Social Psychology:
Social Cognition

James Neill

Centre for Applied Psychology

University of Canberra

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Learning Objective

• To describe the social-cognitive processes people use to try and understand themselves and others

Attribution

• Process of inferring the causes of mental states and behaviors of yourself and of others
• We are all ‘intuitive scientists’ or 'naive psychologists'.

Attributions - External/Internal

• External attributions: Behavior is due to the situation, ‘The boss yelled at me ... because this is April 15th and his taxes are not done.’
• Internal attributions: Behavior reflects the person, ‘The boss yells at everyone ... because he is a hostile person.’

Fundamental Attribution Error

• tendency for observers, when analysing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of external factors and to overestimate the impact of internal factors

• Tendency for us to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external factors

Self-serving Bias

We tend to attribute

• our
  • successes to internal (dispositional) causes
  • failures to external (situational) causes
• other's
  • successes to situational causes
  • other's failures to dispositional causes

Interval vs. External Attribution

Internal vs. External attributions depend on:

• Consensus:
• Consistency
• Distinctiveness

Processes that Modulate Attribution

• Discounting: Person downplays the role of a variable because of the influence of another variable
• Augmentation refers to an increase in an internal attribution for certain behaviors

Attributions - Summary

• We all try to explain (and predict) behaviors.
• Dispositional (personality) vs. Situational (environmental) attributions
• We tend to overly attribute behavior to dispositional causes.
  (Fundamental Attribution Error)
• We tend to bias towards having more positive and less negative attributions about ourselves.