PSY 306 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Spike Jonze, Ikea, Georg Simmel
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10 Aug 2019
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Class 5: Attribution
Example
● Heider & Simmel (1946)
○ Shows triangles and circles moving around but people will
attribute emotions to the shapes
● Spike Jonze Ad for Ikea
○ Makes everyone feel bad for a lamp, and then reminds
everyone that it is just a lamp
Inferring
(Invisible) Mental
States
● Natural to describe movements in terms of intentions, desires, and
affective states
○ But we can’t see these, all we can see is the behaviors
● What is reasonable to infer?
○ Trait → State → Intention → Behavior
● What do we actually infer? (erroneously)
○ Behavior → Intention → State → Trait
● We infer for empathy to understand others and for predicting
future behavior
○ We infer automatically by best guess (nave or lay theory,
pseudo-hypothesis testing
● Dispositional Facts, also called traits
○ Situation factors, also called context
● A good way to determine if a behavior is the cause of a situation
or trait, it is smart to track it or look back
○ Whether it is constant (trait) or happens every once in a
while (situation)
● Hal Kelley’s (1967) “Covariation Model” of Attribution
○ Distinctiveness (subject of the act)
○ Consensus (object of the act)
○ Consistency (across time or situations)
● Limitations of Covariation Analysis
○ Model of what we should do, not necessarily what we
actually do (normative model)
“Correspondent Inference Theory” Ned Jones (1965)
● Allows for attributions based on single behavior
○ Behavior = Dispositions + Situational Factors
● Situational Constraints
○ No dispositional inference can be made when a social
norma creates the behavior
● Counter Normative Behavior
○ Suggests a correspondence between the behavior and
one’s internal dispositions
“Discounting and Augmenting” Ned Jones (1965)
● The more plausible reasons there are for someone’s actions, the