Module 52
Attitudes and Social Cognition
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The self-serving bias . When their teams win, coaches usually feel that the
success is due to their coaching. But when their teams lose, coaches may think
it’s due to their players’ poor skills. Similarly, if you get an A on a test, you
may think it’s due to your hard work, but if you get a poor grade, it’s due to
the professor’s inadequacies. The reason is the
self-serving bias, the tendency
to attribute success to personal factors (skill, ability, or effort) and attribute
failure to factors outside oneself (Krusemark, Campbell, & Clementz, 2008;
Shepperd, Malone, & Sweeny, 2008).
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The fundamental attribution error . One of the more common attribution biases
is the tendency to overattribute others’ behavior to dispositional causes and
the corresponding failure to recognize the importance of situational causes.
Known as the
fundamental attribution error, this tendency is prevalent in
Western cultures. We tend to exaggerate the importance of personality
characteristics (dispositional causes) in producing others’ behavior and
minimize the infl uence of the environment (situational factors). For example,
we are more likely to jump to the conclusion that someone who is often late
to work is too lazy to take an earlier bus (a dispositional cause) than to
assume that the lateness is due to situational factors, such as the bus always
running behind schedule.
Why is the fundamental attribution error so common? One reason pertains
to the nature of information available to the people making an attribution.
When we view another person’s behavior in a particular setting, the most
conspicuous information is the person’s behavior. Because the individual’s
immediate surroundings remain relatively unchanged and less attention
grabbing, we center our attention on the person whose behavior we’re consid-
ering. Consequently, we are more likely to make attributions based on personal
dispositional factors and less likely to make attributions relating to the situation
(Follett & Hess, 2002; Langdridge & Butt, 2004; Tal-Or & Papirman, 2007).
Social psychologists’ awareness of attribution biases has led, in part, to the devel-
opment of a new branch of economics called behavioral economics.
Behavioral economics
is concerned with how individuals’ biases and irrationally affect economic decisions.
Rather than viewing people as rational, thoughtful decision makers who are impar-
tially weighing choices to draw conclusions, behavioral economists focus on the irra-
tionality of judgments (Ariely & Norton, 2009).
Attribution biases do not affect all of us in the same way. The
culture in which we are raised clearly plays a role in the way we
attribute others’ behavior.
Take, for example, the fundamental attribution error: the
tendency to overestimate the importance of personal, dispositional
factors and underattribute situational factors in determining the
causes of others’ behavior. The error is pervasive in Western
cultures and not in Eastern societies. For instance, adults in India were more likely to use
situational attributions than dispositional ones in explaining events. These fi ndings are
the opposite of those for the United States, and they contradict the fundamental attribution
error (Miller, 1984, Lien et al., 2006).
One reason for the difference may lie in the norms and values of Eastern society,
which emphasize social responsibility and societal obligations to a greater extent than
Western societies. In addition, the language spoken in a culture may lead to different
sorts of attributions. For instance, a tardy person using English may say, “I am late”;
this suggests a personal, dispositional cause (“I am a tardy person”). In contrast,
speakers of Spanish who are late say, “The clock caused me to be late.” Clearly, the
statement in Spanish implies that the cause is situational (Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988;
Macduff, 2006; Alon & Brett, 2007).
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