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Actor-Observer Effect. refers to a tendency to attribute one’s own actions to external causes, while attributing other people’s behaviors to internal causes.
The actor-observer bias explains the phenomenon of attributing other people’s behavior to internal factors while attributing our own behavior to external or situational forces, also known as the fundamental attribution error (Jones & Nisbett, 1971; Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973; Choi & Nisbett, 1998).
Self-serving Bias. The tendency to attribute our successes to our own effort and abilities (internal factors) and our failures to external factors.
In an external, or situational, attribution, people infer that a person’s behavior is due to situational factors. Example: Maria’s car breaks down on the freeway. If she believes that the breakdown happened because her car is old, she is making an external attribution.
The fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or over-attribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.
Harold Kelley’s covariation model (1967, 1971, 1972, 1973) is an attribution theory in which people make causal inferences to explain why other people and ourselves behave in a certain way. Attributions are made based on three criteria: Consensus, Distinctiveness, and Consistency (Kelley, 1973).
Consensus and consistency hypothesis. Kelley’s Covariation Model (Kelley, 1973) demonstrates that consensus (i.e., agreement by others about the attribution) and consistency (i.e., observing the same stimulus multiple times) help perceivers draw conclusions about a target’s behavior.
Fritz Heider developed models of attribution for both object perception and person per- ception. His theory of object perception (first described in Heider, 1920, his dissertation) is rarely cited today, but it serves as the foundation for his later theory of person perception.
In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring the causes of events or behaviors. For example, over the course of a typical day, you probably make numerous attributions about your own behavior as well as that of the people around you.
In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior.
For example, a dispositionist might explain bankruptcy as the largely self-inflicted result of personal laziness and/or imprudence. Situationists, in contrast, view bankruptcy as frequently caused by more complicated external forces, such as divorce or the medical and other costs of unanticipated illness.
When people blame a scapegoat, how do you think they choose evidence to support the blame? One way in which they might do this is to selectively attend to information that would bolster their argument. Furthermore, they may actively seek out information to confirm their assertions.