Chapter 3
Attribution and social explanation
Sep 8th 2016
Seeking the causes of behavior
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People try to understand the world to make it orderly and meaningful enough for
adaptive action
 without this understanding we feel uncomfortable
Allows us the prediction of behavior
 possibly influence whether someone will behave in that way or not
 we gain control over our destiny
People try to construct causal explanations⁄
Attribution = process of assigning a cause to our own behavior and that of others
Overview of attribution theories
o Naïve psychologistsI – Heider (1958)
o Theory of correspondent inference – Jones & Davis (1965)
o Covariation model – Kelley (1967)
o Theory of emotional lability – Schachter (1964)
o Theory of self-perception – Bem (1967, 1972)
o Attributional theory – Weiner (1979, 1985)
o Intergroup perspective – Deschamps (1983), Hewstone (1989), Jaspar
People as naïve psychologists
 Model of social cognition that characterizes people as using rational, scientific-like,
cause-effect analyses to understand their world
 Since we feel that our own behavior is motivated, we look for the causes and reasons
for other people’s behavior in order to discover their motives
 Causal theories to predict and control environment
 we tend to look for stable and enduring properties of the world around us
 Distinction between internal attribution and external attribution
o Internal (or dipositional) attribution = process of assigning the cause of our
own or others’ behavior to internal or dispositional factors
o External (or situational) attribution = assigning the cause of our own or
others’ behavior to external or environmental factors
 Internal causes are hidden from us, presence can only inferred when there are no
clear external causes
 People tend to be biased in preferring internal to external attributions
From acts to dispositions
 Correspondent inference = causal attribution of behavior to underlying dispositions
 Dispositional cause is a stable cause
 makes people’s behavior predictable
 increases our own sense of control
 Five sources of information to make a correspondent inference
1. Freely chosen behavior is more indicative of a disposition than is behavior
clearly under the control of external threats, inducements or constraints
2. behavior with non-common effects (= Effects of behavior that are
relatively exclusive to that behavior rather than other behaviors)
 tells more about dispositions
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Chapter 3
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Attribution and social explanation
Sep 8th 2016
outcome bias = Belief that the outcomes of a behavior were intended by
the person who chose the behavior
if behavior produces a small number of different effects it tells us
something about that person’s disposition
3. socially desirable behavior tells little about a person’s disposition
 controlled by societal norms
4. we make more confident correspondent inferences when it has important
consequences for ourselves (= hedonic relevance)
5. personalism = behavior that appears to be directly intended to benefit or
harm oneself rather than others
limitations of the theory:
 correspondent inferences depend on attribution of intentionality, yet
unintentional behavior can be a strong basis for a correspondent inference
people sometimes do not attend to non-occuring behaviors
 not able to compute the commonality of effects accurately
People as everyday scientists
 covariation model = Kelley’s theory of causal attribution – people assign the cause of
behavior to the factor that covaries most closely with the behavior
 assign that factor a causal role
 people use this model to distinguish between internal dispositions and external
factors
o Consistency information – Information about the extent to which a behavior
Y always co-occurs with a stimulus X
 does Tom always laugh at the comedian or only sometimes?
o Distinctiveness information – Information about whether a person’s reaction
occurs only with one stimulus, or is a common reaction to many stimuli
 does Tom laugh at everything or only the comedian
o Consensus information – Information about the extent to which other people
react in the same way to a stimulus X
 does everyone laugh at the comedian (high consensus) or is is only
Tom who laughs (low consensus)?
 When consistency is low, people discount the potential cause and search for
alternatives
 no consistent relationship between a specific cause and a specific behavior
Consistency
Distinctiveness
Consensus
Low
High
+ High
+ High
High
+ Low
+ Low
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Attribution
Discounting
(search for another
cause)
External
(attribution to the
stimulus)
Internal
(attribution to the
person)
Chapter 3
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Attribution and social explanation
Sep 8th 2016
General issues:
o People are actually poor at assessing covariation of different events
 poor statisticians
o No guarantee that people use the covariation model
o People tend to attribute causality to the most salient feature
Require multiple observations
Causal schemata = Experience-based beliefs about how certain types of cause
interact to produce an effect
Extensions of attribution theory
Explaining our emotions
 Causal attributions play a central role in how we experience emotions
 Emotions may have two distinct components:
o Physiological arousal
o Cognitions that label the arousal and determine which emotion is experienced
Attributions for our own behavior
 People make more general attributions for their own behavior
 self-perception theory = Bem’s idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves only by
making self-attributions; we infer our own attitudes from our own behavior
Task performance attributions
 Causes and consequences of the sorts of attribution made for people’s success or
failure
o Locus – performance caused by the actor (internal) or the situation
(external)?
o Stability – is the cause stable or unstable?
o Controllability – to what extent is future task performance under the actor’s
control?
