Discuss the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior

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

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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.)

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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