been referred to as a

“depressive attributional style”

This style has been strongly linked with clinical depressionSlide58

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Self-Serving Biases, Depression

The learned helplessness model of depression views this attributional style as directly

causing

depression

Others have argued this attributional tendency is merely a

symptom

of depression

Reflecting the affective state of the depressed person

Whether a cause or a symptom

Attributional retraining programs, in which people are taught how to make more self-enhancing attributions, are being widely accepted as an important clinical intervention in the treatment of depression Slide59

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Do People Attribute Spontaneously?

Some psychologists have suggested that attribution theory exaggerates the extent to which people seek causal explanations for everyday occurrences and events:

That the degree of attributional activity suggested by attribution research may simply be an artifact of the reactive methodologies used in such studies

Keep in mind that most attribution studies require, and instruct, participants to indicate their agreement or disagreement with attributional statements provided by the researchers

So, do people spontaneously engage in causal thinking and, if so, under what conditions do they make causal attributions?

2 studies address these questions directlySlide60

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Do People Attribute Spontaneously?

Lau and Russell (1980):

Examined newspaper reports of 33 sporting events

The 6 baseball games in the 1977 World Series, and a number of college and professional football games

Found that more causal attributions were made after an

unexpected

outcome than an expected outcome

Taylor (1982):

Found that 95% of a sample of cancer victims spontaneously made attributions about the cause of their cancer

Also that 70% of close family members of cancer victims made spontaneous attributions about the cause of their loved one’s cancerSlide61

Social Cognition & Attribution: Attributional Biases, Do People Attribute Spontaneously?

These two studies suggest that people do in fact spontaneously make causal attributions about events around them

At least when those events are either unexpected or negative

Weiner (1985) similarly concludes that people do indeed engage in spontaneous causal thinking

But mostly for unexpected events and especially when confronted with failure

This conclusion is consistent with that of others who have argued that people

actively look

for causal explanations for the unexpected or different

And that in such situations the complexity of attributions increases

No doubt many events in social life are common, routine, everyday, and give no need for any sort of attributional analysis

For such events, people probably function

mindlessly

or essentially run on automatic

However, people

do

make causal attributions under some conditions

And even when operating mindlessly people probably could generate causal attributions for the events passing them by if they were required to Slide62

Social Cognition & Attribution: Criticisms of Classic Attribution Theories

Thus far in this chapter, attributing causes to behavior and events has been presented primarily as an

intraindividual

cognitive phenomenon

In traditional attribution models individuals are construed as information processors:

Who attend to and select information from the environment

Process the information

And then arrive at a causal analysis of the behavior or event in question

This is too simple

As we all know, social life is an intricate complex mass of individuals, couples, groups, sects, ethnicities, nations, etc. all interacting and negotiating an ever-changing social reality which is reproduced, represented, and reconstructed

None of us interacts with any one other person as if that person were an abstracted, fixed and given

individual

We all are social, contextualized, and cannot interact with or even perceive others as if we, or they, were anything else

According to your textbook:

Attribution theory persists in theorizing the asocial, decontextualized fiction called the “individual”Slide63

Social Cognition & Attribution: Criticisms of Classic Attribution Theories

Hewstone

has argued that the bulk of attributional research has been articulated at the

intrapersonal

and the

interpersonal

levels

Kelley’s covariation model is a good example of the intrapersonal level

An individual perceives an event – usually behavior enacted by another individual

Engages in a mental calculus estimating the consistency, consensus and distinctiveness of that event

Then arrives at a conclusion regarding the cause of the event

The attributer turns only inward in this attributional search

Without reference to interpersonal relations, dominant social representations, the language of causation, and their relative group memberships and identifications

Everything, apart from the event that triggered the attributional search, takes place internally within the mind of the individual Slide64

Social Cognition & Attribution: Criticisms of Classic Attribution Theories

The actor-observer effect and the fundamental attribution error are examples of interpersonal attribution research

Even here, the individuals in the interaction come to the interaction strictly as individuals:

The individuals have no history, no power or status differentials, no social context

