Attribution Theory

Discuss the types of attribution someone makes when they appraise a souls behaviour. How may bias occur in their reasoning particularly if they pass water a very different background to the person they observe? attribution theory focuses on ways in which we gather and process information in order to come up with judgements and explanations for peoples behaviours and personalities or as explained by Fiske & Taylor (1991) how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at casual explanations for events.It examines what information is gathered and how its combined to form casual judgements. there learn been many studies aimed at explaining the main errors people make when making inferences about peoples behaviour and whether culture has an effect on how we make attributions. There are two types of attributions, internal attributions, also known as dispositional attributions, are when we attribute behaviour to persons disposition (mental state, personality, emotions, characteris tics, etc. ).External attributions (also known as situational attributions) can be explained as attributing behaviour to the situation or the environment in which the behaviour took place. Correspondent inference (Jones & Davis, 1965) can be explained as when the commentator infers that the actors behaviour corresponds with their motives (an internal attribution). A correspondence bias is when the observer over-attributes the cause of behaviour to dispositional factors at the expense of situational antecedents.This can also be explained as the fundamental attribution error (Lee Ross, 1977). Another believed to be error in attribution is suppressing dispositional inferences during social judgement, which leads to the dispositional muster (Geeraert & Yzerbyt, 2007), meaning relying on dispositional inferences in incidental judgements. It is believed that a judgement begins with a dispositional bias and situational information is to correct the initial judgement (Quattrone, 1992), t his is called situational correction.Geeraert & Yzerbyt state that the observer must suppress dispositional judgements during the correctional stage and galvanic pile with the dispositional rebound in subsequent stages. Furthermore, a cause of the FAE (fundamental attribution error) could potentially be the fact that the observer may not see oftentimes to gain in making the effort to analyse the situational causes of a certain behaviour and too cognitively demanding (Andrews, 2001).However, due to the fact that they have greater incentives to forecast and influence behaviour, people who tend to depend on others are less likely to make erroneous attributions, which explains why people from more interdependent cultures (such as East Asians) tend to avoid the FAE (Choi et al, 1999) in contrast with people from more independent cultures (such as Europeans or Americans).To further elaborate on this point, numerous psychologists believe that culture may have a determining effect on whe ther the observer is prone to excessively relying on dispositional judgements. This is shown in Choi & Nisbetts 1998 study, which was in line with Snyder & Jones 1974 study, where a group of Korean and American participants were given the t subscribe of writing an essay with a designated position.They were then asked to judge a forced writer (a writer which wrote a piece as a forced task, whether or not what they were writing reflected their own beliefs). In contrast with the previous study, the Americans judgements were not affected, however, the Koreans no longer displayed correspondence bias when the situational forces were made salient. Kitayama and Miyamoto carries out a similar study, including Japanese and American students and as predicted, the Americans displayed correspondence bias, while the Japanese students did not.Moreover, with the aim of discovering whether the dispositional rebound occurs amongst people of East Asian background and using the dispositional rebound as a tool to study the process of attribution, a study was carried out which participants consisting of cv students from Hogeschool Gent, Belgium and 128 students from Kasestart University in Bangkok, Thailand, were given the task of decide a free or forced writer in the attitude attribution paradigm. The diagnosticity of the essays were manipulated in order to have participants also judge the essays based on whether they were diagnostic or not.Thai students were more sensitive to the manipulation of the diagnosticity of the essays, whilst the Belgian participants showed no sensitivity at all. Both cultural groups displayed symptoms of the dispositional rebound when judging a diagnostic forced essay, however, Belgian participants were the only ones to display the dispositional rebound when judging a non-diagnostic essay. Subsequently, participants were asked to judge a series of pictorially represented behaviours. Both Belgian and Thai participants displayed the dispositional reboun d when the situational information was hidden.However, Thai participants no longer displayed the dispositional rebound when the situational information was made salient (also discovered by Choir & Nisbett in their 1998 study and Miyanoto & Kitayama in their 2002 study). A further explanation of the dispositional rebound could be that it is the ironic consequence of suppression and correction of an initial dispositional concept as a result of cognitive fatigue due to the fact that the judgment of a constrained target demands a larger amount of cognitive effort which due to the reduction of cognitive resources, leaves some observers to rely on less demanding abstract language.Furthermore, several other studies which have directly focused on the universality of the correspondence bias (Choi & Nisbett, 1998 Kashima, Siegal, Tanaka, & Kashima, 1992 Krull et al. , 1999 Van Boven, Kamada, & Gilovich, 1999) have shown that people from interdependent cultures arent immune to erroneous attri butions .In these studies, both East Asians and Americans were given the task of judging a constrained target in the context of the attitude attribution paradigm (this requires participants to read an essay which either favours or opposes a particular sales outlet under the conditions that participants are told whether or not the writer had a choice in selecting the viewpoint which the essay reflects), the perceiver induced constraint paradigm (this requires participants to ask a target to read out a pre-written attitudinal statement, then comply observe the target and then try to figure out the targets true attitude) and the quiz paradigm.The results showed that regardless of culture, all participants displayed correspondence bias. These findings may suggest that culture may not determine whether an observer is prone to erroneous attributions. In conclusion, it seems that the most erroneous method in our ways of making social judgments is our tendency to rely excessively on dispos itional information when doing so and ironically suppressing our dispositional inferences which intellect seems to enforce the occurrence of, seems to cause a rebound effect in subsequent social judgments.But, it also seems that being raised in a community where it is the norm to be dependent on one another, tends to make one naturally more sensitive to informational information when it is there to be sensed and accordingly more able to make accurate inferences about behaviour and mental states.