The Socio-cultural Level of Analysis

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The Socio-cultural Level of Analysis
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Understanding Attribution will help us to
understand the two concepts of situational and
dispositional causes of behavior
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Understanding attribution in order to better
understand situational and dispositional factors

• Attribution how people interpret and explain
  causal relationships in the social world. We, as
  humans have a need to understand why things
  happen.
• ATTRIBUTION THEORY - motivational theory looking
  at how the human beings construct the meaning of
  an event based on his /her motives to find a
  cause and his/her knowledge of the environment.

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Understanding attribution in order to better
understand situational and dispositional factors

• Att. Theory basically looks at how people make
  sense of their world what cause and effect
  inferences they make about the behaviors of
  others and of themselves.
• Example In the middle of the lecture someone
  walks in class latewe can attribute the student
  being late to the following reasons-he or she is
  always late (dispositional), or he or she was in
  a discussion with a teacher (situational).

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Understanding attribution in order to better
understand situational and dispositional factors

• The purpose behind making attributions is to
  achieve COGNITIVE CONTROL over one's environment
  by explaining and understanding the causes behind
  behaviors and environmental occurrences.
• Fritz Heider, who coined the phrase in 1958,
  states that there is a strong need in individuals
  to understand momentary events by attributing
  them to people's external factors or to stable
  characteristics of internal factors.

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Understanding attribution in order to better
understand situational and dispositional factors

• Two basic kinds of attributions made Internal
  and External
• Internal factors - dispositional
• External factors - situational

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Objective 2.1

• Describe the role of situational and
  dispositional factors in explaining behavior

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What are you being asked to do?

• Provide a clear definition of each.
• Provide a detailed account of the role that each
  play in explaining behavior.
• Provide relevant examples of situational and
  dispositional behavior in society.

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Dispositional and Situational Factors of Behavior

• Dispositional factors of behavior The cause of
  behavior are factors occuring inside the
  individual (e.g. personality, past experience,
  cognitive/cultural schemas, biological factors)
• Situational factors of behavior The cause of
  behavior are factors occuring outside the
  individual (e.g. situation and context)

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Dispositional and Situational Factors of Behavior

• Whenever people are interacting with each other
  or engaging in any group activity, they tend to
  make quick judgments (attributions) about each
  other. They judge the motive behind a person's
  actions and attribute it to dispositional or
  situational causes.
• Dispositional attribution is the assumption that
  a person's behavior reflects his internal
  dispositions like his personality, beliefs,
  attitude etc.
• Situational attribution is the assumption that a
  person's behavior is influenced by an external
  influence from the environment or culture.

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Examples of how situational and dispositional
factors differ...

• You have just taken a mock exam and been told by
  your teacher that you have not done very well.
  This surprises you since you had been revising
  for weeks before the exam.
• How do you explain your poor performance?
  Situational or dispositional?

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Question of the day...

• Does situational or dispositional factors better
  explain behavior?

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The power of the situation

• Human behavior is explained by the social
  situation (situational factors) more than
  individual personality (dispositional factors).
  Situations play a greater role in human behavior
  than most people want to believe (Zimbardo,
  1971).
• Zimbardo also describes the social situation as
  the single biggest indicator of understanding
  human behavior. He asserts that good people can
  do evil things if the situation calls for it (The
  Prison study can be mentioned to show this
  phenomena)

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The power of the situation

• For example, when a couple of guards were clearly
  reluctant to push the prisoners, it was a nudge
  from the experimenters (in their role as wardens
  and superintendent) that caused them to be more
  aggressive.
• The more passive guards were also motivated by
  the actions of the most aggressive on their
  shift.
• This shows that it is possible for people with
  negative dispositions to situationally impact
  others.

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• Does this happen in real life?

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The power of the situation

• Simply put, we adapt to our situations (This is
  supported by prinicple 1 and 3). Every situation
  and setting requires a different set of
  mannerisms. For example, people act differently
  in class then when they are around teachers.

