PSYC 002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Fundamental Attribution Error, Social Influence, Cognitive Dissonance

• School: UC Riverside
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 002
• Professor: Elizabeth Davis

Document Summary

Attributions: judgments about the causes of our own and other people"s behavior. Dispositional/personal (internal) attributions: people"s characteristics cause their behavior/always making negative assumptions ( he"s a stupid driver! ) Situational (external) attributions: aspects of the situation cause a behavior ( maybe the driver is just tired. ) Outgoing professor in class, not outgoing in meetings, other situations. How we explain someone"s behavior affects how we react. Three aspects of information determine the type of attribution we make: consistency, distinctiveness, consensus. Self-serving bias: the tendency to make personal attributions for successes and situational attributions for failures. Primacy effect: our tendency to attach more importance to initial information. Initial information may shape how we perceive subsequent information. Influences our desire to make further contact with a person. Recency effect: more weight given to information that is more recent. Mental set: a readiness to perceive the world in a particular way. Schemas: mental frameworks that help us organize and interpret information.