Social Psychology Lecture 2: Attribution Processes

Last time we talked about our perception of others in terms of liking and attraction. Obviously, our behavior towards others is very much influenced by whether we like them or not. But in order to deal with others, we have to understand why they do what they do. This is important because our reaction to the behavior of others depends heavily on our perception of its causes. An accidental slight is forgiven, whereas a deliberate one is not. This holds true in our own reaction to others as it does in to the law. The area of social psychology that deals with the attribution of causes to the behavior of others, and of ourselves, as we will see, is called attribution theory, and that will be our topic today. Obviously behaviors may have many different causes, but to simplify our analysis we will be looking at two basic kinds of causes: Causes external to the individual and causes internal to the individual. An external or situational cause is one based on the constraints or demands or requirements placed on the individual (or actor) by the situation he is in (which may include people, of course).. An internal or dispositional cause is something in the individual himself: his motives, abilities, personality. What we will be looking at is what leads us to make situational or dispoaitional attributions for behavior. One important view, perhaps the dominant one, in the area of attribution theory is that of Harold Kelley, and it his general outline of the attribution process we will follow, though he is not without critics. According to Kelley, we apply three very logical rules in deciding whether the situation is responsible for an individual's: If the situation rather than the individual's disposition is responsible for the behavior then three things should be true:

1. There should be consistency in the individual's behavior. That is, he should always behave in the same way in this situation. In general (and we will talk about exception later), behavior that has high consistency is more likely to be seen as due to the situation than to the individual's disposition. For example, suppose Bill is flirting with Sue. If Bill always flirts with Sue, then the consistency of his behavior is high, and is likely top be attributed to the presence of Sue. If Bill sometimes flirts with Sue and sometimes not, then the consistency of his behavior is low, and is likely to be seen as due to his disposition or mood. 2. The person's behavior in the situation should be distinctive, that is, it should be different from his behavior in other situations. In general, behavior that is highly distinctive is more likely to be seen as due to the situation than to the individual's disposition. If Bill flirts only with Sue, and with no other girls, then his behavior with Sue is highly distinctive, and due to the presence of Sue. If he flirts with every girl, then his behavior has low distinctiveness, and is more likely to be seen as dispositional. 3. Other people should respond in the same way in this situation as the actor does, that is there should be consensus about the behavior in this situation. In general, behavior of high consensus is more likely Page 1 of 4

to be attributed to the situation than to the individual. If everybody flirts with Sue, then Bill's behavior has high consensus, and is more likely to be attributed to something about Sue. If everybody else ignores or shuns Sue, then Bill's behavior has low consensus, and is more likely to be attributed to something about Bill and his feelings. According to Kelley, we use two rules in deciding about the consensus of a behavior. The first is the discounting rule: We discount or rule out dispositional causes for a behavior if the behavior is required, demanded, or expected in the situation. For example, a young child is told not to hit his little sister, and his mother sits nearby to make sure he doesn't. The child behaves nicely. We tend to discount the possibility of a dispositional cause (he's a good boy) and are likely to attribute his good behavior to the presence of his mother, (a situational attribution) because the child's behavior is what we would expect a child to do under the circumstances. This is the discounting rule. The second rule is the augmentation rule: We are more likely to see a behavior as having internal causes if that behavior is opposite to what is expected or required, or demanded in the situation. If the child we mentioned hits his sister while his mother is watching, we tend to see this as indicating a bratty personality (a dispositional attribution), since it is opposite to what we expect a child to do in these circumstances. This is the augmentation rule. We have talked generally about consistency, distinctiveness and consensus information alone. But whenever possible, we use all three kinds of information together when judging the causes of behavior. This is important, because one kind of information may lead to different conclusions depending on information about the other factors. Let's expand on our earlier example of Bill and Sue to make this clearer. Suppose that both Bill and Joe flirt with Sue in Psych class. Is Bill flirting with Sue because he is just a generally flirtatious fellow (his disposition is responsible), or does something about Sue (the situation) bring it out in him? Hard to say. But suppose that you know Bill and Sue and know that: 1. Bill always flirts with Sue when they are together (high consistency.) 2. Bill never flirts with anyone else but Sue (distinctiveness is high). 3. Everybody else flirts with Sue. (high consensus) Like most people, I suspect that with that information about consistency, distinctiveness and consensus you came to the conclusion that it was something about Sue rather than Bill's flirtatiousness that is the cause of his behavior. Suppose, however, that you know the following: 1. Bill always flirts with Sue (high consistency). 2. Bill flirts with all the girls (low distinctiveness). 3. Nobody else flirts with Sue (low consensus.) Given these new facts, you are now likely to conclude that it is Bill's personality or disposition that is the cause of his behavior, not something about Sue. In these two cases, high consisency was interpreted differently, depending on information about consensus and distinctiveness. If we rate consensus, distinctiveness and consistency as only high or low, there are 8 possible Page 2 of 4