• Class is often a lot more strict and proper and
  to maintain those expectations, one must
  carefully consider what they say and what they
  do.

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Both playing a role in behavior

• Many social psychologists (Milgram, Zimbardo,
  Asch) strongly assert that the social situation
  is more important than a persons disposition.
• Although dispositions play an important role in
  how people react to their situation.

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Both playing a role in behavior

• What is a real world example of two people with
  contrasting dispositions behaving differently in
  the same situation?

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The power of dispositions on situations

• The power of the interaction between these two
  attributions are evident when a person is
  compelled do certain activities that he or she
  does not want to, but does so because of peer
  pressure.
• For example, a person might not enjoy going to a
  party, might not like to drink, and might hate to
  smoke. However, the peer pressure situationally
  influences a person to do all these unwanted
  things.

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Can our tendency to over emphasize dispositional
or situational factors cause wrongful judgment?
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Objective 2.2

• Discuss Two Errors in Attributions.

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• Provide a clear definition of attributions.
• Identify and define two specific errors
  associated with attributions.
• Provide research supporting these errors
• Provide a personal analysis of each
  error/research on each error.

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Attribution revisited from 2.1

• Attributions determine how a person constructs
  the meaning of an event based on his /her motives
  to find a cause and his/her knowledge of the
  environment.
• In other words, Attributions look at how we make
  sense of the world it gives us control of our
  surroundings.

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Attribution revisited from 2.1

• Heider (1958) was the first to propose a
  psychological theory of attribution.
• Heider discussed what he called naïve or
  commonsense psychology. In his view, people
  were like amateur scientists, erroneously trying
  to understand other peoples behavior by piecing
  together information until they arrived at a
  reasonable explanation or cause.

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Formation of attribution error

• As previously noted, the purpose behind making
  attribution is to achieve cognitive control over
  one's environment by explaining and understanding
  the causes behind behaviors and environmental
  occurrences.
• Our attributions are, however, significantly
  driven by our emotional and motivational drives.
• How can this create errors in attribution?

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Formation of attribution error

• Research has shown that we have a tendency to
  make automatic errors in our attributions. There
  are two important errors or mistakes we tend make
  when assigning attributions.
• Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)
• Self-Serving Bias (SSB)

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• When we overestimate the role of dispositional
  factors in an individuals behavior-and
  underestimate the situational factors-it is
  called the fundamental attribution error.

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Example of FAE

• Briefly describe the following actors
  personality (as best of you can).

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Will Ferrell
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Sylvester Stallone
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Example of FAE

• According to FAE, we attribute these
  characteristics to their personality
  (dispositional) and not the fact that these are
  paid actors who auditioned and were merely
  imitating these personalities in films
  (situational).

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Understanding FAE

• Why is this error so common? Some psychologists
  argue it is because people tend to think of
  themselves as adaptable, flexible and
  ever-changing human beings. We do not like to
  think of ourselves as a type of person.
• However, when we look at others, we do not have
  enough information about them (in most cases) to
  make a balanced decision, so we attribute
  behavior to disposition (this will help us later
  understand the formation of stereotypes).

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Research into FAE

• Ross et. al. (1977) proposed and demonstrated
  this error in research that aimed to see if
  student participants would make FAE even when
  they knew that all of the actors were simply
  playing a role.
• In their study, participants were randomly
  assigned to one of three roles a game show host,
  contestants on the game show, or members of the
  audience.
• The game show host were instructed to design
  their own questions. The audience then watched
  the game show through a series of questions.

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Research into FAE

• When the game show was over, the observers were
  asked to rank the intelligence of the people who
  had taken part. They consistently ranked the game
  show host as the most intelligent, even though
  they knew that this person was randomly assigned
  to this position, and-more significantly-he or
  she had written the questions.
• They failed to attribute the role of the persons
  situation-that is, being allowed to ask the
  questions-and instead attributed the persons
  performance to dispositional factors-in this
  case, intelligence.

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Research into FAE

• Although this study was taken from a very small
  university student sample, it reflects what we
  see everyday in life.
• People with social power usually initiate and
  control conversations (such as teachers, doctors,
  etc.) their knowledge concerning a particular
  topic can give others the impression that they
  are knowledgeable on a large range of other
  topics as well.
• Medical doctors and teachers are often seen as
  experts on topics that are not within their area
  of expertise.

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Self Serving Bias

• Another error in attribution is the self-serving
  bias (SSB). This is seen when people take credit
  for their successes, attributing them to
  dispositional factors, and dissociate themselves
  from their failures, attributing them to
  situational factors.

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What is the difference?

• A fundamental attribution error is when people
  try to find reasons for someone's behavior, they
  tend to overestimate personality factors and
  underestimate situational factors.
• A self-serving bias is when a person describes
  their own behavior and tend to choose
  attributions that are favorable to themselves.
  This means that people like to take credit for
  their good actions and let the situation account
  for their bad actions.

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SSB

• Football coaches and players tend to credit their
  wins to internal factors-for example, being in
  good shape, the hard work they have put in, the
  natural talent of the team-and their failures to
  external factors-for example, weather, fouls,
  cheating, etc. Is this true in other cases?

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Why do we tend to employ SSB?

• Greenberg et. al (1982) argued that the reason we
  do this is to protect our self esteem. How does
  SSB help to maintain self-esteem?

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Why do we tend to employ SSB?

• If we can attribute our success to dispositional
  factors, it boosts our self-esteem, and if we can
  attribute our failures to factors beyond our
  control, we can protect our self-esteem.
• In other words, the SSB serves as a mean of self
  protection.

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Research of SSB?

• In all types of competitive athletics, protecting
  one's sense of self was key to continued
  excellence in performance.
• Confidence in one's self and abilities was the
  foundation upon which overall performance was
  built. Research has concluded that athletes that
  exhibited high self-confidence (seeing
  dispositional connections with success) were more
  successful than those athletes that did not
  (Covassin Pero, 2004).

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Research of SSB?

• One particular study concluded that those
  individuals that had displayed self serving bias
  were able to bounce back after a setback more
  effectively than those athletes that had do not
  display self serving bias(Taylor Brown 1988).
• This finding was also supported by a study
  performed by Dodgson and Wood (1998), where it
  was reported that high self-serving bias
  individuals were more likely to disregard the
  negative implications of failures, while low
  self-esteem people tended to internalize the
  negative. 

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Discussion

• How would self serving bias in school be
  helpful for self esteem and confidence?

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Critics of SSB

• Questions have been raised as to whether the
  self-serving bias is a legitimate universal
  concept or not. Most notably in the literature,
  the questioning by Miller Ross (1975), examined
  the self-serving bias as fact or fiction.
• Not all the studies in the past that were
  hypothesized to show a self-serving bias
  demonstrated the effect.

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Critics of SSB

• Also, Miller and Ross claimed they found that
  there was a fault in some of the older studies
  methodology.
• They claimed that there was little support for
  the concept in the most general form. They argued
  that the literature provided more support for the
  idea that people take credit for success and not
  as much support for people blaming external
  factors for failure.

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Critics of SSB

• Researchers have also claimed that the self
  enhancing effect could be caused by other factors
  other than the self-serving bias, such as, the
  tendency for people to expect success, the
  tendency for people to notice a correlation
  between successful events and behavior more than
  with unsuccessful events, and that people
  misinterpret contingency (Miller Ross, 1975).

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Critics of SSB

• Although many researcher criticize the
  attribution error, many studies have supported
  and demonstrated the concept.
• It has explained the self-seeking nature of
  humans to protect general idea about ourselves
  and others.

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Reflection

• Do you have a tendency to over emphasize
  situational or dispositional factors in your
  achievements/failures?

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Prologue Objective 2.3

• Evaluate social identity theory, making
  reference to relevant studies.

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Introductory discussion

• Write down some of the groups that you identify
  or associate yourself with.
• If the aforementioned groups call for a specific
  set of characteristics, explain them.
• Name at least 4 people in this class who feel you
  most identify with. Explain this connection.

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The argument of self as part of a group.

• Do you feel connected or a sense of belongingness
  to the groups you identify with the most?
• Are you offended when someone talks negatively
  about the group(s) you belong to?
• Would a piece of YOUR identity be taken away if
  the group(s) you identify with the most were
  taken away?

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Objective 2.3

• Evaluate social identity theory, making
  reference to relevant studies.

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What are you being asked to do?

• Provide a clear definition of social identity
  theory.
• Present an evaluation of SID by analyzing
  assumptions, strengths, and limitations.
• Make reference to relevant research on SID.

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Social identification

• Social identification is the process by which we
  define
• ourselves in terms and categories that we share
  with other people.
• In contrast to characterizations of personal
  identity,
• which may be highly personal, social identities
  assume
• some commonalities with others.
• In other words, SI refers specifically to those
  aspects of
• a person that are defined in terms of his or her
• group memberships (this directly relates to
  principle 3).

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Social identification

• Although most people are members of many
  different groups, only some of those groups are
  meaningful in
• terms of how we define ourselves (as with the
  example from our discussion).
• In these cases, our self-definition is shared
  with other people who also claim that categorical
  membership, for example, as a woman, as a Muslim,
  as a marathon runner, or as a IB student.

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Examples of social groups

• Race
• Religion
• Occupation
• Sport
• Class (upper, middle, lower)
• Sexual orientation
• Club/Organization

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Social identity theory

• Social identity theory is based on the assumption
  that individuals have a basic need for positive
  self-esteem, and that self-esteem is wrapped in
  both personal and social identities.
• We all have various social identities, based on
  the groups to which we belong and with which we
  identify.

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Social identity theory

• Social Identity Theory (SIT) was developed by
  Henri Tajfel in 1979.
• The theory was originally developed to understand
  the psychological basis of intergroup
  discrimination.

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What is intergroup discrimination
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Intergroup discrimination
The minimal conditions that would lead members of
one group to discriminate in favor of the
in-group to which they belonged and against
another out-group.
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Tajfels research

• According to Tajfel, our social identity
  contributes to how we feel about ourselves so we
  seek positive social identities to maintain and
  enhance our self-esteem. Very rarely will we
  associate ourselves with a group that we do not
  deem positive.
• One way of achieving a positive social identity
  is to compare our group (in-group) with other
  groups (out-groups). Therefore we develop
  in-group bias or favoritism.

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Tajfels research

• Social identity theory predicts that this bias
  towards ones own group can lead to prejudice and
  the formation of positive or negative stereotypes
  (which is a strength in regards to how the theory
  explains stereotypes).
• The theory also speaks to the human tendency to
  conform to groups.

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Tajfels research

• Tajfel identified three fundamental cognitive
  processes underlying social identity theory
• Categorization The first is our tendency to
  categorize individuals, including ourselves into
  groups. This leads to categorization of the
  social world into them and us.
• Categorizing or grouping ourselves can take place
  with incredible ease as demonstrated in Tajfels
  famous Minimal Group studies.
• Listen to Tajfel discuss his original experiment
• http//www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yw6km
• Read more on Tajfels Minimal Group Studies
• http//homepage.ntlworld.com/gary.sturt/tajfel.htm
  

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Tajfels research
Identification We also adopt the identity of the
group we have categorized ourselves as belonging
to which means we may adopt some of the values
and behaviors of that group. Having this social
identity enhances our self-esteem and acceptance
to the group. What is an example of a social
group that requires you to adopt a set of values
and behaviors?
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Tajfels research

• Comparison We enhance the sense of identity by
  making comparisons with other groups (known as
  out-groups). Having a positive social identity or
  positive distinctiveness means drawing favorable
  comparisons with other relevant groups.
• It was the assumption of Tajfel that if our
  self-esteem is to be maintained our group needs
  to compare favorably with other groups.
• Social Comparison occurs between our group and
  other groups that share something in common with
  us, these are the out group in order to make
  our in-group seem good, we make unfair negative
  comparisons to the out group.

