Judgment Biases and Attributional Biases Essay

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

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.

Notably, the fundamental attribution error is a personal bias that is problematic in society. To emphasize, the fundamental attribution error is when individuals have the tendency to attribute people’s behavior to components of their character or personality, even when situational influences are producing the behavior (Textbook, page 171). An example of the fundamental attribution error operating in daily life is when a driver avoids hitting a pedestrian and causes an accident. In this

Implicit biases are “‘habits of mind,’ learned over time through repeated personal experiences and cultural socialization, which can be activated unintentionally, often outside of one’s own awareness, and are difficult to control” (Burgess, Beach & Saha, 2017, p. 372). Implicit bias is seen in the medical field partly because of the time pressure of medical visits, and the reliance on stereotypes in situations of high stress. It is difficult to study implicit bias because of social desirability. No doctor wants to admit that they are biased and, as a result, they are going to do their best to demonstrate the socially desirable response of being non-biased. However, research shows that bias and prejudice from health care providers toward patients exists, and leads to poorer care related to the assessment of cardiovascular risk and whether or not a patient is referred for additional treatment (Stepanikova, I., 2012). Even health care providers from one of the best health care organizations in the world, Mayo Clinic, struggle with

In the ways of the world it is easier to make assessments about people or objects based on a quick observation. For instance, almost everyone has heard the clique saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This is a perfect scenario where looking at just what is holding the book together a decision is made on whether the book will be picked to read. In the same ways individuals tend to judge each other. Unfortunately, when quick judgments are snapped about a person or object the observer is missing out a bigger picture. This is defined as the fundamental attribution error. For example, a person kicking a vending machine over and over may not have an anger management problem. Although, the observer may make this assumption as they walk by not

When we make situational attributions, we are identifying the cause of an action as something

Availability bias: the tendency for people to base their judgments on info that is readily available to them

It can be said that fundamental attribution error is the tendency for observers to overestimate the influence of personal characteristics and to underestimate the influence of situational characteristics. When people are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, people tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor and tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition (such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc.) as opposed to external situational factors, which can be due to focus on the person more than their situation, about which we may know very little, and also know little about how they are interpreting the situation (Fundamental, n.d.). In an internal or dispositional attribution, people infer that an event or a person’s behavior is due to personal factors such as traits,

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

Attribution explanation (of why something works or happens the way it does), deals with how the sets of very negative beliefs by others uses information to arrive at proof that one thing definitely causes another explanations events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a (proof that one thing definitely causes another) judgment” (Fiske, & Taylor, 1991)

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.

In social psychology, the phrase person perception has historically referred to the perception of others that leads to judgments of traits and dispositions. Fritz Heider proposed that people can attribute the behaviors of others to factors that are internal (personality, dispositions, etc.) or external (situational constraints), but that people are prone to make internal attributions (Ickes, 2000). These basic observations affected decades of research and provided an important foundation for two related theories, in particular. Harold Kelley’s covariation model, for example, described how people discern the attitudes of others based on simple factors surrounding observed behaviors (Sadalla et al, 1994). Similarly, Edward E. Jones

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.

We have read the stories and heard about the reality of individuals with ethnic names being passed over when it comes to job interviews. The last July, NBC ran a story about Yolanda Spivey and her experiment with name bias. Spivey, an African American female, was finding it hard to get job interviews despite her qualification. She created an identical profile as her own using the name Bianca White. While her phone remained silent, "Bianca White's phone and email account sprang to life. At the end of her experiment, Spivey summarized, "Resumes with ethnic sounding names may go into the wastebasket and never see the light of day. The result is that black women have an unemployment rate of twice the national

In their paper entitled ‘Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias’, Mezulis et al. focussed on the magnitude, adaptiveness and ubiquity of the bias and found that nearly all samples included the bias with those within the child and older adult age groups showing the largest