Causal Attribution Flashcards
(35 cards)
Peterson and Barrett (1987)
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.
McArthur (1972)
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.
Ambady & Rosenthal (1993)
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
Borkenau et al (2009)
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
Bartsch and Wellman (1989)
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.
Van Boven, Kamada and Gilovich (1999)
Questioner and responder study in which questioner told responder how to answer
Still judged responder based on answers
Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz (1977)
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
Gilbert (1989)
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
Krill and Erickson (1995)
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
Taylor and Fiske (1967)
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.
Fein et al (1990)
Version of Jones and Harris study – when told writers may have had ulterior motive for writing essay
FAE didn’t occur
Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura and Larsen (2002)
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
Choi and Nisbett (1998)
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
Morris and Peng (1994)
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
Norenzayan et al (2002)
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
Choi et al (2003)
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
Cousins (1989)
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.
Attribution theory
Is a set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of peoples causal assessment
Causal Attribution
Is the study of the way people explain events around them
Early research influenced heavily by Heider (1958)’s two principles
What were Heider (1958)’s two principles?
That people want to understand the world as accurately as they can
There is a distinction between the person and their situation
What is an explanatory style?
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.
What is the covariation principle?
The covariation principle is the idea that behaviour should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behaviour.
What is Kelley’s covariation model?
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
When is a situational attribution made?
When all three dimensions of KCM are high