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Relevant Research

• Tajfel and Turner (1979) identified three
  variables whose contribution to the emergence of
  in-group favoritism is particularly important.
• the extent to which individuals identify with an
  in-group to internalize that group membership as
  an aspect of their self-concept.
• the extent to which the prevailing context
  provides ground for comparison between groups.
• the perceived relevance of the comparison group,
  which itself will be shaped by the relative and
  absolute status of the in-group.

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Evaluation of Social identity theory
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Assumptions of SIT

• In the Social Identity Theory, a person has not
  one, personal self, but rather several selves
  that correspond to widening circles of group
  membership. What does this mean?
• Different social contexts may trigger an
  individual to think, feel and act on basis of his
  particular social group(Turner et al, 1987).
• What are examples of this?

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Other Assumptions of SIT

• After being categorized as being apart of a
  social group(s), individuals seek to achieve
  positive self-esteem by positively
  differentiating their in-group from a comparison
  out-group on some valued dimension (self-serving
  bias).
• Is this true?
• This quest for positive distinctiveness means
  that peoples sense of who they are is defined in
  terms of we rather than I. Is this true? Why
  or why not?

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Strengths of SIT

• SIT has high experimental support.
• For example, Tajfels series of studies on
  minimal groups which tested to see if prejudice
  and discrimination could be created between
  people simply because he placed them into
  distinctive groups.
• He found that the simple act of grouping was
  enough to induce prejudice.  Similarly, in a
  series of early studies into prejudice Sherif
  (1954) found that boys of a similar age and
  background were quick to become hostile to each
  other when they were put into two discrete groups
  during a stay at summer camp.

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Strengths of SIT
2) Social Identity Theory has a considerable
impact on social psychology. It is tested in a
wide range of fields and settings and includes
prejudice, stereotyping, negotiation and language
use. The theory has also implications on the way
people deal with social and organizational
change.
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Strengths of SIT
3) A further strength of social identity theory
is that it provides explanation for real world
behavior.  How do we see in-group bias in the
real world?
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Strengths of SIT

• Furthermore social identity theory can be applied
  usefully to reduce prejudice by using the
  common-in-group-identity model (Gaertner 1993).
•   By re-drawing the group boundary to include
  rather than exclude the out group, then hostility
  between the two groups would cease.

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Strengths of SIT

• For example, in the case of a multi-cultural high
  school suffering from race related violence,
  researchers switched the students primary social
  identity from being race members while at school
  to being students of the school.  There was a
  marked decrease in inter-racial violence.
• This is why we are less likely to see racial and
  other prejudice when two people assumptiously
  belong to a similar sub-group (such as the lower
  likelihood of racial discrimination between IB
  students).

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Limitations of SIT
1) Belonging to a group does not necessarily
lead to social identification with that group,
since people do reject their social group. What
are examples?
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Limitations of SIT
2) Many researchers believe that it is too
simplistic an account of group behavior. 
Prejudice is usually based on historical
relationships, rather than simply grouping.  
Conflict could be due to a history of competition
between the groups. This idea is more consistent
with Sherifs Realistic Conflict Theory which is
an alternative theory of prejudice. Read
more http//www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peace-a
nd-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php
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Limitations of SIT
3) A further criticism of social identity theory
is that by taking a situational approach it does
ignore dispositional factors that may lead to
prejudice. Perhaps some people are more likely to
discriminate because of their up bringing or
personality.