Fundamental Attribution Error

Trevor’s actions led his peers to label him as a constant threat, as well as the school “weirdo.” Everyone, even his parents, cautioned himself or herself around him. Trevor’s own actions categorized him as a threat to all. His peers would wonder about the causes for his actions. This led them to believe in false causes. A theory in this particular case, which is widely used in this concept, is the attribution theory. This explains and states the different types of processes we use to judge behaviors

In the experiment, people were picked randomly and one as a teacher and one as the student. They were told to take a quiz and give electric shocks of increasing intensity as punishment if the student can’t answer. During the experiment, many people were concerned as someone can be heard shouting but only a few people who decided to stop and stick to their morals. But the others kept on going because they were just following orders from a superior (Milgram 77). "The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip Zimbardo, is about an experiment that was made to understand the roles people play in prison situations. For the experiment, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. The participants were told to act as prisoners and guards. It was planned to be a two-week experiment but was forced to shut down in 6 days, all because of people quickly getting into their roles and started acting like the real prisoners and guards (Zimbardo 104). To compare both experiments, although they differed vastly in design and methodology, the point of both experiments was to observe how far an individual would go in inflicting increasing pain on a victim. Also how people obey under authoritative circumstances, when given power or different roles, however the writers differ in the seriousness of the fight for individuality and the use of reality.

The fundamental attribution error intrigued me while reading the book because I came across the example about Hurricane Katrina. I lived through this experience so I felt it was only right that I talk about my take. The definition of the fundamental attribution error is assuming someone’s personality based on their actions, even when there are powerful outside forces that can be influencing them. Hurricane Katrina was a horrible natural disaster that no one could have predicted would happen but none the less it happened. I remember my family and I watching the news together and coming to the crippling conclusion that we had to leave everything we had behind. Of course, we were used to this because we lived in what they call “the soup bowl” and we were used to emergency evacuations for hurricanes. There was no

The authors explain that “fundamental attribution error” is when people focus too much on individual traits rather than the “situational factors in affecting behavior.” What seems to be the case is that “fundamental attribution error” is main problem with Ross and Nisbett’s piece. They tried to focus too much on the logical side of things while entirely disregarding the human factor in their

An example when I used fundamental attribution is when I was taking a class at Gwinnett technical college. I assume that the girl in my class was quiet; because she wanted to keep to herself and she did not want to bother. One day I saw her in an organization with other group members talking and passing out flyers to me and other people. She was also interacting with me as well. She was even communicating with other people. I assume wrong she was not a quiet person.

Social cognition is defined as the ways in which people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information(Gilovich). In the article “Some Systematic Biases of Everyday Judgement” by Thomas Gilovich, he addresses several concepts based on the assertion that faulty processes of reasoning and judgment can cause a person to falsely interpret the events of their everyday lives. The first concept that Gilovich refers to is what is called the “Copmared to what?” problem, which states that people tend to be overly impressed with some statistic or fact without realizing that its true value can only be assessed in comparison to some other factor. An example used in the article states that a 1986 article in Discover magazine claims that ninety percent of plane crash survivors who were interviewed knew where the escape routes were beforehand.

The psychological phenomenon that the study centered around is the FAE, or the fundamental attribution error (also known as the attribution effect or the correspondence bias.) This phenomenon explains the inclination of people to place an emphasis on the internal qualities of a subject rather than external traits. This, however, does not explain or predict the participant’s own behavior or interpretation thereof. Unknowingly, each one of us experiences the FAE on a daily basis. While in traffic, we blame someone cutting us off on their “awful” personality rather than considering the situation or exactly why they were in such a rush. However, if we cut someone off in traffic, we blame it on the situation rather than our own internal habits and traits.

Fundamental Attribution Error is a term used to describe an attitude or belief of someone viewing a situation or being affected by a situation (Gilovich, Keltner, Chen, and Nisbett, 2013). This

As humans we feel the need to explain everything to ourselves and to others, we attribute cause to the events around us which gives us a sense of control. This 'need to explain' is helped through attribution theory argued by Robbins, Millet and Boyle which try to explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior . There are three different type of observations that we make when we attribute behavior to either external or internal sources being consensus, consistency and distinctiveness. Considering a case of job selection process, Sam arrives at an interview and sits down without greeting his employees. Now given due to research that humans pass judgment on to others in a

The article I chose was “What’s not being said about implicit bias and how it shapes our reality” by John A. Powell. I chose this article because it offered me more information on how biases affect society, for example, it mentions an occasion where biases affected policymaking. It also provided me an insight on what well-known members of society think about biases. Moreover, it mentioned a few techniques one can implement in order to diminish unconscious biases. It provided me with more scientific evidence than Verna Myers’s TED Talk on the subject of biases. Now, thanks to this information I will be able to expand on the ideas stated in the previous essay regarding biases.

Diagnosis bias is where one labels a person based on their first impression of that person. Diagnosis bias and value attribution are closely related. With both of these, people refuse to let go of their initial view of a person. When the MIT students were told that their substitute would be “rather cold” or “very warm” (72), instead of evaluating the traits of the sub on their own, they could not get past their initial perception of him. The students had labeled the teacher and assigned his worth beforehand and were thus unable to see past their views of him.

Think back to high school and the number of different groups that there were. Now think of the way that you would classify people back then and how you classify people today. You make these judgements about people without even knowing anything about them. This is known as social cognition. It is the way your brain processes and understands intergroup and interpersonal processes and actions. Social cognition covers things such as attitudes, prejudices, identities, and other things we use to classify people. Overall people will make attributions one of two ways. The first was is by being a naïve scientist. If you are a naïve scientist, you are more likely to put thought and effort when figuring out social inferences. The use information

Social psychology defines the fundamental attribution error as a type of cognitive bias. Simply put, the fundamental attribution error is the act of blaming someone’s behavior on their personality characteristics, as opposed to considering that their behavior might be caused by an external situation. ("In Social Psychology, What Is Fundamental Attribution Error?") I’ve seen an example of fundamental attribution error that took place between a store clerk and a customer. The customer paid for his item, and instead of putting the change in the customer’s hand, the clerk placed the money on the counter. The customer became upset because he thought the clerk was being racist. In actuality, placing the money on the counter was a form of respect in the clerk’s home country.

Fundamental Attribution Error justifies how individuals explain the actions of other individuals. For example; Just the other day I saw one of my students ask a boy out as boyfriend and girlfriend, but immediately got declined. I honestly was in shock when she did that because she didn’t know how to ask the proper way. I right away predicted that she had intentions of him saying no to her because he wasn’t looking for companionship. I think when situations like this occur whether it be negative or positive we always tend to blame an individuals characteristics and or personality rather than a specific issue. In the past, I have had many people judging me and thinking the worst just because of how I present myself and mainly how I have a strong attitude. I’ve always had pride on everything I desired to do, and when someone tells me to do something I most likely won’t listen to you

A study was carried out on five participants, both men and women, of different ethnic groups, with ages that ranged from 13 - 44 years, to determine whether a setting that is perceived as congruent or incongruent with a particular behaviour, had any influence on their ability to make valid attributions. The study aimed to capture which attributions changed from internal to external and vice versa, and which of the paired scenarios showed the biggest change. The method required participants to rate the behaviour and to provide an explanation about their rating. Results indicated a unanimous attribution change in one of the paired scenarios, but slight variance and uncertainty in the other scenarios. Conclusively, the study showed that without strong congruency between a setting and behaviour, results are likely to vary in consistency, due to numerous factors discussed in the study.