PSYC 2230 Lecture Notes - Menotropin

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2230
• Professor: Frank Marchese

Document Summary

Chapter 10: cognitive motivation: attribution theory: attribution theory involves the study of decisions we make about the causes of events. Humans are motivated to attribute or assign causes to outcomes. Motivation to do so stems from the need to make sense of events, personal, interpersonal, impersonal: social attribution: people assign (attribute) particular causes to other people"s behaviour. We assign personal causation to other"s behaviour or we assign situational causation to other"s behaviour. In some sense, assigning causes to other"s behaviour is accounting for the motivations underlying their behaviour. For example, so and so succeeded (or failed) at a task because of: dispositional forces person"s ability, effort, or because of bad luck and the like. According to heider (1950s): we are biased toward dispositional attributions. That is, the tendency to attribute other"s behaviour to stable, internal characteristics. This tendency is called the fundamental attribution error.