It is normal for human beings to attribute outcomes to particular causes. The explanations that humans generate for events are virtually automatic; others may be more deliberated. Attributions or causal explanations are generated by applying a lay person’s theories of how things work. Attribution theory is the term used for the causal explanations of the lay person. Attribution theory focuses on the cognitive processes of the adult social perceiver, and several models treat attributional process as analogous to the operations of a scientist or a computer, whereby a series of logical operations are applied to a set of possible causes to arrive at an explanation of a given event.
One limitation of attribution models is that most of them are made with an assumption that the social cognitive agent is a cool, rational observer whose priority is to gain an accurate understanding of cause-effect relations in the social environment. In practice, human motivations are rarely this simple nor so context-free. Humans are naturally interested in looking for their interests. Because of these humans’ appraisal of their own performance can be affected. Many researches about attribution theory reveal that humans tend to have self-serving bias to regard their own successes favorably, while distancing themselves from responsibility for failures. Meaning, humans tend to attribute success to internal factors while failures are often attributed to external factors. When observing other people however, one tends to attribute their success to external factors while their failures are attributed to internal factors. There are also some studies pointing out that teacher are prone to attributional bias in that they tend to explain their pupils’ success as due to their teaching skills, and their students’ failures as due to lack of effort. One bias that is of particular interest from a developmental social psychological perspective is the so-called ‘fundamental attribution error’. The fundamental attribution effort refers to the tendency of adults to ‘underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behavior. This means that when observing others’ behavior, people are sometimes prone to attribute causality to individuals’ own motives and qualities, rather than to the circumstances in which they act. The different attribution biases are discussed below.
1. Fundamental Attribution Error – this is the tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositions and to underestimate the importance of situational factors when attributing causes to another person’s behavior. The error is regarded as a fundamental one since it is assumed to be pervasive and occur across a wide range of behaviors. Some theorists characterized this as a marked tendency for people to regard situational factors and influences as invisible or non-existent. It is important to realize that the error only applied when making causal attributions about somebody else’s behavior.
2. Self-Serving Bias – this expression of egocentrism is related to mine-is-better perspective and is defined as the habit of perceiving, remembering, and interpreting events in a way that is complimentary to us, even when such interpretations are unjustified. The existence of this habit has long been noted in social psychology. One kind of self-serving bias is attributing the behavior of others to personality factors and that of ourselves to situational factors. Self-serving bias can affect a person’s perception in much the same way that a flawed eyeglass lens distorts vision. A person with self-serving bias can perceive that his failures are someone else’s fault while taking all the credits for his successes. Studies have shown that some people, when reading data that support their beliefs, perceive it to be much more substantial and persuasive than data that challenge their beliefs. Some people will even go so far as to condemn books they have not read – in their minds, any book that challenges their belief must be wrong.
3. False Consensus Bias – this refers to the assumption that our lifestyle, behavior and attitudes are the yardsticks of normality. In other words, we assume people are like us. If we are systematic and organized, we expect others to be likewise. If they are not, we fall right into the False Consensus Bias: we blame them for having a negative attitude.
4. Negative Impression Bias – this is a common perceptual bias. People have a tendency to overemphasize negative information about other individuals. We tend to focus on a person’s negative characteristic and use that perception to judge subsequent behavior.
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