PSYC 221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Eye Contact, Binge Eating, Psychopathology
1 May 2017
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• Attribution Theory
o How we assign causes for behavior, events, and/or consequences
▪ Motivations for understanding and building schemas
o 2 Dimensions
▪ Locus
• Location, where it is coming from
▪ Stability
• How likely it is to be repeated
o Examples
▪ Attributions for success/failure
• Stable
o Internal
▪ Your abilities, likely to repeat again
o External
▪ Difficulty, permanent situation
• Unstable
o Internal
▪ Your effort, unlikely to repeat again
o External
▪ Fortune, temporary situation
o We gravitate toward personality as a basis for understanding the actions of others
▪ This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (or correspondence bias)
▪ Internal attributions for others’ behavior
▪ Cognitive ease
▪ Belief in a just world, blaming the victim
▪ “Just World” hypothesis
▪ Bad things happen to bad people; good things happen to good people
▪ Even when we are told that people have no choice in the matter, we still believe the
actions of others reflects their personality or beliefs
▪ Those in East Asian cultures do not engage in the Fundamental Attribution Error
• Asian culture = holistic view
o Blame the society
• Western culture = analytic view
o Blame the individual
o Attributions for humans, non-human animals and inanimate objects
THE SELF & PERSONALITY
• Identity
o Self-concept/Self schema
o Crucial for psychological health
▪ Continuity over time
▪ Social presentation, bonding
o Relatively consistent over tie
o Distinctiveness
▪ Similarity to others (“typical”) feedback
▪ When people are told they are typical, there is an increased negative reaction
▪ We want to be different from others
▪ Motivation to distinguish from others
• Self-descriptors
• Uncommon experiences
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