Attribution Process

Fundamental attribution error is a basic belief that whatever the problems befall us personally are the result of difficult circumstances, while the same problems in other people are the result of their bad choices. This is significant for understanding negative attitudes toward oversight people because when we personally cannot make it to the gym or eat a healthy snack we don’t blame ourselves. We wither didn’t have time of didn’t have the necessary materials. On the other hand if we someone obese eating unhealthy or who doesn’t go to the gym we make assumptions saying that they don’t have any self control and they are lazy.

Self-serving biases means the person will personal credits on their own success while reproaching the outside source when they fail the certain stuff. This tendency to misremember events in a particular direction is one of the strategies that people use to feel good about themselves (Sanderson, 2010).

Let's discuss some elements of the self-serving bias. First individuals often seem to have an unrealistic optimism. You can call this the "It won't happen to me" attitude. Optimism predisposes a positive approach to life. Sometimes this unrealistic optimism can make an individual seem larger than life. For example, students who are overconfident tend to under prepare. Another example of unrealistic optimism can be seem in newly weds. Most couples marry feeling confident of long term love when in reality half of all marriages fail. The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's opinions and one's undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors. When we behave badly or fail in a task we reassure ourselves by thinking that such mistakes are common. Individuals presume that others have the same

Attributions are the answers to why people do the things they do. People’s behavior can have situational factors and dispositional factors. The situational factors cause external attributions and the dispositional factors cause internal attributions. An example of a scenario where the internal and external attributions can be studied is the following: a man, John, asks a woman, Alice, out on a date and he gets rejected. Possible situational factors can be that she already has a boyfriend, he asked her to go clubbing with him and she does not like to party, or she is not ready to have a relationship because of a recent break up. Possible dispositional factors could be that he should have showered before he talked to her instead of coming

The key concepts behind the idea of attribution theories is to question what was the cause why you chose it and what information led you there. [1]Heider in his description tells us that we make judgements based on either internal/disposition causes, which are responsible for the motivating behaviour located in the persons personality or his apparent mood or on external situational causes which are caused by the environment. External attribution tells how the person acts in a situation outside the persons control whereas internal attribution is telling us

Various studies and theories have developed to explain why and how people make decisions on why people do things and have hypothesised that people make both internal and external attributions of others, based on the relation to different contexts, or that people behave differently to what is expected, normally, conventionally or abnormally….in

As opposed to attribution theory 's emphasis on human rationality in the search for the causes of behavior, the theory of heuristic and systematic information processing takes a stance on the opposite end: Humans, with all things being equal, could not be bothered to think deeper than what can be concluded using learned shortcuts and easily accessed information. The latter heuristic processing is preferred in most situations as it does not require cognitive effort because of its automaticity yet nevertheless arriving at

Research has showed that we tend to believe that others are susceptible to social influence, but that we are immune to this same pressure (Lilienfeld et al, 2014, pg 496). This idea has been proven false time and time again, and we see the contrary results when we look at social attribution error. Social attribution theory is when we tend to overlook the impact of environmental influences on a person and instead blame their behavior on their personality, beliefs and intelligence (Lilienfeld et al, 2014, pg 501). For example, consider a person waiting in a long Starbucks line at seven in the morning. When the cashier takes your order, she avoids eye contact

It is true that there are students that make themselves fail. Whether it may be a focusing issue, lack of effort, or just simply that they do not care, that is their fault. Many students would prefer to be just the average Joe. (Rose 128) But, this is a small percentage of the many kids who are failing. Majority of kids want to succeed and learn but are not

Another example of the attributional biases is the self-serving bias (SSB). The difference between self-serving bias and the fundamental attribution error is that in self-serving bias, the “witness” is personally involved. Self-serving bias states that a person has the tendency to attribute successful outcomes to dispositional factors and unsuccessful outcomes to situational factors. An example of self-serving bias is exams: if one were to get 90% in an exam, they would attribute to internal, dispositional factors and say that the good mark came from their hard work, whereas if one were to fail in an exam, they would attribute to external, situational factors, blaming the mark on luck or bad teaching. There are a number of reasons why the self-serving bias might occur, such as:

Bernard Wiener is a social psychologist who is actively promoting his research on attribution of motivation and emotions theory. “Attribution investigates the perception of causality or the judgement of why a particular incident occurred” (Weiner, 1972). Wiener discerns attributions encourage and/or deter cognitive processes and learning. There are three stages of the attribution theory: observation, determination of behavior, and attributing to causes. Once an event or occurrence is observed, and behavior is exhibited, then an external or internal attribution is defined through two perspectives: self and other. Wiener suggests, using his mentor John Atkinson’s concept, that motivation is formulated and can be identified through attributions.

Rothman et al 's study focuses on how easy it is to elicit internal attribution, they did this through the words 'you ' and 'your doctor '. Two hundred and fifty women were randomly selected and assigned to one of three information conditions. All participants then took part in a session on mammography and breast cancer. The control condition group received the material without attribution control, in the external attribution condition the participants were told the information instead with the term 'your doctor ' and finally the internal attribution condition were given the information with the word 'you '. Examples of some of the phrases used are: “A/ your doctor will look at the/ you will ask if the... mammogram can reveal very small masses that aren’t detectable by a self exam.” (Rothman et al, 2003). The findings of this study were that the women participating in the internal attribution condition were more probable to get a mammogram within the next 12 months. This has been put down to the fact that the line 'you ' puts the responsibility with the participant. Therefore Heider 's work has ecological validity as it can be seen to work in a real life setting.

There are two theories that explain the root of human behaviors and why people behave the way they do; The attribution theory and the covariation model. Heider, the father of the attribution theory, believed that all human beings are amateur scientists, persistently piecing together facts and information in an effort to grasp a situation and the motivations behind it. Typically, one will assume behavior to be a result of internal personal factors such as attitude, feelings, and character traits. A teacher yelling at her student will be criticized for having a bad temper. On the flip side, attributing a behavior to external factors would mean holding the situation and circumstances responsible; The same teacher may actually be yelling at a student because of his/her lack of conduct.

The Attribution Theory supposes that people attempt to understand the behaviour of others by attributing feelings, beliefs, and intentions to them. (Heider, 1958)

Attribution theoristshave proposedseveral conditions whichaffect the inference of dispositionsfrom behavior (e.g., the actor's intentions, the actor's prior knowledgeof the behavior'sconsequences, the ability of the actor to produce the observed effects, the convariance