Theories of Social Psychology
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Theories of Social Psychology
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
In 1977 Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile and Julia Steinmetz at Stanford University ran a quiz game. Pairs of students tossed a coin: one became the questioner, the other the contestant. The questioner wrote ten difficult general-knowledge questions from their own special interests (a favourite book, a home town’s history) and asked them aloud. Contestants answered only about four of the ten correctly.
Afterwards both players, and observers who had watched, rated each player’s general knowledge. Contestants and observers rated the questioners as far more knowledgeable. Yet the roles had been decided by a coin, and any questioner can look brilliant when choosing questions only they can answer. People judged the person and overlooked the situation that produced the performance.
Figure 1. In the quizmaster study, a random role created an advantage that onlookers did not take into account.
Definition
Attribution: the process of explaining the causes of behaviour and events, our own or other people’s.
Dispositional (internal) attribution: explaining behaviour by the person’s traits, abilities, motives or effort. Situational (external) attribution: explaining it by circumstances, other people, the task or luck.
Fundamental attribution error (FAE): the tendency, when explaining other people’s behaviour, to overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational ones (term from Lee Ross, 1977). Also called the correspondence bias.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for success (internal attribution) and blame failure on circumstances (external attribution).
Fritz Heider (1958) argued that ordinary people try to explain behaviour so that the social world feels predictable and controllable. The basic choice is between the person and the situation. A teacher who sees a student arrive late can blame laziness (dispositional) or the broken-down bus (situational), and the choice decides whether the teacher feels annoyed or sympathetic.
Harold Kelley (1967) proposed the covariation model: when we have watched behaviour on several occasions, we judge its cause by three kinds of information. Take this case: Uwase gets a low mark from Mr Habimana in her French oral examination.
| Information | The question it asks | Points to the situation (the teacher) if… | Points to the person (Uwase) if… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consensus | Do other students also get low marks from him? | most students get low marks from him (high) | only Uwase gets a low mark (low) |
| Distinctiveness | Does Uwase get low marks only from him? | her marks from other teachers are good (high) | she gets low oral marks in every subject (low) |
| Consistency | Does she get low marks from him every time? | yes, every term (high) | yes, every term (high) |
High consensus, high distinctiveness and high consistency point to the teacher (perhaps he marks harshly). Low consensus, low distinctiveness and high consistency point to Uwase (perhaps oral exams make her anxious). If consistency is low, people tend to blame a passing circumstance, such as illness on that day.
Studies such as McArthur (1972) found that people do use these three kinds of information, but they underuse consensus: they pay less attention to what everyone else does than the model predicts, which is one route to the fundamental attribution error.
| Bias | What happens | Evidence and its status |
|---|---|---|
| Fundamental attribution error | Others’ behaviour is put down to their character. | The quizmaster study (1977); found in many Western studies, but weaker in some East Asian samples, where situations are more often mentioned. |
| Actor–observer bias | We explain our own actions by the situation and others’ by their character. | Storms (1973) found that when people watched a video of themselves from the observer’s viewpoint, they explained their own behaviour more by their character. Later reviews found the bias is much smaller and less general than first claimed. |
| Self-serving bias | “I passed because I worked hard; I failed because the paper was unfair.” | A review of 266 studies by Amy Mezulis and colleagues (2004) found it in all age groups, strongest in American samples, smaller in some Asian samples and in people with depression. |
Attributions shape what we do next. A student who explains a poor English mark by “I have no talent for languages” (internal, stable, uncontrollable) is likely to give up. A student who says “I did not practise speaking aloud” (internal, unstable, controllable) can change something. Teachers, coaches and counsellors therefore try to steer people towards attributions they can act on, a technique called attribution retraining.
Opinion Science: “What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?” Listen for the presenter’s examples and for why situations are easy to overlook when we watch other people.
Important
Evaluate attribution theory. Its strength is that it describes judgements everyone makes and has practical uses in schools and counselling. But Kelley’s model describes an ideal reasoner: in daily life people rarely gather all three kinds of information, and they often decide quickly from a single event. The quizmaster study was a well-controlled experiment, but with American university students; the size of the fundamental attribution error varies across cultures, so it is not as “fundamental” as its name suggests.
Warning
Common mistake: thinking that consistency decides between person and situation. In Kelley’s model, high consistency appears in both the person pattern and the situation pattern. It is consensus and distinctiveness that tell them apart.
Tip
Memory hook for Kelley: “All HIGH, blame the place; LOW, LOW, HIGH, blame the face.”
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables, Figure 1 and the exercises.
