Discuss the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior

Discuss the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior Matthew Lewis Karina Chavez Theresa Tomaszewski

Attribution Theory • Attribution is defined as how people interpret and explain casual relationships in the social world. • The attribution theory argues that people look for an explanation of behavior, associating either dispositional (internal) attributes or situational (external) attributes" • Humans have a need to understand why things happen. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB7kt_9td7c&feature=BFp&list=WL2DC0630F3507F165

Fritz Heider- The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships • Taught at the University of Kansas • Writings essentially founded the modern field of social cognition • From observing other people’s actions, people make inferences about intention and responsibility. • People tend to make an attribution about behavior depending on whether or not they are performing it themselves or observing someone else doing it.

Actor-Observer Effect • When people discuss their own behavior, they tend to attribute it to situational factors. • Situational: something to do with external factors • When people observe someone else’s behavior, they are more likely to attribute it to dispositional factors. • Dispositional: something to do with internal factors

Lee et al. (1977) • Aim: To see if student participants would make the fundamental attribution error even when they knew that all the actors were simply playing a role. • Participants were split into three groups: A game show host, game show contestants, and a game show audience. • The game show hosts were instructed to design their own questions and the audience watched the game show through the series of questions. • After the “game show”, observers were asked to rank the intelligence of the actors. • The game show host was consistently ranked as the most intelligent, even though the observers knew the person was randomly picked and that they had designed the questions. • The observers failed to attribute the role to the person’s situation (being allowed to ask the questions) and attributed the person’s performance to dispositional factors (intelligence.)

Lau and Russell (1980) • Compared the self-serving attributions made by individuals acting alone to those acting in groups. • Found that American football coaches and player tend to credit their wins to internal (dispositional) factors. • Attributions for group performance to causal factors other than "self" and "environment” were also explored, • 549 statements by professional athletes were coded for their attributional content. Lone performers made more self-serving attributions than team performers. Also, as player actions became more interdependent, players made fewer self-attributions and more group-internal attributions for successful outcomes. Level of player interdependence did not affect failure attributions.

Fundamental Attribution Error • Attribution Theory argues that people are more likely to explain another person’s actions by pointing to dispositional factors rather than to the situational. • When people underestimate the role of dispositional factors in a individual’s behavior and underestimate the situational factors, it is called the fundamental attribution error. • Since people gather information by observing others, this often leads to illogical conclusions.

Self-Serving Bias (SSB) • Another error in attribution is the self-serving bias. • This is seen when people take credit for their successes, attributing them to dispositional factors, and dissociate themselves from their failures, attributing them to situational factors.

Miller and Ross (1975) • Proposed that there is evidence for self-serving effect in the attribution of success but not in the attribution of failure. • Reflects biases in information-processing rather than self-esteem maintenance. • There is little empirical support for the proposition in its most general form. Some support was found for the contention that individuals engage in self-enhancing attributions under conditions of success, but only minimal evidence suggested that individuals engage in self-protective attributions under conditions of failure. Moreover, it was proposed that the self-enhancing effect may not be due to motivational distortion, but rather to the tendency of people to (a) expect their behavior to produce success, (b) discern a closer covariation between behavior and outcomes in the case of increasing success than in the case of constant failure, and (c) misconstrue the meaning of contingency.

Miller and Ross (1975) • If we expect to succeed and we do succeed, we attribute it to our skill and ability. • If we expect to succeed and we do not succeed, then we feel that it is bad luck or external factors that brought about this unexpected outcome. • If we expect not to do well and we do not do well, then we attribute it to dispositional factors. • If we expect to fail and we are successful instead, we tend to attribute our success to external, situational, factors. • It has been found that people who are severely depressed tend to make more dispositional attributions thus blaming themselves for feeling miserable.

Sources • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Heider • http://www.jstor.org/pss/2786826

Discuss the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior