Social Psych Lecture 5 2.4
- Fundamental Attribution Error: overestimate the role of internal dispositions and underestimate the role of situational factors
- Jones & Harris (1967) "Fidel Castro"
- Two-step Process
- Two-step Process:
- Make an internal attribution
- Attempt to adjust the attribution by considering the situation the person was in
- We're likely to move to the second step if we go from automatic to controlled thinking (consciously slow down, cognitively alert, suspicious) (ex.:)
- Perceptual Salience: Any stimulus that is vivid or salient in a situation will be seen as the cause of behavior in that situation
- Taylor and Fiske (1975)
- Implication: Lassiter and colleagues (2007; Lassiter, 2010)
- Videotaped confession
- Varied perspective
- Shown to judges, police officers
- Was confession voluntary or coerced?
- Self-serving attributions:
- Take credit for own successes (i.e. internal attributions)
- Blame situation/others for own failure (i.e. external attributions)
- Ex.: Professional Sports
- Likely to attribute success to themselves, failure to something outside themselves
- Lvl o/Experience
- Individual vs Team
- Belief in a Just World
- Assumption that ppl get what they deserve and deserve what they get
- Defensive attribution
- Culture and Social Perception:
- Holistic vs Analytic
- American (Analytic, central person)
- Japanese (Holistic, Background persons)
- Emotions
- Perceptual Processing
- fMRI
- Lines in boxes
- East Asians/Americans
- Focus on lines (ignore context)/boxes (attend to context)
- Most effort...
- Cultural Differences in the Fundamental Attribution Error
- Miller (1984)
- Indians living in India/Americans living in US
- Explain friend's behavior
- Situational (external)/Dispositional (internal)
- Hong and Colleagues (2003)
- Picture: fish in front of a school of fish
- Why?
- Bicultural (Hong Kong Chinese)
- Prime US or Chinese culture or control
- Chinese prime: situational attributions (fish is being chased)
- US Prime: dispositional attributions (fish is leading)
- Miller (1984)
- Holistic vs Analytic
-
Cultural Differences Self-Serving Biases