PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Fundamental Attribution Error, Attribution Bias, Honestreporting

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Stephanie Denison

Document Summary

Person perception: the processes by which we perceive and understand one another and ourselves. Attitude: the evaluative beliefs that we have about our social world and the entities within it. Any judgement about a person is a claim about causation. Any claim about causation of someone"s behaviour is called attribution. When a behaviour is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behaviour to the situation rather than to the behaving person"s personality. Heilder noted that people tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situation when they make attributions about others actions. There is lots of person bias or fundamental attribution error in attribution. Western culture teaches that we are in charge of our own destiny, so this leads to the ides that everything that happens can be attributed to the individual, not the situation. Eastern cultures tended not to have as much person bias.