Psychology: Attribution and Biases

Study Notes

Naïve Scientist - People act like scientists casually trying to understand and explain behavior. People are motivated to understand the world around them.
Locus of causality - Attributions about the source or cause of behavior; internal - dispositional, external - situational. Internal attributions: "That person is lazy." External attributions: "Traffic was terrible.”
Stability and controllability - Stability: The extent to which the casual factor is stable or unstable. Controllability: The extent to which the casual factor is controllable or uncontrollable.

Fundamental attribution error - tendency to overestimate the role of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors in explaining others behavior.
Actor-observer bias - The tendency to make dispositional attributions for others’ behavior while making situational attributions for our own behavior.
Self-serving bias - Tendency to attribute our successes to internal causes and our failures to external causes

Cognitive miser - A model of how people process information that assumes people are limited in their capacity to process information, and as a result, they often use mental shortcuts to make judgments.
Heuristics - Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that people use to simplify and speed up the process of making judgments.
Representativeness Heuristic - People classify things according to how similar they are to a typical case.
Availability Heuristic - The tendency to rely on information that is most readily available.
False consensus Effect - the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, values, and attitudes.
Anchoring Heuristic - The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we receive.
Motivated Tactician - A model of how people process information that assumes that people are flexible in their thinking and choose the most appropriate strategy depending on the situation.

Mere Exposure - The tendency to develop a preference for things merely because we are exposed to them repeatedly.
Richard LaPierre - Found a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory - An uncomfortable state that occurs when people hold two or more conflicting cognitions. People are motivated to reduce dissonance.

Social Norms - Shared expectations about how people should behave in a given situation. Descriptive norms - How people typically behave. Injunctive norms - What people are expected to do.
Conformity - The tendency to change one’s behavior or beliefs to match those of others.
Groupthink - A phenomenon that occurs when group members strive for consensus and avoid any dissenting views, even if it means ignoring important information.
Milgram's study of obedience - Subjects were led to believe they were administering electric shocks to a learner; The study revealed a disturbingly high level of obedience to authority, even when it meant harming others.
Explaining obedience - People can be led to obey orders even when those orders are unethical.
Conformity - Sometimes people conform to fit in, avoid social disapproval, and because they believe that the group is correct; it’s about getting along with the group.

Social facilitation - The presence of others can enhance performance on simple or well-learned tasks. The presence of others can hinder performance on complex tasks.
Social Loafing - Tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group than when working alone.

Theories of self-comparison - We assess our own abilities and opinions by comparing ourselves to others
- Festinger (1954) - We compare ourselves to people who are similar to us.
- Social comparison theory - We compare ourselves to people who are better than us (upward comparison) and people who are worse than us (downward comparison).
Self-esteem - Our overall evaluation of ourselves.