Download Fundamental attribution error

Thought QuestionsJot down your thoughts!
• Why do you obey some rules and
disobey others at school?
• Have you ever been convinced by
friends to do something you knew was
wrong? To do something you knew
was right?
• Do you consider yourself a conformist
or a nonconformist? Why?
CHS AP Psychology
Unit 12: Social Pyschology
Essential Task 12-1:Apply attribution theory to
explain the behavior of others with specific
attention to the fundamental attribution error,
self-serving bias, just-world hypothesis and
differences between collectivistic and
individualistic cultures
Social Psychology
• The scientific study of the ways in
which the thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors of one individual are
influenced by the real, imagined, or
inferred behavior or characteristics of
other people
Social Cognition: How you think
about people?
• Impression Formation – how do you
construct your social cognition?
– Primacy effect
• Early information about someone weighs
more than later information in forming
impressions
• We are “cognitive misers”
– Self-fulfilling prophecy
• A person’s expectations about another elicits
behavior from the other person that confirms
the expectations
• “Hostile” partners continued to be more hostile
Impression Formation
• Schemata
– Ready-made categories
– Allow us to make inferences about others
(good for cognitive misers)
– Also plays a major role in how we
interpret and remember information
– We will remember characteristics of our
schema that weren’t there
Impression Formation
• Stereotypes
– A set of characteristics believed to be shared
by all members of a social category
– It is usually unfair
– Most often applied to sex, race, occupation,
physical appearance, place of residence,
membership in a group or organization
– Can become the basis for self-fulfilling
prophecies
Attribution
• Attribution Theory: tries to explain
how people make judgments about the
causes of other people’s behavior
• Three criteria used to judge behavior
– Distinctiveness: Is this how the person
treats everyone or are you different?
– Consistency: Has the person always
treated you this way or is this different?
– Consensus: Do other people do this
same thing or is this really different?
Attribution: Why did he do that?
Example
• Bob walks past you without saying hi.
– Distinctiveness: Your explanation as to why Bob
did this will be different if he does this to
everyone in the hall or just you
– Consistency: Your explanation as to why Bob
did this will be different if he always says hi to
you or if you don’t really know each other.
– Consensus: Whether you’re in New York vs. a
college of 600 will change how you explain
Bob’s behavior.
Biases in Attribution: The errors to which
your guesses will succumb
• Actor-Observer Effect: attribute actions of others
to internal factors and the actions of yourself to
external factors
– Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to
overemphasize personal causes for others’ behavior
and underemphasize personal causes for our own
behavior
• Defensive attribution
– Self-Serving Bias: Tendency to attribute our successes
to our own efforts and our failures to external factors
– Just-world hypothesis: Assumption bad things happen
to bad people and good things happen to good people
• Attribution across cultures varies dramatically
Effects of Attribution
How we explain someone’s behavior affects
how we react to it.
Attitudes: feelings, often influenced by our beliefs,
that predispose our reactions to objects, people, and events
• The Nature of Attitudes
– Relatively stable
• Beliefs – facts and general knowledge
• Feelings – love, hate, like, dislike
• Behaviors – inclination to approach, avoid, buy
• Self-monitoring
– High self-monitors look for cues about how
they are expected to behave
• Makes using attitudes to predict behavior difficult
– Low self-monitors express and act on their
attitudes consistently making prediction easier
Attitude Development
• Many factors contribute to the
development of attitudes
– Imitation
– Reward
– Teachers
– Peers
– Mass media
Attitudes Can Affect Action
Our attitudes predict our behaviors
imperfectly because other factors,
including the external situation, also
influence behavior.
Attitude Change
• Process of persuasion
– Must get and maintain the person’s
attention
– Must comprehend the message
– Comprehension leads to acceptance
Attitude Change
• How the message gets comprehended
and then accepted is by these things:
– Source (credibility is key)
– Message itself (more effective when it
acknowledges other arguments and then
gives novel ones – a little fear is good)
– Medium of communication (writing good
for complex, media better for audience
with a gist, face-to-face is the best)
– Audience’s characteristics
Routes a Message Can Take to
Persuade You
• Central Route to Persuasion
– when the attitude of the audience, or individual, is
changed as a result of thoughtful consideration of the
message.
• Peripheral Route to Persuasion occurs when
positive or negative cues (such as images, sounds, or
language) are associated with the object of the message.
– An advertisement featuring a song that the audience
member likes, or a person whom the audience
member sees as appealing might cause a person to
have positive feelings toward the brand, without that
person ever thinking deeply about the message.
Other techniques
• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
• Low-ball technique
• Brainwashing
• Write-it-down technique
• Fifty-words-or-less technique
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• (Leon Festinger 1957)
• Occurs whenever a person has two
contradictory cognitions or beliefs at the
same time. They are dissonant, each one
implies the opposite of the other.
• The less coerced and more responsible we
feel for an action the more dissonance. The
more dissonance the more likely we are to
change our attitude
• It creates an unpleasant cognitive tension
and the person tries to resolve in the
following ways: (see next slide)
Audience Characteristics
• Most difficult to change if
– Strong commitment to present attitude
– Attitude is shared by others
– The attitude has been held since early
childhood
• Up to a point the larger the difference
between message and audience the more
likely attitudinal change will occur
• Low self-esteem more likely to change
Resolution of Cognitive Dissoance
1. Sometimes changing your attitude is the easiest
way to solve this.
–
Example: I am a loyal friend, but yesterday I gossiped
about my friend Chris . . . Well I can’t change my
action . . . but I don’t want to change my view of
myself, so my attitude about Chris must be wrong.
He is more of an acquaintance than a friend.
2. Increase the number of consonant elements –
the number of thoughts that back one side.
–
It was awesome gossip
3. Reduce the importance of one or both of the
sides
–
The person I gossiped with won’t really tell that
many people.