Attribution and media
representations
Outline of attribution theory
• Human beings want to understand the world
– Evolutionary advantages
• Events and human behavior call for
understanding
– Want to be able to predict future behavior
• Explanations are drawn from LTM for
observed behaviors
– Schema developed over time
Attribution
• Once explanations are developed they guide
future explanations of similar behavior
– Stimulus generalization
• People will be judged according to the
attributed causes of their behaviors
• Future interactions with people whose
behavior was attributed to some cause will be
guided by those attributions
Attributions
• Those interactions will influence the
relationship between the individuals
• Those interactions will affect the selfperception of the interactants
• Future behavior will be influenced by those
self-perceptions, leading to new attributions
and behaviors
Heider: Attribution is characterized by:
• Mental abstraction
• Uncertainty reduction
• Normativeness
– Subsequent research called normativeness into
question
Influences over interpretation
• “The information contained in a behavioral
episode is often ambiguous; that is, it is
associated with multiple categories. For
example, a silent response may be interpreted
as empathic, submissive, or hostile.”
• Context
• Prior knowledge of actor
• Heider (1958) argued that a number of
influences on observers determine their
attribution of causes of behavior as either
dispositional or environmentally driven
– Indication of intent
– Effort
– Implication of personality trait
• Default dispositional
– Equifinality
• Locus of control (whose fault)
• Stability (is it ongoing)
• Controllability (Can I change it?)
Cues for attribution
• Consensus
– Everybody’s doing it
• Distinctiveness
– He’s the only one
• Consistency
– Cross-situational
• Violations of social norms
• Lack of situational cues
Free will
• Edward Jones and Keith Davis (1965) stressed
that attributions of intentionality depend on the
impression that the actor freely chose what to
do. There had to be alternative options as well as
a lack of situational pressures, such as coercion
by others.
• A chosen option is most informative if its
alternatives differ in their consequences, and if
the person was able to foresee these
consequences.
Biases
• Observer’s self-esteem and social identity
• Observer’s attentional focus and perspective
• Observed behavior’s implications with regard
to competence and morality
– Immoral behavior requires immorality and success
requires competence but moral behavior does not
require morality and failure does not deny
competence
Audience factors
• Some audience members are more likely to
make dispositional attributions while others
are more likely to make situational
attributions
Age of audience member
• Young children do not perceive enduring
dispositional factors
• Older children (8-11 years) demonstrate
opposite tendency
• Teens weigh both factors
Culture
• Americans emphasize dispositional factors
• Eastern cultures emphasize situational
explanations
• Difference increases with age--socialization
Process
• Identification
– Choice of categorical definition of person, action
• Attributional processing
– Evaluate competing hypotheses of
• Momentary state (intention, feeling, goal)
• Enduring disposition (aggressiveness)
• Situational forces (lack of choice, compulsion)
Group membership
• Application of group knowledge to individual
– “Stereotyping”
Observer’s processing goals
• Research shows that asking observers to focus
on personality leads to increase in
dispositional attribution
• Focusing on situation leads to an increase in
situational attribution
Processing capacity
• Less time, capacity, distraction likely to
increase default attributions
– In U.S., that means dispositional
Self-attributions
• We don’t have the privileged insight into our
own behaviors we think we do
– We witness our own behaviors and then
attributed causes to them
– Usually we interpret them in ways biased in our
favor
• Good intentions
• Environmental influences
– Those with low self-esteem may attribute selfdeprecating causes
• Attributions we developed in the past may affect our
current self-attributions
• Some of those attributions may come from our
experience attributing causes to behaviors depicted in
media
• We tend to attribute “dispositional” causes to
characters on television, etc.
– We don’t take environmental constraints upon behavior
into much account
• Other cultures may be more likely to do so
• More processing effort tends to increase our sensitivity to
environmental influences
– Affects the workings of dispositional theory
Self-serving bias
• When good things happen to me, I deserve it (I
worked hard or I am a special person).
• When good things happen to you, you don’t
deserve it (the teacher likes you or you just got
lucky).
• When bad things happen to me, it’s not my fault
(the teacher doesn’t like me or he started it).
• When bad things happen to you, it’s your fault
(you should work harder or you should be more
careful).
Inclusion in disposition theory
Observed
behavior
Attribution
Character
evaluation
Other relations to entertainment
• Sometimes a good deal of the enjoyment of a
narrative is tied to the process of attribution—
figuring out why someone did something
– Tying motive to action
– Explaining circumstances that led to actions
Additional implications
• Persuasion
• Evaluating people and groups
– News, non-fiction as well as fiction
• Narrative
– E.g., cop shows
• Stereotyping