Causal Attribution and Social Judgment

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Causal Attribution and Social Judgment
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Outline

• Causal Attributionhow we make sense of other
  peoples behaviour
• Self-knowledgehow we make sense of who we are
  and our own behaviour
• Social Judgmentstrategies, errors and biases in
  social decision making

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Optimistic attributional style predicts future
physical health Even controlling for earlier
health
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Why Attribution Matters

• Attribution
• Explanatory style
• internal/external
• stable/unstable
• global/specific

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Why Attribution Matters

• Optmistic attributional style
• Negative events are viewed as
• External, unstable, specific
• Pessimistic attributional style
• Negative events are viewed as
• Internal, stable, global

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Optimistic attributional style predicts
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Attributional Biases

• Fundamental attribution error overestimating
  internal factors and underestimating external
  factors when explaining other peoples behaviour
• Castro Study

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Jones and Harris (1967) Castro study
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Attributional Biases

• Fundamental attribution error

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Attributional Biases

• Fundamental attribution error explanations
• Perceptual
• Cognitive
• Motivational
• Cultural

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Cultural differences in causal attributions
Sports articles US newspapers, more
dispositional attributions Hong Kong newspapers,
more situational attributions Cultural
differences disappeared for editorials Lee,
Hallahan, Herzog, 1996
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Cultural Differences in Perceptions of
Personality Malleability (Norenzayan, Choi,
Nisbett, 2002)
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Just World Beliefs(Lerner Miller, 1978)

• Just-world beliefs-
• By and large, people deserve what they get in
  life
• Basically, the world is a just place
• People who do their job will rise to the top
• People who meet with misfortune have often
  brought it on themselves
• Injustice in the world is a perceived threat to
  self
• JWB allows individuals to maintain a sense of
  purpose and controlbad things couldnt happen to
  me
• Outcomes reflect personal traits more FAE
• One pernicious consequence blaming victims

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Just World Beliefs

• Blaming the victimexperiments by Lerner
  colleagues
• Participants watch another person suffer (victim)
• Restore Justice Condition Participant can help
  the victim
• JWB Condition participant cannot help the victim
• Outcome Participants evaluation of the victim
• Results RJ condition positive evaluation of
  victim
• JWB condition derogation of the victim

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Just World Beliefs

• Victim derogation is less likely
• Who believes in a just world?

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Attributional Biases

• Actor-observer effect
• Example
• Explanations
• 1) point-of-view
• 2) Knowledge of situational inconsistency for
  self, but not others

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Attributional Biases

• Self-serving bias
• Cultural differences in this tendency
• Explanation

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Self-Knowledge

• How and how much do we know ourselves?
• Barriers to self-knowledge
• Conscious vs. unconscious self-knowledge
• Strategies for self-knowledge

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Escape from the Self

• Our defenses stop us from knowing ourselves, esp.
  undesirable aspects
• We escape self-awareness through

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Self-Knowledge

• We may have limited ability to know ourselves
• Ways into self-knowledge
• Introspection
• Observing our own behaviour
• Learning about how others see us

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Introspection

• Look inward to observe
• 1) Feelings, thoughts, desires
• 2) Reasons behind our actions
• More successful with 1) then 2)
• The causes behind our tendencies are not readily
  visiblepsychological research better way to know
  this

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Introspection--do we know the causes of our
behavior?

• Confabulation studies with split-brain patients
  (Gazzaniga Ledoux)
• Pantyhose study (Nisbett Wilson)

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• Flash images of emotion arousing object to left
  visual field--right hemisphere
• Observe ps reaction
• Record ps explanation
• Confabulation!

Language centres in Left Hemisphere
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Introspection--do we know the causes of our
behavior?

• Confabulation studies with split-brain patients
  (Gazzaniga Ledoux)
• Pantyhose study (Nisbett Wilson)
• Cognitive dissonance studies, studies of
  discriminationpeoples explanations of their own
  behaviour have little to do with observed causes

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Observing our own behaviour

• Self perception theory
• Visualizing a situation and observe our reactions
  to it

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How Others See Us

• Our defenses prevents us from wanting to know
  ourselves
• But others who know us well can see through these
  defenses
• They can also be good observers of our behaviour
• Ex

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Strategies that facilitate self-knowledge

• Self-acceptance
• Connecting with our feelings and observing our
  thoughts without identifying with them
• Find out how knowledgeable others see us
• Visualizing our reactions to future situations
• Psychological research

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Heuristics in Social Judgment

• Heuristic
• They usually operate outside of awareness
• Helps us make decisions under uncertainty

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Heuristics in Social Judgment

• I have a friend he loves art, enjoys classical
  music, travels a lot, and is temperamental. Is he
  a) French chef b) civil engineer?

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Heuristics in Social Cognition

• Which is a more likely killer a) airline crash
  b) car accident
• Which is more dangerous to your health a)
  terrorism b) smoking

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The statistics

• By number of deaths
• Deaths due to car transportation 40,000/year
• Deaths due to airline transportation 200/year
• By number of passengers
• Car 1/6800 deaths per year
• Airline 1/1.6 million per year
• Controlling for distance covered
• 10-40 times more likely to die driving than
  flying

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The statistics

• But media coverage is incredibly skewed
• 0.02 cancer stories/1000 cancer deaths
• 1.7 murder stories/1000 homicides
• 2.3 AIDS stories/1000 AIDS deaths
• 138 plane crash stories/1000 airplane deaths

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Social Cognition Conclusions

• Naïve realism belief that ones own perspective
  reflects objective reality, whereas others are
  biased
• People are not objective observers of the social
  world they construe their world in particular
  waysheuristics and self-protective defenses to
  make sense of the social world