Jared and Sara
6B
Attribution theory: people’s tendency to attempt to
explain possible relationships in the social world.
 Situational factors- behavior is dependent upon
current circumstances or situation; the cause of the
behavior is seen to be external to the individual, e.g.
circumstances or luck.
 Ex: weather during a game, favoritism during a test,
broken down car when being late, etc.
 Dispositional factors-Behavior is caused by factors
which are specific to them as a person, their
personality or other internal and generally unchanging
characteristics.
 internal factors, factors pertaining to the personal
attributes/actions.
 Ex: intelligence, motivation, looks, personality, etc.
 Twelve students were selected out of 75 to play the
prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the
Stanford psychology building. Another twelve of the same
75 were selected to play the Guards. Roles were assigned
randomly to the 24 men. The participants adapted to their
roles well beyond what even Zimbardo himself expected,
leading the officers to display authoritarian measures and
ultimately to subject some of the prisoners to torture. In
turn, many of the prisoners developed passive attitudes
and accepted physical abuse, and, at the request of the
guards, readily inflicted punishment on other prisoners
who attempted to stop it.
 Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of
lawyers representing Abu Ghraib prison guard Staff
Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He had full access to
all investigation and background reports, testifying as
an expert witness in SSG Frederick's court martial,
which resulted in an eight-year prison sentence for
Frederick in October 2004.
 Zimbardo drew on the knowledge he gained from
participating in the Frederick case to write the
book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good
People Turn Evil.
 Mindlessly Taking the First Small Step
 Dehumanization of Others
 De-individualization of Self (anonymity)
 Diffusion of Personal Responsibility
 Blind Obedience to Authority
 Uncritical Conformity to Group Norms
 Passive Tolerance of Evil Through Inaction, or
Indifference
Happens when in new or unfamiliar situations
 Milgram who investigated the dispositional attribution
of Nazi German soldiers. In the Obedience
experiments, ordinary people fulfilled orders to
administer what appeared to be fatal electric shocks to
a confederate of the experimenter. Milgram argued it
was situational cues ( such as the prestigious setting,
and authority of the experimenter) that compelled
participants to administer dangerous shocks.
 Bierbauer ( 1979 )
 People tend to connect success to dispositional factors,
and failure to situational factors (side note blaming
things on dispositional factors when failing to much
can be harmful to self-esteem). This is called selfserving bias. People also tend to explain others
behavior mainly in terms of dispositional factors and
often do not deeply consider situational factors, this is
called fundamental attribution error.
 Jones and Harris hypothesized that people would attribute apparently
freely-chosen behaviors to disposition, and apparently chance-directed
behaviors to situation. The hypothesis was confounded by the
fundamental attribution error.
 Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays. Subjects were asked to
rate the pro-Castro attitudes of the writers. When the subjects believed
that the writers freely chose the positions they took (for or against
Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favor of Castro as
having a more positive attitude towards Castro. However, contradicting
Jones and Harris' initial hypothesis, when the subjects were told that
the writer's positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated
writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more
positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him. In
other words, the subjects were unable to see the influence of the
situational constraints placed upon the writers; they could not refrain
from attributing sincere belief to the writers.
Campbell & Sedikides, 1999
 Participants perform a task that tends to be a test of
intelligence, social sensitivity, teaching ability, or therapy
skills. The participants are then given feedback about how
they performed on the task, which usually has no relation
to how the participant actually did on the task in reality –
the feedback is bogus. The participants then assign
attributions for the outcome. They determine what factors
contributed to the outcome of the event. The questions
about attribution could either ask about effort and ability
versus difficulty and luck or the participants are instructed
to declare their responsibility for the result of the task. The
self-serving bias is exhibited when participants attribute
failure to external factors and success to internal factors
Correspondent Inferences state that people make
inferences about a person when his or her actions are
freely chosen, are unexpected, and result in a small
number of desirable effects.
According to Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis’
Correspondent Inference Theory, people make
correspondent inferences by reviewing the context of
behavior. It describes how people try to find out
individual’s personal characteristics from the behavioral
evidence. People make inferences on the basis of three
factors; degree of choice, expectedness of behavior, and
effects of someone’s behaviors.
 Co-variation principle states that people attribute
behavior to the factors that are present when a
behavior occurs and absent when it does not. Thus, the
theory assumes that people make causal attributions
in a rational, logical fashion, and that they assign the
cause of an action to the factor that co-varies most
closely with that action. Harold Kelley's co-variation
model of Attribution looks to three main types of
information from which to make an attribution
decision about an individual's behavior.
 The first is consensus information, or information on
how other people in the same situation and with the
same stimulus behave.
 The second is distinctiveness information, or how the
individual responds to different stimuli.
 The third is consistency information, or how frequent
the individual's behavior can be observed with similar
stimulus but varied situations. From these three
sources of information observers make attribution
decisions on the individual's behavior as either
internal or external.
 Stanford Prison Experiment
Situational or Dispositional?
 Milgram Experiment
Situational or Dispositional?