ATTRIBUTION: FROM ELEMENTS TO DISPOSITION Flashcards
how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experiences, being neither internal or external
Attribution
by Fritz Heider, how we attribute feelings and intentions to people to understand their behavior
Attribution theory
Two categories of attribution theory
Personal attribution
Situational attribution
attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood or effort.
Personal attribution
attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck
Situational attribution
a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and other’s behaviors.
attribution bias or attributional bias
quick, easy, automatic – using a pricess that one might call “intuitive”
SYSTEM 1
slow, controlled, and requires attention and effort – a process that feels more reasoned
SYSTEM 2
information-processing rules of thumb that enables us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that often lead to error.
Cognitive heuristics
a tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to mind.
Availability heuristics
Availability heuristics can lead us astray in two ways:
False-concensus effect
Base-rate fallacy
a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes and behaviors
False-consensus effect
the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates
Base-rate fallacy
a tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
counterfactual thinking
the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior
Fundamental attribution error
characterized by the tendency to form and hold beliefs that serve the individual’s needs and desires.
sometimes called as. “self-serving biases”
motivational biases
the process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression
impression formation
impressions formed of others are based on a combination, or integration of:
personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver and a weighted average, not a simple average, of the target person’s characteristics
Information integration theory
process of impression formation invilves combining personal attributions about an individual to create coherent picture of them.
the arithmetic
In this model, individuals sum up all the positive and negative traits of a person to form an impression. The more positive traits, the better the impression.
Summation model
calculates the mental average of all various traits. a higher value is associated with a more favorable impression
Averaging model
the tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily influence the interpretation of new information.
Priming
people can be distinguished by five broad personality traits: extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
Trait difference in impressions
the positive or negative nature of a trait affects how it shapes or impressions
Trait valence and impressiosn
