ATTRIBUTION MEANING,HEIDER THEORY, CAUSE AND BIAS IN PSYCHOLOGY

ATTRIBUTION MEANING,HEIDER THEORY, CAUSE AND BIAS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

ATTRIBUTION

    The process of explaining one’s own behavior and the  behavior of others.

CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR  : Attribution theory  was originally developed by social psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) as a way of not only explaining why things happen but also why people choose the particular explanations of behavior that they do. There are basically two kinds of explanations— external and internal causes.

   1)When the cause of behavior is assumed to be from external sources, such as the weather,  traffic, educational opportunities, and so on, it is said to be a situational cause.For example, if John is late, his lateness might be explained by heavy traffic or car problems.

  2) if  the cause of behavior is assumed to  come from within the individual, it is called a  dispositional cause. In this case, it is the person’s internal personality characteristics  that are seen as the cause of the observed behavior.

    There’s  an emotional component  to these kinds of attributions  as well. When people are happy in a marriage, for example, researchers have found that when a spouse’s behavior has a positive effect, the tendency is to attribute it to an internal cause (“He did it because he wanted me to feel good”). When the effect is negative, the behavior is attributed to an external  cause (“She must have had a difficult day”). But if the marriage is an unhappy one, the opposite attributions occur: “He is only being nice because he wants something from me” or “She’s being mean because it’s her nature to be crabby” (Fincham et al., 2000; Karney & Bradbury, 2000).

The best-known attributional bias is the  FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR, which is the tendency for people observing someone else’s actions to overestimate the influence of that person’s internal characteristics on behavior and underestimate the influence of the situation. In explaining our own behavior, the tendency to use situational attributions instead  of personal is called the actor–observer bias because we are the actor, not the observer. In other words, people tend to explain the actions of others based on what “kind” of person they are rather than looking for outside causes, such as social influences or situations (Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007; Harman, 1999; Jones & Harris, 1967; Leclerc  & Hess, 2007; Weiner, 1985).

         One study has found that attribution of motive may also create conflict between groups (Waytz et al., 2014). The study compared Israelis and Palestinians in the    Mideast as well as Republicans and Democrats in the United States. Obviously, these groups continue to experience a great deal of animosity, conflict, and an unwillingness to shift from long held beliefs. Over the course of five studies, in which participants were asked to rate the motives of others for engaging in conflict, researchers found that each side felt that their side  was motivated by love more than hate but that the other side’s motivating force was hate. Calling this idea motive attribution asymmetry, the researchers suggest that this is at least one reason compromise and negotiation are so difficult to obtain—if the other side hates you, you believe them to be unreasonable and negotiations impossible.