Beliefs and Judgment

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Beliefs and Judgment
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Attribution

• We have a strong need to explain what is going on
  around us.
• Attributions are our best guess as to what is
  going on.
• Negative events
• Unexpected events

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Why are attributions important?

• 1) Prediction and Control
• 2) Determine feelings, behaviors, attitudes
• e.g., Person bumps you
• 3) Expectations about the future
• e.g., Attributions of success and failure
• This person will likely help me in the future

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Attribution

• e.g. Uptown at the R-bar, Plonk, etc. - Person
  says hi
• Attributions the individual makes about the
  situation are critical
• Does the person like you?
• Are they just being polite?
• Did they mistake you for someone else?
• Do they want something from you?
• Are they really saying what is someone like you
  doing here?
• Are they so drunk that their brain is carbonated?

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Attribution

• Patty Hearst Story

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Lewinian Equation

• B S D
• Did Patty hearst rob the bank b/c of
  dispositional qualities

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Attribution

• Patty Hearst Story - Our interpretation
  (Attributions) as jurors are critical.
• Did she rob the bank b/c
• criminal
• doesnt care about others
• was in love with S.L.A. leader
• Was tortured and trapped in closet for 57 days

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The Logical Approach

• Gestalt influenced.
• Asch (1946) traits intelligent-envious or
  reverse.
• Smart and competitive
• Vs. crafty and devious

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Heider (1958)

• People have a need to understand and predict what
  will happen to them and others around them. The
  best way to do this is through understanding the
  causes of human behavior.

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Why did a person behave as they did?

• Two types of attributions
• Dispositional attributions- Attributing behavior
  to internal causes.
• Situational attributions- Attributing behavior to
  external causes.

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Five core ideas

• -people have enduring invariant dispositions
  transmitted through behavior.
• -attribution extracts invariance
• -attribution is vital to grasp reality, predict,
  control
• -attribution is not necessarily conscious a form
  of causal analysis.
• - attribution factors out situation to get at
  disposition.

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Correspondent Inference Theory

• Jones Davis (1965)
• 3 ideas
• 1. Covariation of behavior with effects reveals
  intention.
• 2. When behavior covaries with more than one
  effect, intention or disposition is ambiguous.
• 3. Covariation of others behavior reveals
  extraordinariness of actors.

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Dealing with the Ambiguity

• Analysis of non-common effects- unique
  consequences deliver info about actors intention
  (what differs between alternatives). Narrow
  possibilities by considering social desirability
  of NC effects.
• Social Desirability
• Social Roles (e.g., friendly waitress/waiter)

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Causal Attribution

• Kelly (1967)
• Covariation Principle
• Consistency (A always behaves this way)
• Distinctiveness (A behaves this way rarely)
• Consensus (A behaves like others)

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More Kelly

• When High for each, we can be fairly confident in
  our Situational attribution
• When H-consistency, L-distinctiveness,
  L-consensus- Dispositional attribution.

• People test for three kinds of Covariation,
  actors, stimuli, time. (Like JD plus
  consistency).

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Kelly (1971)

• discounting principle- the role of a cause is
  discounted if other potential causes are present.

• -Ordinary behaviors attributed to situation.
• Weiner (1972 1979) Stability, locus,
  controllability Turrets).

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The Above theories

• These theories are normative- they describe how
  causal attributions should occur given present
  information.
• Game time!

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ERRORS in Attribution
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The Fundamental Attribution Error or
Correspondence Bias

• We tend to underestimate the impact of the
  situation and exaggerate the impact of
  dispositions in making attributions.
• BDs.

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Jones Harris (1967)

• I.V. free/solicited
• I.V. pro-/anti-Castro
• D.V. Perceptions of essayists attitude.
• What did they think the authors Castro-attitude
  was?
• Ross (1977) FAE. People underestimate situational
  forces-law.

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Ross, Amabile, Steinmetz (1977)

• Quiz game.
• Randomly assigned three participants to be a
  questioner, contestant, or observer.
• Asked to generate difficult but not impossible
  general knowledge questions.
• Observers and Contestant rated the contestants
  and questioners general knowledge.
• Lets draw.
• -do not discount situational advantage of
  questioner.

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Write this down on a little piece of paper and
turn it in to me during break.

• General knowledge of each person on 0 no
  knowledge to 100much knowledge scale.
• Q (Questioner) ???
• C (Contestant) ???
• A (Average MSU Student) ???

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Why do we make the FAE?

• Salience - Refers to something that stands out
  grabs our attention.
• Attribution is matter of perspective
• Observing others - Other salient causal,
  therefore...
• For ourselves - Situation salient causal,
  therefore...
• Jones Nisbett (1972) actor observer effect.

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One way the FAE has been applied to the real
world.

