PSY BEH 104S Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Fundamental Attribution Error, Fidel Castro, Attribution Bias
14 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Attribution theory: how people understand social causes of events, how people construe and make sense of the ways people behave. A rational process can be formulated describing how people ought to interpret the behavior of others (and oneself: attribution theory. People are sometimes capable of approximating this rational process (with sufficient time and motivation) More typically, people"s attributions are incomplete : overly influenced by salient information, affect, mental shortcuts, people usually tend to discount situational factors. Participants overemphasized the writer"s personal beliefs on communism and fidel castro even when they knew that some of those writers didn"t have a choice on what stance to take. Subjects randomly assigned to be questioner, contestant, or observer in quiz game. Contestant tries to answer them and invariably does poorly. After game, everyone rates general intelligence of questionnaire and contestant: also when you"re engaged in an action yourself, you"re more likely to not account for situational characteristics.