They are interchangeable, asocial, decontextualized, often disembodied individuals Slide65

Social Cognition & Attribution: Criticisms of Classic Attribution Theories

These models thus far have had little to say about the social, interactive, and cultural context within which causal attributions are made

Attribution theory has therefore been criticized for being predominantly an individualistic theory

Requiring a greater social perspective

Several social psychologists have attempted to develop a more social account of attributionsSlide66

Social Identity Theory and Attributions

The extraordinary events of September 11, 2001 – the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington – will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most politically salient and defining events at the beginning of the 21

st

century

These attacks and their graphic portrayal on television (as they occurred in real time) stunned the world Slide67

Social Identity Theory and Attributions

The research on spontaneous attributions would suggest that such a negative and unexpected event is likely to generate considerable attributional activity

Indeed, as the enormity and significance of the attacks began to sink in, people tried to make sense of this event by looking for reasons as to why it occurred

Why would a group of individuals plan and execute such a brazen act of mass murder and suicide by flying planes into tall buildings?Slide68

Social Identity Theory and Attributions

Here is how Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain, attempted to make sense of this event in a speech he delivered the day following September 11, 2001:

“The world knows the full evil and capability of international terrorism which menaces the whole of the democratic world. The terrorists responsible have no sense of humanity, of mercy, or of justice. To commit acts of this nature requires a fanaticism and wickedness that is beyond our normal comprehension.”Slide69

Social Identity Theory and Attributions

Over time, of course, we have been provided with a range of explanatory accounts, by a variety of expert sources including other world leaders, politicians, the media, and social analysts

These explanations included accounts such as that of Tony Blair that attributed the cause(s) of September 11 primarily to the religious fanaticism and extremism of “evil” terrorists

Accounts that attributed the cause(s) to geopolitical factors and the current state of international relations

Importantly, people’s attributions for this significant event were not arrived at simply through a solitary cognitive process of information processing:

People’s social, cultural and political identifications significantly shaped their causal analysis and response to the events of September 11Slide70

Social Identity Theory and Attributions

A social identity, or intergroup, approach to attributions examines:

How group memberships, social identifications, and intergroup relations affect the sorts of attributions people make

Although we will discuss this work in more detail later in the chapters on stereotyping and prejudice

Here we will cover what Pettigrew (1979) has coined the “ultimate attribution error”Slide71

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

Pettigrew combined the fundamental attribution error and

Allport’s

classical work on intergroup relations:

Formulated an analysis of how prejudice shapes intergroup “misattributions”

Pettigrew (1979) noted how people typically make attributions that:

Favor and protect the group to which they belong (ingroup)

Derogate groups to which they do not belong (outgroup)

The title of the universal attribution error was meant partly as a joke about the rather grand title Ross gave to the FAE

It’s very unlikely that anything in the social sciences deserves the label “fundamental”

Thus, Pettigrew names this ingroup serving and outgroup derogating attributional pattern the

“ultimate attribution error”

Slide72

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

When a person is confronted with an obviously positive behavior committed by a member of a disliked outgroup

That person will have trouble reconciling this with their negative stereotype of the group

And is unlikely to make a dispositional attribution

This positive outgroup behavior is likely to be explained away or dismissed as either being:

Due to external situational pressures OR

Due to the exceptional and thus unrepresentative nature of the outgroup member

In contrast, negative behavior by an outgroup member will be attributed to stereotypic dispositions and traits that are associated with the outgroup

This pattern of attributions is completely reversed for ingroup behavior

Positive ingroup behavior is attributed to dispositional traits

Negative ingroup behavior is attributed to external situational factors Slide73

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

Indeed studies from around the world have demonstrated what may be a universal, certainly a pervasive, self-serving and ethnocentric pattern in the way we see and explain the events around us

These studies will be discussed in detail in chapter 7

But we will discuss one interesting study regarding the real world of intergroup conflict in Northern Ireland Slide74

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

Hunter, Stringer, and Watson (1991): simple study demonstrating the social psychological processes underlying the markedly different perceptions of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland

Gathered newsreel footage of Catholic and Protestant violence in Northern Ireland

One scene showed a Protestant attack on a Catholic funeral

The other scene showed two soldiers in a car being attacked by a group of Catholics

Both scenes had been rated as being comparable in their degree of violent content by a sample of Spanish and German foreign exchange students

Then the two clips were shown to Catholic and Protestant students at the University of Ulster (located in Northern Ireland)

The clips were shown without sound to control for any possible effects of media bias

Students were then asked to “explain in their own words what they thought was happening in the videos, and why they thought those involved had behaved as they had”

Students’ reasons for the behavior of the people shown in the video were coded as either an internal or an external attributionSlide75

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

Catholic students:

Causes of violent acts committed by Catholics were viewed as being somewhere in the situation (21 vs. 5)

Causes of violent acts committed by Protestants were viewed as being caused by dispositional factors (19 vs. 5)

Protestant students:

Causes of violent acts committed by Protestants viewed as situational (15 vs. 6)

Causes of violent acts committed by Catholics viewed as dispositional (15 vs. 6)

Yet the two groups were watching the same acts of the same people which had been judged to be equal in violence

Pattern of internal and external attributions

Catholic violence

Protestant violence

Catholic students

Protestant students

Catholic students

Protestant students

Attribution

Internal

5

15

19

6

External

21

6

5

15Slide76

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: The “Ultimate Attribution Error”

The behavior of participants in the Hunter et al. experiment isn’t unusual

Studies of this type demonstrate that social perception, especially in situations involving partisanship, is rarely, if ever, neutral and dispassionate

Also, the possibility of ever being able to find a single “true” account of social “reality” is highly questionable

These studies also suggest that differential attributions of this kind for ingroup and outgroup violence are probably linked to the maintenance and perpetuation of intergroup conflict

External attributions for violence committed by ingroup members by both groups may serve to justify violence committed by one’s own group and to view it as legitimate

Further, internal attributions for the other group’s violence may perpetuate hostilities and perhaps even lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy

Members of the outgroup come to act in ways the ingroup expects Slide77

Social Identity Theory and Attributions: Group Differences in Explanations for Social Issues

A considerable body of research has indicated that social groups prefer different explanations for a range of social issues and problems (ex. Poverty and unemployment)

Explanations for these social issues are linked to political identifications and voting behavior

Ex. In Britain

Conservatives rate individualistic explanations for poverty and unemployment as more important than Labor voters

Labor voters rate societal-structural factors as more important

Explanations are therefore not purely cognitive phenomena

But, are collectively shared by those with similar political and social identities Slide78

Social Representations and Attributions

How do social representations affect attribution processes and outcomes?

If we accept that explanations for everyday events and experiences are social phenomena, which are negotiated and communicated during social interaction

Then, we require an approach that emphasizes the contents of social knowledge

Enter social representations theory Slide79

Social Representations and Attributions

Like attribution theory, social representations theory also emphasizes the fundamental human need to understand and explain events in everyday life

Difference:

Attribution theory seeks to identify the internal cognitive processes involved in making causal explanations

Social representations theory seeks to locate these causal attributions not in individual minds, but in the cultural meaning systems embodied by social representations

So, both theories emphasize the importance of explanation in social life

But, the two theories are articulated at different levels of analysis

Unlike traditional attribution theory, social representations theory emphasizes the social and collective nature of explanations Slide80

Social Representations and Attributions

Moscovici

and

Hewstone

have proposed that social representations should be viewed as the foundations on which attributions are built

“A theory of social causality is a theory of our imputations and attributions, associated with a representation… any causal explanation must be viewed within the context of social representations and is determined thereby.”