• Lassiter Irvine (1986)
• Videotaped Confessions
• 2 Murder Trials
• I.V. - Camera focus
• D.V. - Voluntariness
• D.V. - Verdict
• RESULTS?
• Lassiter, Geers, Handley, Weiland, Munhall
  (2002)

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Culture ?

• Culture, collectivistic cultures tend to explain
  behaviors situationally, individualistic-
  dispositionally. But
• Krull et al (1996) FAE replicates in China.

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How and why does the FAE occur? Operating
Sequences

• Quattrone (1982) Saw dispositional and
  situational attributions as sequential
  operations, not two sides of a coin.

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Three stage model of attribution

• 1. Identification (automatic)- what was the
  behavior?
• 2. Dispositional inference (automatic)- What was
  the nature of the behavior?
• 3. Situational Correction (effortful and
  conscious)- Was a situation capable of causing
  the behavior?
• -(Anchoring Adjustment)

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Gilbert, Pelham, Krull (1988)

• Anxious behavior
• I.V. - Videotape (Anxiety provoking subtitles
  hidden secrets, sexual fantasies versus Mundane
  subtitles Ideal vacation, favorite hobbies)
• I.V. - Load (No-load versus Load).
• What happened?

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Inevitability?

• Krull Erickson (1995) sit/dis, which do they
  want to know about?
• Actor anxious.
• I.V. Told dispositionally anxious/calm
• D.V. thought topic was less/more anx provoking.

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Is the FAE bad?

• -Could it be evolutionarily adaptive?
• -its efficient
• -little harmin general.
• -often useful, sometimes wrong.
• -Given people often choose their situations, we
  may make the correct dispositional attribution in
  a logically incorrect way.

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Constructing interpretations and memories.

• -We respond not to reality as it is but to
  reality as we construe it (text p.98)

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Perceiving and interpreting events

• Ross, Lepper, Lord (1979)
• Participant ½ Pro- ½ anti-capital punishment.
• Stimuli 1 study confirming and 1 study
  disconfirming the students beliefs about the
  deterrent qualities of CP. Both groups got the
  same 2 studies.
• What Happened?
• Lets draw.

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Belief Perseverance

• Anderson et al. (1980)
• Firefighters
• Can it be eliminated?
• Yes, explain the opposite.

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Reconstructing Past attitudes

• Bem McConnell (1970) control over university
  curriculum.
• Measured attitude imbedded within screening
  questionnaire.
• Week later, wrote anti-student control essay.
• What happened?

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Similar effects for our interpretation of
behavior and experiences.

• Loftus Palmer (1974)
• Viewed car accident.
• Asked to judge speed
• Smashed into/hit.
• 2 X More likely to report seeing broken glass.

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.5 close eyes
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Priming

• Read the following words and answer my question
  as quickly as possible (the first answer that
  pops into your head.
• Ocean
• Waves
• Shell
• Breeze
• Sand

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Priming

• Priming-activating associations among concepts,
  feelings, thoughts.
• Higgens et al (1977)
• Unscrambled words like excitement or danger.
• Read a passage about a man going out to sea
  alone.
• Rate the man adventurous or wreckless depending
  on earlier priming.

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• Atthumorous, poised, sociable.
• Unnot.

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Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• Snyder, Tanke, Berscheid (1977)- Behavioral
  confirmation
• M and F participants (never saw each other).
• Getting acquainted experiment.
• I.V. males presented a picture of an attractive
  or unattractive woman and told this is who they
  were going to talk to.
• D.V. Males impression and observers impression of
  female.

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Heuristics
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Representitiveness heuristic

• Judging the likelihood of things by how well they
  seem to fit or match a particular category.

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Bob

• Likes to solve math puzzles
• Reads a lot
• Has never been to a keg party
• Put together a transistor radio at the age of 4
• Often wonders about the uni-directional verses
  bi-directional infinity of time.
• Is he a
• 1)      Psych major
• 2)      Physics major

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Ignoring base rate information

• Pretend only 1 of MSU students were physics
  majors and 20 were psych majors.
• Now what is Bob?

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Availability heuristic.

• This is used to evaluate the frequency or
  likelihood of an event on the basis of how
  quickly instances or associations come to mind
  (Fiske and Taylor, 1991).

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Anchoring and adjustment

• Under conditions of uncertainty, we will
  sometimes pick a starting point (or anchor) then
  adjust to reach a final judgment.
• How many hotdogs can Joe eat in an hour.
• Well, he has been known to eat 5 in an hour
  before.
• Hows about, ummmmmmm.9?

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• Counterfactual thinking- thinking what might have
  otherwise been.
• Illusory correlation-thinking that two things go
  together because of biased information searches.
• Man, every time I wear that shirt, I have a bad
  day.