Discuss Two Errors in Attribution

6. Discuss two errors in attributions

Social psychology is the part of psychology in which psychologists analyze how people's thoughts, behavior and feeling are influenced by the presence of others (actual, imagined or implied). Attribution is the process in social level of psychology in which humans try to explain causes of others behavior or events. The attribution theory is a term that explains the model explaining the processes. Research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider during the early years of the 20th century. He was an Australian psychologist and published the book "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations" in 1958. This book brought up the concept of balance theory, which was introduced by the theory of attribution. He believed that people are motivate by two primary needs:

* The first need is to form a coherent view with the world

* The second need is to gain control over the environment

There are two types of attribution. These include situational and dispositional attribution. Situational or internal attribution is the internal factors that will affect their behavior such as their genetic makeup, their ethics, their religion etc. Dispositional attribution or external factors are the factors from the environment surrounding a person that will influence their behavior, such as social pressure, nature of the situation etc.

Taking in to consideration the tendency of humans to want to explain others behavior, studies have evaluated whether we tend to explain others behavior using situational attribution of dispositional attribution. A study looking in to this is for example the study by Lee in 1977. In this study participants were randomly assigned in to three roles, questioners (game show host), answerers (contestants) and observant. Even though the observant knew that the game show hosts asking the questions they had made up themselves were just normal people such as themselves, they found that the observant had a tendency to list the game show hosts as more intelligent when asked who they thought were most intelligent. These findings prove the fundamental attribution error in humans when evaluating an event, and the tendency to explain the behavior or intelligence level (inability to answer questions) on dispositional factors rather than situational factors.

Another bias we have as humans is called the self serving bias. This states that we tend to equate success to internal attributes and failure to external attributes when evaluating our own success or failure. For example, a study in 1980 by Lou & Russel proves this tendency to bias as they found that American professional athletes and coaches attribute 80% of their teams winning to internal factors such as skill and ability, while the losses of the team was often