Meaning that, when we attribute causality, our attribution stems from an overall social representation

And thus, any attribution we make has to be viewed in the context of the social representation it came from Slide81

Social Representations and Attributions

In a similar vein,

Lalljee

and Abelson (1983) suggest a “knowledge structure” approach to attribution

Well-learned consensual structures, like highly organized event schemas or scripts, do not usually evoke causal explanations because people expect the sequence of events that occur

People’s prior expectations, beliefs knowledge or schemas will determine what parts of social information we need an attribution for

Information that is consistent with a person’s schema or representation won’t require an in-depth search for causality, because that information is expected and therefore automatically processed

In contrast, information that is inconsistent with expectations or existing knowledge will require a more detailed search to an explanation

Ex. The

Walmart

greeter scenario

The greeter is nice, polite, and helpful = expected and processed automatically

The greeter is mean and insulting = need to know why the greeter acted this way, thus attributional processes are needed Slide82

Social Representations and Attributions

“… social representations impose a kind of automatic explanation. Causes are singled out and proposed prior to a detailed search for and analysis of information. Without much active thinking, people’s explanations are determined by their social representations”

The social function of such automatic explanations is that they are learned and thus socially communicated through language

It is suggested that the use of cultural hypotheses to explain behavior and events can be regarded as a kind of

“socialized processing”

Culturally agreed upon explanations eventually become common-sense explanations

Each society has its own culturally and socially sanctioned explanation or range of explanations for phenomena such as illness, poverty, failure, success, and violence

Point being, people don’t always need to engage in an active cognitive search for explanations for all forms of behavior and events

Instead, people can use their socialized processing for social representations Slide83

Social Representations and Attributions: Social Origins of the FAE

The study of perceived causality in attribution theory is primarily concerned with what passes as everyday social explanation

There are 2 kinds of attributions central to attribution theory: dispositional (personal) and situational (contextual)

These 2 types of explanation correspond to what has been referred to as “individual” and “social” principles

Earlier we discussed one of the most consistent findings in attribution research: the FAE

We also discussed that this bias has primarily been explained by cognitive and perceptual factors (like the dominance of the actor in the perceptual field)

But, we also talked about how others have suggested that this bias may be due to our individualistic culture Slide84

Social Representations and Attributions: Social Origins of the FAE

The importance of individualism specific to liberal democratic societies and, most particularly, in American social, cultural, and political life, has been emphasized by political philosophers

Ex.

Lukes

(1973) pointed out how political, economic, religious, ethical, epistemological, and methodological domains have been filled with individualist principles

Liberal individualism’s central principles emphasize the importance of the individual over and above society, and view the individual as the center of all action and processes

This representation of the person may seem pretty self-evident and not particularly controversial, But, the anthropologist

Geertz

emphasizes its uniqueness:

“The western conceptions of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”

Meaning that the emphasis on individualism in western culture is odd given that the majority of societies around the globe don’t think this waySlide85

Social Representations and Attributions: Social Origins of the FAE

If, indeed, attributions and explanations are grounded in social knowledge

Then, cultural variations in the representation of the person should yield cross-cultural differences in the prevalence of person attributions

The overcomplicated point the authors of this textbook are trying to make:

The focus on individualism in western society, which is part of our social representations, is not the general view of the rest of the world

Emphasis on individualism leads to more personal attributions and less situational attributions

So, if attributions do stem from social knowledge, or social representations, cultures that place emphasis on individualism should make different attributions from cultures than do not

Thus, there should be differences in prevalence of personal attributions between cultures

Supporting research…Slide86

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

Before any research was specifically designed to examine cultural influences on attributions:

Developmental research had found a significant tendency for dispositional attributions to increase with age in western cultures

Young western children predominantly make references to contextual factors to explain social behavior

Western adults are more likely to stress dispositional characteristics of the actor

Anthropologists had also found that that:

Non-western adults place less emphasis on the dispositional characteristics of the agent and more emphasis on the contextual or situational factors, compared to western adults Slide87

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

At first, social psychologists didn’t attempt to explain these differences in a social way

Rather, they tried to explain them in terms of individual cognition and experience

Ex. Early explanation of why young children don’t make dispositional attributions

Young children have a limited cognitive capacity to make dispositional attributions because it requires the cognitive competence to generalize behavioral regularities over time

It was argued that children did not acquire the cognitive capacity to do this until they were older

Similarly, it was argued that non-western adults are less likely to make dispositional attributions because the cognitive capacity to do so is more likely to be associated with the experience of living in complex modernized societies Slide88

