Fundamental Attribution Error Research Paper

In this paper we will analyze and discuss unconscious biases in our personal lives, workplace and home. How we become aware of these biases, what causes

Biases. I realized that knowing about biases does not protect me against them. This assignment made me recognize how easily the biases (in my case, the confirmation bias) can undermine my judgment, perception, and reasoning. Based on the consumer’s physical attributes and the way he presented himself, I formed an initial belief and an expectation that Rodney had a positive self-concept. Even when the test results clearly indicated that the consumer’s view of himself was negative, I was still committed to my cognitive impression and I recalculated the scores twice, to make sure I had not made an error and misconstrued his profile.

The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or reckless driver. This will be an error if the other driver had a good reason for running the light, such as rushing a patient to the hospital. If this is the case and Alice had been driving the other car, she would have understood that the situation called for speed at the cost of safety, but when seeing it from the outside she was inclined to believe that the behavior of the other driver reflected their fundamental nature (having poor driving skills or a reckless attitude) cognitive dissonance - is a mental condition in which an individual has two or more contradictory ways of seen things, ideas, perceptions, values, etc, or come into contact with contradictory information they begin to feel psychologicaly

Combining the concepts of the Fundamental Attribution Error and the Actor-Observer Bias, when we predict others' behavior, we are likely to overestimate the role of dispositional causes. When we predict our own behaviors, we are likely to see our behaviors are caused by situational factors.

To define this term in my own words, I will say that this term means to think about things in the wrong way. The thinking is that there are two main reasons for the behavior that we are receiving. These reasons include, internal reasons and external reasons. Internally speaking, it is what makes people perform actions that can be attributed to our personalities. We act the way we do, because that is the way we are. Externally speaking, we behave the way that we do, because of the predicaments that we are in. It is the mixture of internal and external reasons that explains our behavior. The fundamental attribution error, is when internal reasons are blow out of proportion, when you are trying to comprehend why people do what they do.

One of the biggest problems we have in society today is the division between blacks and whites. Though the United States has come a long way in this separation, we still see major disparities in every social institution; blacks being on the negative end in each. Between the prison system, school, and the work place, there hasn’t been enough, if any, programs or laws to change that. The reason is, there are a lot of people who think the problem is not with the systems, but just a problem with the individuals. This is referred to as the Fundamental Attribution Error. This theory explains that when a person is evaluating another person’s behavior, they typically overestimate the personal disposition impact and underestimate the impact of the situation.

When Mary brought her fiancé to meet her family during thanksgiving, he spoke loudly to the point where it was irritating. Mary’s aunt then commented on her disbelief that Mary was going to marry a man with a personality like that. She attributed Mary’s fiancé’s behavior to an internal attribution, his personality, instead of holding the pressure of making the first impression to be responsible of the fiancé’s forced behaviors. Mary’s aunt made a dispositional attribution that many have been a result of correspondence bias, which is “the tendency to make dispositional attributions instead of situational attributions” (Text, p.406). At an instance, Mary’s aunt chose to make dispositional attributions and assumed that the fiancé had an annoying personality. Although, if Mary’s and her fiancé’s roles were reverse, she may have acted the same way: loud and aggravating.

After reading Edward E. Jones and Keith E. Davis’ essay: “From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in Person Perception”, and watching Dan Gilbert’s Ted talks, I came across a few ideas that I’ve never thought of before, and in addition to that, I acquired new insights from them, most especially Gilbert’s Ted talks. I also found relating themes between Jones and Davis’ essay and Gilbert’s Ted talk: “The surprising science of happiness” (2004), “Why we make bad decisions” (2005) and “The psychology of your future self ” (2014). The themes or keynote that I think stood out were our actions as humans, our perceptions, our decisions, and how these things affect us.

Psychologists inside the perceptive science have for a long time believed that casual reasoning procedures such as fundamental labels are the same in every culture. Although identifying that the content of causal beliefs can differ widely across cultures, psychologists have assumed that the ways in which people come to make their causal judgments are essentially the same, and therefore that they tend to make the same sorts of inferential errors. A case in point is the fundamental attribution error, or FAE, a phenomenon that is of central importance to social psychology and until recently was held to be invariable across cultures. The FAE refers to people's inclination to see behavior as the result of dispositions corresponding to the apparent

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.

When looking at my past, a situation that could be perceived as having some attribution theory would be when I was watching people at Super bowl parties. This is because they use internal factors, like traditions or rituals they perform, to correlate that with outcomes of the game. Another example would be assuming that just going to a class constantly will give me a good grade. This is so because just assuming that being there will get a person an A grade without putting in the effort to the class is preposterous yet, some people try this method and complain when their assumptions do not coalesce.

Three common errors in judgement that I have personally dealt with in my life are, stereotypes, snap judgements, and unwarranted assumptions. In all cases, I was not the person on the receiving end of the negativity that is so often associated with all three of these examples, but rather I was the facilitator in all three instances.

Taking my first general psychology has been very interesting. I am ending the semester with a lot of newly acquired knowledge about how and why our brain works the way it does. I have chosen three out of many of the things I have learned and reflected on them deeply in this paper. First, I will be talking about Social Categorization, which has changed my views on how I generally perceive people. Secondly, I will discuss Stereotype vulnerability, which has brought me to the realisation that stereotypes are more than just labels and can seriously change the way people behave towards not only one another but with themselves. Lastly, I will discuss The Fundamental Attribution Error, which will always cause me to think twice or even three times about how I perceive people's actions. These topics have all been significantly mind altering for me in ways I will explain further in this paper.

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

We attach and assume meanings to others behavior in our day to day life and the theory developed by Fritz Heider based on this is called The Attribution Theory. This was developed overtime by many other social psychologists as well, including Edward Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley. The Attribution Theory seeks to help people make sense of their world by identifying causes for the behaviors and events they experience. Throughout this paper I will explain the theory, talk about my personal experience with it, studies performed about it and lastly the significance that this theory holds in our society today.