Gilovich • Keltner • Nisbett
Social
Psychology
SECOND EDITION
Chapter 4
Understanding Others
©2011 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Explaining Events
• Attribution theory
– General term for theories about how people explain the causes of
events they observe
• Often make inferences about other people immediately
based on their physical appearance
– Research shows people with more baby-faced featured as judged
as more naïve and trustworthy
Explaining Events
• Attributions influence behavior towards others
– Baby-faced people get more favorable treatment in court but are
seen as less appropriate for high responsibility jobs
• Snap Judgments
– Attributions are often made very quickly based on limited
information
– Snap judgments can be accurate, but most accurately predict
what other people will think
Causal Attributions
• Causal Attribution
– Explanation for the cause of your or another person’s behavior
• Importance of Causal Attributions
– The type of attribution made will influence how you respond to
the situation
• For instance, if your friend cancels plans with you. Attributing it the
fact that your friend isn’t feeling well will generate a very different
reaction than attributing it the the idea that your friend no longer
likes
Causal Attributions
• Internal attribution
– Behavior is explained by aspects of the person
• External attribution
– Behavior is explained by aspects of the situation the person is in
Attributions and Health
• Explanatory Style
– A person’s habitual way of explaining events
• Explanatory Dimensions
– Internal versus external
• Degree that cause is linked to the self or the external situation
– Stable versus instable
• Degree that the cause is seen as fixed or as something that is temporary
– Global versus specific
• Degree that the cause is seen as affecting other domain in life or is restricted
to affecting specific domains
Attributions and Health
• Pessimistic attribution style
– Internal, Stable, Global attributions habitually made for negative
events
• “It’s my fault”, “I’m never going to be able to”, “I suck at everything”
– Pessimistic attributions styles predict lower grades, poorer physical
health later in life
Gender differences in Attributions
• Gender differences in children’s attribution styles
– Boys more likely to attribute failures to external causes
– Girls more likely to attribute failure to internal causes
Gender differences in Attributions
• Differences may be due to elementary school
socialization
– Study found that teachers gave negative feedback
related to intellectual ability to girls and negative
feedback related to nonintellectual aspects of behavior
– Boys may be inadvertently taught that failures are due
to lack of effort while girls may learn that failures are
due to ability
Covariation Principle
• Covariation principle
– Behavior attributions made by weighing information
about the potential causes of the behavior
– Consensus
• What would most people do in the given situation
Covariation Principle
• Covariation principle
– Distinctiveness
• Whether an individual’s behavior is unique to a given
situation or whether that person would the same way in
different situations
– Consistency
• Whether an individual acts the same way in similar
situations
Covariation Principle Application
• External attributions likely if consensus, distinctiveness, and
consistency are high
– For instance, a person yelling loudly at a football game
• Since most people would (high consensus)
• If the person doesn’t yell in other situations (high distinctiveness)
• The person yells throughout the game or at other football games (high
consistency)
– Assume the person’s behavior is a product of the situation
Covariation Principle Application
• Internal attributions likely when consensus and
distinctiveness are low but consistency is high
– For instance, a person laughing at a funeral
• Since most people wouldn’t (low consensus)
• If the person laughed in other solemn situations (low distinctiveness)
• The person continued to laugh throughout the funeral or at other
funerals (high consistency)
– Assume there is something unusual about the person
Imagining Alternatives
• Prior knowledge about the world allows us infer the
likely cause of a behavior
• Discounting Principle
– Principle that less weight should be given to a particular
cause of behavior if there are other alternative causes
present
Imagining Alternatives
• Augmentation Principle
– Principle that more weight should be given to a particular
cause of behavior if the other causes present would have
produced an opposite result
• Make more inferences about a person when they act in
way that are unexpected for the situation
Counterfactual Thinking
• Causal attributions can be formed by comparing real outcomes to
imagined alternatives
• Counterfactual Thinking
– Thoughts of what might have been, could have been, or should have
been “if only” something had been done differently
Counterfactual Thinking
• Emotional amplification
– Emotional reactions to counterfactual thoughts increase depending on
how easy it is to imagine the alternative
– May feel more personally responsible for failure depending on how easy
it is to imagine the alternative
• Counterfactual thinking at the Olympics
– Seemingly ironic, bronze medalists are often more satisfied with their
accomplishment than silver medalists
– Silver medalists may imagine a gold medal as the alternative
