PSYC 2230 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Fundamental Attribution Error, Correspondence Theory Of Truth

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

Document Summary

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