Bs 101 module 4a - attitude and theories of attribution
- 1. Behavioural Science – Attitude & Attribution 1 Moumita Mukherjee Attitude - Theories of Attribution Attributions are explanations for events and behaviour. Heider differentiated between two types of causal attribution – personal and situational. Personal attributions refer to factors within the person, such as their personality characteristics, motivation, ability and effort. Situational attributions refer to factors within the environment that are external to the person. For example, if we were discussing why a particular student has failed an important university examination, we would consider personal factors (such as her academic ability and how much effort she invested in preparing for the exam). But we might also look at situational attributions (such as whether she had good tuition, access to library facilities and sufficient time to study). Heider noted that we tend to overestimate internal or personal factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining behaviour. This tendency has become known as the fundamental attribution error, which we’ll return to in the next section. In a similar vein, Jones and Davis (1965) found that we tend to make a correspondent inference about another person when we are looking for the cause of their behaviour. In other words, we tend to infer that the behaviour, and the intention that produced it, correspond to some underlying stable quality. For example, a correspondent inference would be to attribute someone’s aggressive behaviour to an internal and stable trait within the person – in this case, aggressiveness. Jones and Davis argued that this tendency is motivated by our need to view people’s behaviour as intentional and predictable, reflecting their underlying personality traits. But in reality, making correspondent inferences is not always a straightforward business. The information we need in order to make the inferences can be ambiguous, requiring us to draw on additional cues in the environment, such as the social desirability of the behaviour, how much choice the person had, or role requirements. Like Heider, Kelley (1967) likened ordinary onlookers to naïve scientists who weigh up several factors when attributing causality. Kelley’s covariation model of attribution states that, before two events can be accepted as causally linked, they must co-occur. The covariation of events and behaviour was assessed across three important dimensions: 1. Consistency – does the person respond in the same way to the same stimuli over time? 2. Distinctiveness – do they behave in the same way to other different stimuli, or is the behaviour distinctively linked to specific stimuli? 3. Consensus – do observers of the same stimuli respond in a similar way? Kelley argued that we systematically analyze people- and environment-related information, and that different combinations of information lead to different causal attributions. Ross (1977) defined the fundamental attribution error (FAE) as the tendency to underestimate the role of situational or external factors, and to overestimate the role of dispositional or internal factors, in assessing behaviour. Heider put forward a largely cognitive explanation for the FAE. He suggested that behaviour has such salient properties that it tends to dominate our perceptions. In other words, what we notice most in (a) behaviour and (b) communication is (c) the person who is central to both. People are dynamic actors – they move, talk and interact, and these features come to dominate our perceptual field. Supporting this cognitive explanation, Fiske and Taylor (1991) argued that
- 2. Behavioural Science – Attitude & Attribution 2 Moumita Mukherjee situational factors such as social context, roles and situational pressures are ‘relatively pallid and dull’ in comparison with the charisma of the dynamic actor. It is well known that people tend to accept credit for success and deny responsibility for failure. More generally, we also tend to attribute our success to internal factors such as ability, but attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck or task difficulty. This is known as the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias also operates at the group level. So we tend to make attributions that protect the group to which we belong. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in what Pettigrew (1979) called the ultimate attribution error (UAE). By extending the fundamental attribution error to the group context, Pettigrew demonstrated how the nature of intergroup relations shapes the attributions that group members make for the same behaviour by those who are in-group and out-group members. So, prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes of disliked out-groups lead to derogating attributions, whereas the need for positive enhancement and protection of the in-group leads to group-serving attributions. People are therefore more likely to make internal attributions for their group’s positive and socially desirable behaviour, and external attributions for the same positive behaviour displayed by out-groups. In contrast, negative or socially undesirable in-group behaviour is usually explained externally, whereas negative out-group behaviour is more frequently explained internally.