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

Joan Miller was among the first social psychologists to point out that these explanations disregard the possibility that developmental and cultural differences may:

“result from divergent cultural conceptions of the person acquired over development in the two cultures rather than from cognitive or objective experiential differences between attributors”

Cultural differences

Western notions of the person are essentially individualistic, emphasizing the centrality and autonomy of the individual actor in all action

Non-western notions of the person tend to be holistic, stressing the interdependence between the individual and his/her surroundings

Developmental/age differences

Reflect the enculturation process – the gradual process by which children adopt the dominant conception of the person within their culture Slide89

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

Miller’s 1984 research does support this theory

Cross-cultural study comparing the attributions made for prosocial and deviant behaviors

American vs. Indian Hindu

Sample: 8, 11, and15 year olds, and a group of adults (mean age = 40.5 years)

Results:

At older ages, Americans made significantly more references to dispositions (

M

= 40%) than did Hindus (

M

< 20%)

Most of the dispositions referred to personality characteristics of the actor

There were no significant differences that distinguished the responses of 8-11 year old American children from the responses of Hindu children (difference was an average of 2%)Slide90

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and AttributionsSlide91

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

Within each culture developmental trends indicated a significant linear age increase in reference to:

General dispositions among Americans

Context among the Hindus, emphasis on social roles and patterns of interpersonal relationships

These attributional patterns reflect Indian cultural conceptions

Emphasis on locating a person, object, or event in relation to someone or something else

Ex. Explanations given by an American and a Hindu participant regarding a story about an attorney who, after a motorcycle accident, left his injured passenger in a hospital without consulting with the doctor while he went on to work

American: “The driver is obviously irresponsible (disposition). The driver is aggressive in pursuing career success (disposition).

Hindu: “It was the driver’s duty to be in court for the client whom he’s representing (context). The passenger might not have looked as serious as he was (context/aspects of another person).Slide92

Social Representations and Attributions: Culture and Attributions

More recent cross-cultural studies have generally confirmed Miller’s cultural hypothesis

It appears that the tendency to overrate personal/dispositional factors of the agent in western adults cannot be completely explained by cognitive and experiential interpretations

The attribution “bias” may not simply be a cognitive property or universal law of psychological functioning

It may be culture-specific

Though the agent of action tends to dominate the perceptual field for Americans

The “person” does not seem to enjoy the same degree of perceptual dominance among non-western people Slide93

Social Representations and Attributions: Lay Explanations for Social Issues

It’s clear that attributions or lay explanations for behavior and events are not only the outcome of internal cognitive processes

Rather, they are social phenomena that are based on widely held and shared beliefs in the form of social and collective representations

Hewstone

(1989) suggested the concept of an

“attributing society”

– our tendency to seek explanations within our predominant cultural frameworkSlide94

Social Representations and Attributions: Lay Explanations for Social Issues

Our explanations for social phenomena are shaped not only by culture but also by scientific and expert knowledge

The diffusion and popularization of scientific concepts throughout society is occurring at a rapid rate through the mass media

Increasingly, expert knowledge contributes to the stock of common sense which people draw upon to understand social reality

Thus, people can be regarded as “amateur” scientists, “amateur” economists, “amateur” psychologists, etc., as they draw upon this information to explain a range of phenomena

Such as the causes of cancer, economic depression, or problems in personal relationships

Some of this knowledge becomes an integral part of mass culture and, ultimately, what will come to be regarded as “common sense”Slide95

Social Representations and Attributions: Lay Explanations for Social Issues

The attributions that people make for societal events such as social issues provide us with rich insight into a society’s prevailing explanations or meaning systems

Research on causal attributions for social issues has included everyday explanations for poverty, unemployment, riots, and health and illness

Research has found that people in western industrialized societies are more likely to attribute poverty to individualist-dispositional causes, such as lack of effort and laziness, than situational-societal causes

People primarily hold the poor responsible for their dilemma

In contrast, unemployment is predominantly attributed to social and structural causes such as economic recession and government policies