– Bronze medalists may imagine receive no medal as the alternative
Errors and biases in attribution
• Self-serving bias
– Tendency to attribute failures to external causes and
success to internal causes
• For instance, athletes may attribute loses to bad referees but
victories to talent and hard work
– Self-serving biases can boost and maintain positive selfesteem
Errors and biases in attribution
• Fundamental Attribution Error
– Tendency to believe that a behavior is due to a person’s
traits or disposition despite the situational causes present
• For instance, inferences may be made about someone’s true
personality even when we are aware that their behavior resulted
from an assigned role
Reasons for the
Fundamental Attribution Error
• Motivation to believe in a just world
– Motivated to believe that people get what they deserve in life
• Good things happen to good people, bad things to bad people
– Fundamental attribution errors may be reassuring because feel
less vulnerable to external factors influencing our life outcomes
Reasons for the
Fundamental Attribution Error
• Perceptional Salience
– Often attribute things to what appears the be most obvious cause
– Fundamental attribution errors may occur because people are
often more salient than the surrounding context
• Automatic and controlled cognitive processing
– Dispositional attributions are often made automatically
– Situational attributions require more cognitive thought after
weighing information about the context
Actor-Observer Differences
• Attributions may differ between the person engaging in a
behavior and a person observing the behavior
– The actor is disposed to explain behavior as due to the situation
– The observer is disposed to explain behavior as due to
dispositional qualities of the actor
• For instance, when explaining choice of major for themselves and their
friends. Students indicated aspect of the major for their choice, but
personality characteristics for their friend’s choice
Actor-Observer Differences
• Causes of actor-observer differences
– Perceptual salience
• As actors, the situation is salient. As observers, the person is salient
– May ignore the influence of dispositions when explaining our
own behaviors
– Lack of information about the intentions and past behaviors of
the actor
Culture and Context
• Collectivistic cultures may be more attuned to
contextual factors
– Emotional Context
• When judging the facial expression of an individual, collectivists
more influenced by facial expressions of other people in the scene
Culture and Context
• Collectivistic cultures may be more attuned to
contextual factors
– Nonsocial Contexts
• When describing an animated underwater scene, individualists
were more attuned to the focal objects while collectivists
described the scene as a whole
Culture and Context
• Collectivistic cultures may be more attuned to
contextual factors
– Rod and Frame Test
• Individualists perform better at making absolute judgments, but
collectivists perform better at relative judgments.
• Relative judgments require paying attention to the length of line in
context with the frame that surrounds it
Culture and Causal Attributions
• The fundamental attribution error may be less prevalent in
collectivistic cultures
– Individualists more likely to attribute behaviors to dispositions
– Collectivists more likely to attribute behaviors to the situation
• Coaches in the U.S. were more likely attribute wins to abilities of the
players Coaches in China were more likely refer to difficulties had by the
other team
Culture and Causal Attributions
• Culture differences in attribution even for non-humans
– In one study, participants were shown an animation of a single
fish swimming away from a larger group
– American participants were more likely to attribute behavior to
individual choices of the fish, but Chinese participants to the
actions of the group
• Attributional differences exist in some American sub-cultures
– For instance, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican children were
found to make fewer dispositional inferences than Caucasians
Priming Culture
• For people who are connected to both
independent and interdependent cultures,
attribution styles may change depending on the
cultural context
Priming Culture
• Evidence from Hong Kong
– Hong Kong is heavily influenced by both China and the
Western countries like the U.S. and the U.K.
– Residents of Hong Kong can switch between
independent and interdependent attributions styles
• Made more dispositional attributions after being primed with
images related to Western culture
• Made more situational attributions after being primed with
images related to Chinese culture
Culture and Personality
• The “Big Five” dimensions of personality are the same
cross-culturally
– For both individualists and collectivists, personalities can be
described along traits of openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
• Individualists are more likely to view personality traits as
stable, fixed, and unchangeable
Culture and Personality
• Collectivists more likely to view personality traits can
change through effort and changing circumstances
• Cultural differences in desire for self-improvement
– When given a chance to repeat a task that they had done well or
had done poorly, Japanese students chose to repeat the task
they had done poorly. Canadian students chose to repeat the
task they had done well