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Dispositional Attribution Analysis

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Attribution is designating an outcome to one or more external or internal factors. There are two main errors in attribution: Fundamental attribution errors (FAE) and self-serving bias (SSB). Fundamental Attribution Errors are when people overestimate the role of dispositional factors in an individual's behavior culminating in illogical conclusions. In FAEs, people observe and make conclusions straight away, assuming that it is a dispositional factor. Dispositional factors have to do with personal/internal and generally unchanging characteristics, which are specific to a person. These are features such as, the personality, traits, feelings, moods and abilities of a person. Sometimes, people will consider but ignore situational factors because …show more content…

Greenberg et al. speculate that humans employ SSB in order to preserve / boost their own self-esteem. If success it attributed to our internal factors, it boosts our self-esteem and we see ourselves as more superior than we were before. This is further influenced by the attribution of failures to external factors that are out of our control, so then we can protect our self-esteem. This illustrates that the SSB is a mechanism for self-protection. The SSB usually happens more often in individualist cultures, which is why it is commonly associated with western …show more content…

They were told to teach two children – Pupil A and Pupil B – how to multiply numbers by 10 and 20; this was taught in two phases. After teaching the students each phase, worksheets were given to the teachers to hand out to the students to assess the students learning progress. However, the worksheets were made in a way that Pupil A did very well on both sheet and gave all correct answers, whereas Pupil B did poorly on both sheets, where they did poorly on the first one and improved slightly on the second one later; The teachers were completely unaware of this. When the teachers were asked about Pupil B’s performance, they seemed to attribute Pupil B’s improved performance to their abilities as a teacher but the failure to the pupil’s lack of ability. So when attributing students’ learning progress, teachers showed SSB for the purpose of enhancing the image of their ability to teach. Due to the fact that this was a lab experiment, this study lacked ecological validity. The participants were psychology students, not teachers and it didn’t really show a representative sample; it was an artificial environment, so how accurate can it

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As a Psychology major, I am taught to analyze people in an objective and holistic way. More than once, all humans tend to fall into the trap of the fundamental attribution error. The FAE is the claim that, in contrast to interpretations of their own behavior, people place undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining another person’s behavior. This means that people tend to accuse a person's errors on internal factors, instead of how external factors can lead to errors. As I was reading “I’d

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One of the key perceptual distortions, which resulted in a miscommunication between Sarah and myself, was the fundamental attribution error. Ross, 1977 states that the fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the inclination to attribute someone’s behaviours to internal factors (his or her personality), rather than external factors (situation). In the case of Sarah, I attributed her lying around all the time and not engaging in schoolwork or activities due to her having a lazy personality. But in actuality, her condition – DSPS prevented her from being able to function in what I considered to be normal. Therefore, I was suffering from a perceptual distortion by attributing her behaviours to internal factors rather than external, as DSPS was

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The SSB supposes that we satisfy ourselves by applying our positive behaviour to dispositional factors and our negative behaviour to situational factors. An example of when this occurs could be when you do an exam. If you do well, you like to think that it is thanks to the fact that you studied hard, but when you fail, you like to think that it is because your teacher did not teach the topic well enough. Regardless of the situation, SSB seems to occur in order to boost our self-esteem, which also means that it is more prevalent in cultures where self-image is of importance. So once again, we should take precaution when considering the occurrence of this attribution error, if it seems to show up in a culture where it is not common, you may have misread the

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Chapter two in the textbook Reflect & Relate an Introduction to Interpersonal Communication by Steven McCornack talks all about what “self” is and how to achieve complete fulfillment for one’s self which is also known as self-actualization. The components of self, as described in the book are, “ . . . self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem” (McCornack 39). Self-awareness is the idea in which one can take a moment to move feelings, beliefs, and other external influences aside and just evaluate oneself in a holistic perspective that is not skewed by opinions of others, etc. Having the ability to actually think about who one is brings a lot of power and mental stability in such a way that allows for improvement.

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Attribution theory helps to give reason as to why we judge people differently and to whether their behaviour was internally or externally

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It has many subcategories that contribute to its overall makeup, one example being personality.

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Finally, the fundamental attribution error occurs when a person fails to notice situational factors and assume that a behavior or specific actions are due to an individual’s personality or character traits (Harman, 1999).

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