Attribution Processes and Biases

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• How we process and store social information and how this affects how we perceive others' behaviour

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• Process of assigning a cause to you own and others' behaviour. Why we behave the way we do.

1. Causal attributes

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   • An inference process through which perceivers attribute and effect to one or more causes

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• People are intuitive psychologists who construct causal theories of human behaviour and because it is the same form as systematic scientific social psychological theories, they are actually naive psychologists. Based on 3 principles...
• 1) The need to form a coherent view of the world.  Because our own behaviour is motivated not random we look for causes in others in order to discover their motives
• 2) The need to gain control over the environment Because we construct these causal attributes in order to predict and control the environment we tend to look for stable and enduring properties of the world that cause behaviour.
• 3) The need to identify internal vs. external factors Personal factors - internal (dispositional) attribution. The process of assigning the causes of our behaviour to internal factors. Environmental factors - external (situational) attribution.The process of assigning the causes of our behaviour to external factors.

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• This theory explains that the cause of behaviours is due to and underlying disposition e.g. a friendly action is caused by the underlying disposition to be friendly. People often like do make these attributions about others because it is a stable cause that makes behaviour predictable.

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• Kelly argues we try to act like scientists by identifying what factor co-varies most closely to the behaviour and then assigning the factor a causal role. Sometimes referred to as the ANOVA model (Analysis of Variance). People use this model to attach internal (personality) or external (social pressure) reasons to the cause of behaviour.

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• Causality of Success or Failure: Locus Stability Controllability

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• Systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feelings and intuition

1. Correspondance Bias

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• People make clear dispositional attribution errors even when there are clear environmental/external causes.
• Asked students if they would walk around campus advertising minimum wage. The students who said yes believed that everyone else would do the same.

1. Self-esteem maintenance
2. Salience of our own opinion
3. We are generally friends with people similar to ourselves

1. Internal

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   • A shop-assistant is rude to you... They are a rude person ro simply stressed?
2. External

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   • You are rude to a shop-assistant... you are a rude person or simply stressed?

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• Success - I am smart Failure - It was a bad paper Split into self-enhancing and self-protecting biases. Why? Expectations of self-esteem, maintain positive self identity

1. Availability Heuristics

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   • Judge frequency or probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples (memory accessibility)
2. Representative Heuristic

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   • Categorise based on similarity between instance and prototypical category members. E.g people from a location, similar to stereotype
3. Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristsic

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   • Starting point (or initial standard) influences subsequent judgements.