Causal Attribution

Question 1

Peterson and Barrett (1987)

Answer 1

Asked participants to imagine 6 positive and negative events and provide a likely cause for each and then measured dimensions

A tendency to describe negative events in terms of internal, stable and global causes is considered to be a pessimistic explanatory style and vice versa is optimistic.

Question 2

McArthur (1972)

Answer 2

People were given verbal descriptions of behaviours to explain e.g Ralph tripped over Joans feet while they were dancing and were given three statements about each dimension

Found that Kelleys model does predict the way people make attributions fairly well.

Question 3

Ambady & Rosenthal (1993)

Answer 3

Participants are shown three small 2 sec video clips of teachers from actual lectures (no sound) then rated them on several personality scales related to teaching then correlated the participants ratings with ratings from lecturer’s students

Found positive correlations in every case

Question 4

Borkenau et al (2009)

Answer 4

Photos of people who filled out personality questionnaires which were shown to participants for varying times (e.g 50ms) and then rated them on personality rating scales

Significant positive correlation for introversion/extroversion trait as you increase the time they are more accurate with other traits too

The people could pose however they wanted and they did a follow up study and found a correlation between facial expressions and inferences of extroversion/introversion

Question 5

Bartsch and Wellman (1989)

Answer 5

Participants given simple sentences of a person doing something and asked why they are doing it

Responses were coded into desired and beliefs

Found that adults combines both to give a satisfactory explanation and this tendency was present in children but less strong.

Question 6

Van Boven, Kamada and Gilovich (1999)

Answer 6

Questioner and responder study in which questioner told responder how to answer

Still judged responder based on answers

Question 7

Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz (1977)

Answer 7

Split into questioners and contestants

q’s had advantage of using their knowledge to generate questions

c’s and observers still judged q’s as more knowledgeable

Question 8

Gilbert (1989)

Answer 8

P’s watched women behaving anxiously in silent video of interview

Half told interview topic was anxiety provoking and others neutral which impacted anxiety ratings of women

Gave another two groups list of words to remember (cognitive load) and found no difference in anxiety ratings

Question 9

Krill and Erickson (1995)

Answer 9

Same study as Gilbert (1989) but asked about the situation instead and told the person was anxious or not

Found cognitive load prevented processing of dispositional factor instead

Question 10

Taylor and Fiske (1967)

Answer 10

Two people sat opposite have a conversation and participants view is manipulated to only see one of their face or both

When asked who set the tone of the conversation they claim it’s the actor who’s face they could see due to high salience.

Question 11

Fein et al (1990)

Answer 11

Version of Jones and Harris study – when told writers may have had ulterior motive for writing essay

FAE didn’t occur

Question 12

Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura and Larsen (2002)

Answer 12

American and Chinese participants shown a box with a line and then given another empty different size box and either told to draw line of same length or same length in relation to original box

Americans were better at absolute task and Chinese at relational

Question 13

Choi and Nisbett (1998)

Answer 13

Found no cultural difference between Americans and Koreans in essay study until they manipulated situation salience by having half particpants write a short essay and half were even given recommended arguments to use

Found this reduced FAE in Koreans only

Question 14

Morris and Peng (1994)

Answer 14

Chinese and American participants presented with simple cartoon of fish interacting with a group (1 ->group/group->1 or 1≤- group/group≤1)

A saw behvaiour as internally caused and C saw it as externally caused

Question 15

Norenzayan et al (2002)

Answer 15

No difference in agreement that personality is important in predicting behaviour but Americans disagreed with weakness of personality and importance of situation whereas East Asians agreed

Question 16

Choi et al (2003)

Answer 16

P’s had to solve a murder and given list of 97 pieces of info that may be relevant and had to cross off what they thought wasn’t

Koreans crossed off less and made external causal attribution but when amount of info was controlled there was no cultural difference

Question 17

Cousins (1989)

Answer 17

Americans describe themselves in personality traits when no situation is specified but Japanese rarely do and the opposite is found when the situation is specified

Shows East Asians are more focused on interaction between them.