 Determines what kind of emotion people feel towards someone’s success or failure
Applications of attribution theory
Individual differences and attributional styles
 There are individual differences in the sorts of attributions they make (= attributional
style)
 Internals believe they have significant personal control over their destiny
 Externals believe they have little control over what happens
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ASQ (attributional style questionnaire) measures the sorts of explanation that people
give for unpleasant events on three dimensions:
o Internal/external
o Stable/unstable
o Global/specific
ACS (attributional complexity scale) measures individual differences in the
complexity of the attributions people make for events
Interpersonal relationships
 Attributions are there to explain, justify or excuse behavior, as well as to attribute
blame and instil guilt
 Three basic phases of relationships:
o Formation = attributions reduce ambiguity
o Maintenance = need to make attributions decreases (stable relationships
established)
o Dissolution = increase in attributions in order to regain an understanding of
the relationship
 Attributional conflict is strongly correlated to relationship dissatisfaction
 Couples that are happily married explain positive behavior by citing internal factors
and negative behavior is believed to be influenced by external factors
 distressed couples behave in the opposite way
Attributional biases
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Attribution process can be biased by personality, interpersonal dynamics or biased to
meet communication needs
Cognitive misers = model of social cognition that characterizes people as using the
least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive
behaviors
Motivated tacticians = model of social cognition that characterizes people as having
multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of
personal goals, motives and needs
Correspondent bias and the fundamental attribution error
 Best-known attribution bias is correspondence bias
 general tendency for people to overly attribute behavior to stable underlying
personality dispositions
 Fundamental attribution error = Bias in attributing another’s behavior more to
internal than to situational causes
 Essentialism = Pervasive tendency to consider behavior to reflect underlying and
immutable, often innate properties of people or the groups they belong to
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Chapter 3
Attribution and social explanation
Sep 8th 2016
Focus of attention
 Actor’s behavior attracts more attention than the background (disproportionately
salient in cognition)
Differential forgetting
 Attribution requires the representation of causal information in memory
 People tend to forget situational causes more readily than dispositional causes
 dispositional shift over time
Cultural and developmental factors
 Affect correspondence bias
 Different cultural norms for social explanations
Linguistic factors
 In English it’s relatively easy to describe an action and the actor in the same terms
 Much more difficult to describe the situation in the same way
The actor-observer effect
 Tendency to attribute our own behavior externally and other’s internally
 We tend to consider their behavior more stable and predictable than our own
 We tend to make more dispositional attributions for socially desirable than socially
undesirable behavior
o Perceptual focus
o Informational differences
The false consensus effect
 Seeing our behavior as more typical than it is
 We usually seek out similar others
 Our own opinions are very salient to us
 We are motivated to ground our opinions
 build a stable world
Self-serving biases
 Attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-esteem or the self-concept
 Self-enhancing biases = we take credit for our own success (internally)
 Self-protecting biases = explain away our negative behaviors and failures (externally)
 Self-enhancing biases are more common than self-protecting biases
 people with low self-esteem tend not to protect themselves
attribute failure internally
 Self-handicapping = publicly making advance external attributions for our anticipated
failure or poor performance in a forthcoming event
 Illusion of control = Belief that we have more control over our world than we really
do
 Belief in a just world = Belief that the world is a just and predictable place where
good things happen to ‘good people’ and bad things to ‘bad people’
 people get what they deserve
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Chapter 3
Attribution and social explanation
Sep 8th 2016
Intergroup attribution
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Process of assigning the cause of one’s own or others’ behavior to group
membership
Serve two functions:
o First relating to ingroup bias
o Second to self-esteem
Ethnocentrism = evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to
other groups
Ultimate attribution error
o Positive ingroup behavior and negative outgroup behavior  internally
o Negative ingroup behavior and positive outgroup behavior  externally
 group-enhancing bias
Ethnocentric attributions depend on intergroup dynamics in a sociohistorical context
Influenced by nature of the relations between the groups
Two processes responsible for ethnocentric intergroup attributions:
o Cognitive process: social categorization
 behavior that is consistent with our stereotypes attributed to stable
internal factors
 expectancy-inconsistent behavior attributed to unstable situational factors
o Self-esteem process: people need to secure their self-esteem
 social identity theory = theory of group membership and intergroup
relations based on self-categorization, social comparison and the
construction of a shared self-defintion in terms of ingroup-defining
properties
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