The process of assigning cause to our own behaviour, and that of others.
Attribution (p. 84)
Hedonic Relevance (p. 87)
Personalism (p. 87)
Consistency Information (p. 87)
Model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause–effect analyses to understand their world.
Heider’s Theory of Naive Psychology (p. 85)
Jones and Davis’ Theory of Correspondent Inference (p. 86)
Kelley’s Covariation Model (p. 87)
Conspiracy Theories (p. 108)
Three Principles of Naïve Psychology (p. 85)
Looking for behaviour causes to discover other people’s motives.
Focus on stable and enduring properties.
Distinguish between personal factors.
Behaviour freely chosen.
Explanation of behaviour due to internal reasoning such as personality.
Dispositional Attribution (p. 85)
Situational Attribution (p. 85)
Explanation of behaviour due to external reasoning such as environment.
A theory explaining how people infer that a person’s behaviour corresponds to an underlying disposition or personality trait.
Five Sources of Information or Cues to Make a Correspondent Inference.
Behaviour Freely Chosen (p. 86)
Non-Common Effects (p. 86)
Behaviour Social Desirability (p. 86)
The act was freely chosen.
Effects of behaviour that are relatively exclusive to that behaviour rather than other behaviours.
Behaviour likely to be controlled by societal norms.
Refers to behaviour that has important direct consequences for self.
Behaviour that appears to be directly intended to benefit or harm oneself rather than others.
A theory of causal attribution whereby people assign the cause of behaviour to the factor that covaries most closely with the behaviour.
Conspiracy Theory (p. 108)
Three Classes of Information Associated with the Co-Occurrence of a Certain Action.
Distinctiveness Information (p. 87)
Consensus Information (p. 87)
Levelling (p. 107)
Information about the extent to which a behaviour Y always co-occurs with a stimulus X.
Correlation (p. 13)
Information about whether a person’s reaction occurs only with one stimulus, or is a common reaction to many stimuli.
Confounding (p. 10)
Information about the extent to which other people react in the same way to a stimulus X.
External Validity (p. 12)
Experience-based beliefs about how certain types of cause interact to produce an effect.
Causal Schemata (p. 89)
The Actor-Observer Effect (p. 97-98)
Illusion of Control (p. 100)
A tendency for people to over-attribute behaviour to stable underlying personality dispositions.
Correspondence Bias (or Fundamental Attribution Error) (p. 95)
Outcome Bias (p. 86)
Ultimate Attribution Error (p. 102)
Belief that the outcomes of a behaviour were intended by the person who chose the behaviour.
Tendency to consider behaviour to reflect underlying and immutable, often innate, properties of people for the groups they belong to.
Essentialism (p. 96)
Stereotype (p. 103)
Tendency to attribute our own behaviours externally and others’ behaviours internally.
A tendency to see your own behaviour as more typical than it really is.
The False Consensus Effect (p. 98-99)
Self-Serving Bias (p. 99)
Attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-esteem or the self-concept.
Self-Serving Biases (p. 99)
Sharpening (p. 107)
Select the all the types of self-serving bias.
Self-Handicapping (p. 100)
Belief in a Just World (p. 100-101)
Publicly making advance external attributions for our anticipated failure or poor performance in a forthcoming event.
Belief that we have more control over our world than we really do.
Belief that the world is a just and predictable place where good things happen to ‘good people’ and bad things happen to ‘bad people’.
Process of assigning the cause of one’s own or others’ behaviour to group membership.
Intergroup Attribution (p. 102)
Social Representations (p. 105)
Evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to other groups.
Ethnocentrism (p. 102)
Tendency to attribute bad outgroup and good ingroup behaviour internally and attribute good outgroup and bad ingroup behaviour externally.
Collectively elaborated explanations of unfamiliar and complex phenomena that transform them into a familiar and simple form.
Three processes associated with rumour transmission
Assimilation (p. 107)
The rumour quickly becomes shortened, less detailed and less complex.
Certain features of the rumour are selectively emphasised and exaggerated.
The rumour is distorted in line with people’s pre-existing prejudices, partialities, interests and agendas.
Explanation of wide spread, complex and worrying events in terms of the premeditated actions of small groups of highly organised conspirators.
