Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Attribution
This section made me think of inferences I have drawn in the past about events and behavior. I agree people do this all the time. People usually blame external causes, but in reality most of the time it is internal. People say they did not do well on a test or quiz because it was hard. When in reality, it is on the person to study and it is a stable internal cause. The person has the ability to study and the intelligence to get a good grade, they just decided not to. It is peoples own behavior that got them the grade, not anyone else. This is an example of Bias attribution and it happens a lot. People are more willing to give their friends credit than someone that they do not know. I went through a day with this on my mind and it amazed me how many times it came up and how often it presented itself.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is a discussion, not a comment. I am unable, for some reason, to make new discussion topics.
ReplyDeleteATTRIBUTION AND STEREOTYPES:
In class today we were discussing attribution and I learned a great deal about how it pertains to the field of social psychology. For example, when we drive, we are constantly using attributions. We, for one, attribute bad driving to internal factors. For example, one day I was driving with my friend and we were stuck behind a car that was driving really slow. The first thing my friend said was "What are you grandpa Moses? Look he is 100 years old!" This is a clear example of attribution because my friend was attributing bad driving to being old. Another example of this I saw while I was watching an episode of "The Office". During the episode, they are playing a game where they each have a type of person (ie. woman or man) written on a card their foreheads. The goal was to act stereotypical towards that person based on what their card said and to have the person try to figure out what their card said. At one point one of the characters had a card that said "Asian" on their head. Based off stereotypes, the person trying to guess said, "What am I a woman" when he was told that the stereotype was being a bad driver. As a result it is apparent that we also attribute bad driving to being of Asian descent or with the female gender as well.
Another example of attribution is when we see a foreclosure sign. When we think of internal attributions we often think of foreclosure as a result of the owners having poor financial management. However, on the other side, if we think of external attribution, we would assume that the owner lost his or her job and thus the change in economics caused the foreclosure at no fault of their own. As these example show, however, it is clear that attribution is a part of everyday life.