Question 18

Attribution theory

Answer 18

Is a set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of peoples causal assessment

Question 19

Causal Attribution

Answer 19

Is the study of the way people explain events around them

Early research influenced heavily by Heider (1958)’s two principles

Question 20

What were Heider (1958)’s two principles?

Answer 20

That people want to understand the world as accurately as they can

There is a distinction between the person and their situation

Question 21

What is an explanatory style?

Answer 21

A person’s habitual way of explaining events typically assessed along three dimensions; internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific.

These dimensions can be assessed to infer whether a person has a pessimistic or optimistic explanatory style.

Question 22

What is the covariation principle?

Answer 22

The covariation principle is the idea that behaviour should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behaviour.

Question 23

What is Kelley’s covariation model?

Answer 23

Kelley argues we aim to distinguish between three possible causes which are; the actor (person doing behaviour), the target )to whom it is being done) and the circumstances (all other factors)

He proposed we do this using three dimensions;
o Consensus – how most other actors would behave with the same target
o Distinctiveness – the way the actor behaves with different targets
o Consistency – the way the same actor and target behave in different circumstances

Question 24

When is a situational attribution made?

Answer 24

When all three dimensions of KCM are high

Question 25

When is a dispositional attribution made?

Answer 25

When consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency is high

Question 26

What are the limitations of KCM?

Answer 26

CA are prone to many biases e.g FAE

People don’t wait to gather lots of covariation info before making attributes

The more fundamental attribution isn’t between situation and person but between intentional (beliefs and desires) or accident

Question 27

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 27

The failure to recognise the importance of situational influences on behaviour and overemphasise importance of dispositions on behaviour

Question 28

Jones and Harris (1967)

Answer 28

FAE and the pro/anti Castro essay written by students who either had free choice or no choice of argument

People judged the essays as reflecting the authors views regardless of if they had choice or not

Question 29

What is automatic characterisation?

Answer 29

Gilbert (1988) suggests that FAE arises out of a sequential process in which automatic attributions of personal characteristics come first and then effortful adjustments are made in the light of situational information.

These adjustments can be disrupted by other things that make demands on processing capacity.

However research has shown that this sequence can be reversed depending on the task set for participants.

Question 30

How do expectations influence attributions?

Answer 30

The attribution of attitudes depends of the relation between the behaviour people see and what they expect.

For example Jones et al (1961 recreated their study manipulating the quality of essay also and found that good quality essays had the same results but weakly argued essays caused people to judge the writers true attitude was the opposite of that in the essay.

Question 31

What is the just world hypothesis?

Answer 31

The belief that people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get.

This belief can be comforting in the sense it reassures you that being a good person will result in good things happening to you.

This bias can explain the FAE as we are likely to ignore situational factors by focusing on the person as a cause of their own fate.

Question 32

How does perceptual salience affect attribution?

Answer 32

People give more causal weight to things that are in high salience than low.

People tend to be more interesting and are the focus of our attention; therefore this may explain why dispositional attributes are more noticeable to us and lead to FAE.

Question 33

How does face value affect attribution?

Answer 33

People tend to take the behaviour of strangers at face value; when given reason to think that the actor may be engaged in deception they don’t show FAE as they are suspicious.

Question 34

What are the cultural differences in attribution?

Answer 34

Individualistic culture are more dispositional and collectivists attend more to context

FAE can be explained as a cultural phenomenon as its weaker or in collectivist cultures but only when the situational manipulation is salient

Research shows personality traits are equally important but understood differently - col relate them to situations but ind beleive they are fixed and stable

Question 35

What are the cultural differences on world view?

Answer 35

East Asians - holistic view meaning they see every element of the world as being interconnected therefore a single thing can’t be seen in isolation - may consider more info as relevant

Westerns - atomistic view suggesting they see things as separate and independent

World views affect the types of questions scientists investigate