combinations of H and L distinctiveness, consistency and consensus. Some of these combinations lead to obvious or easy conclusions about causes, but others do not. In reality, these factors can have a wide range between high and low, the task of making judgements about causality on these grounds is not always easy. There are a number of additional complications in the attribution process. Let me mention one or two. Remember we mentioned the discounting rule, which is that we discount the possibility of dispositional causes if the behavior is expected, required, or forced. Let me give you an example. Subjects observe through a one-way mirror while a student is given an intelligence test. Some observers sees a student who is doing well on the test, while a second group of observers sees a student who is doing badly. Both groups of observers are then asked to estimate the I.Q. of the student they saw. As you might expect, the successful student is rated as having a higher I.Q. than the unsuccessful student. Essentially, the observers attribute the subject's performance to his abilities, or intelligence, a dispositional attribution. Given the information they have, this makes perfectly good sense. Now, however, after they have done their rating, the experimenter tells them that the test they saw was faked: The tester had been instructed to make one subject's performance look bad and the other's look good. The behavior they saw, therefore, was due to the situation, not to the individual's abilities. Now they are asked to rate the subject's intelligence again. What will happen to the ratings of the two groups of observers? You might think that the I.Q. ratings would now be the same, since both groups know that what they saw was the result of the experimenter's deviousness, not the subject's intelligence. But that is not what happens. When studies like this repeatedly find that the second I.Q. ratings are still biased by what the observers saw: The successful subject is still rated as having a higher I.Q. than the unsuccessful subject. It appears that the observers have attributed the subject's performance to his abilities despite the knowledge that it was forced by the situation. They have not followed the discounting rule. This is a very general tendency in all of us: We tend to interpret an individual's behavior as the result of internal or dispositional causes, even when we have information that suggests the behavior was required or forced by the situation. This tendency is called the fundamental attribution error. And this is not the only complication to our simple scheme of consistency/consensus/distinctiveness, because not only do we use this information in judging the causes of behavior, but we supplement this information with pre-existing beliefs and biases that may have little to do with reality, or with the situation we are judging. For example, we have a tendency to believe that someone is successful because of his abilities, but a failure because of bad luck, or the situation. This is a bias we have about causality. We also like to believe that in this world we get what we deserve, good or bad. That belief, called the just world hypothesis, leads us to think that if something bad happens to someone he or she somehow contributed to it, or deserved it. This may in part explain why some people still tend to believe that a woman who is raped somehow asked for it. And speaking of sexual biases, it is still the case (at least as recently as 6-8 years ago), that both men and women tend to attribute a man's success to his abilities, and a woman's success to the situation, or to har work. On the other hand, a woman's failure tends to be attributed to lack of ability, whereas a man's failure tends to be attributed to bad luck - the situation. Not a pleasant situation. Similar sorts of biases and prejudices about racial, ethnic and religious groups may lead us to attribute their failures and shortcomings to internal causes, and their successes to luck or even deviousness. We also use implicit personality theories to assist us in judging the causes of an individual's Page 3 of 4

behavior. An implicit personality theory is a set of assumptions about what personality characteristics belong together. For example, if a person is perceived as honest, he will also be seen as warm, understanding, etc. A physically attractive person will tend to be seen as being more likeable and intelligent than someone who is unattractive. These assumptions about personality play an important role when we try to decide the causes of their behavior. We saw an example of this in the last lecture when adults were asked to attribute causes to the misbehavior of an attractive or unattractive child. And there is one more twist or complication to all of this. So far we have been talking about evaluating the causes of someone else's behavior - some actor whose behavior we observe. But we apparently apply very similar processes of reasoning to our own behavior. Why did I do that? What was the reason for my behavior? While the general process of attribution is very similar in the two cases, there are some important differences in our judgement of causes of our behavior rather than someone elses. For example, we talked about the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to overestimate the importance of internal causes in determining behavior. This bias seems to disappear when we judge our own behavior. Indeed, we tend to see our own behavior as much more determined by the situation than observers do. There is also some evidence, though not completely consistent, that we are more likely to attribute our successes to skill or ability, and our failures to chance or bad luck (the situation). That's all we have the time to cover for now. The research on attribution processes is large, and getting larger. It is also very complex, since all of the factors we mentioned (and others we did not mention) may interact in complex ways in attribution. Attribution theory is being applied to a wider and wider range of problems and phenomena in social psychology, as we will see when we look at its application to attitude change in a later lecture.

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