According to attribution theorists the laypersons judgments of others are biased

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Social Psychology 1PSY514

According to attribution theorists the layperson’s judgments of others are biased. Discuss the evidence for supposing that these biases are inevitable.

   Attribution theory is a social psychology theory developed by Fritz Heider in 1958 who was the first to propose this psychological theory, he saw people as lay psychologists that are trying to establish causal explanations noting that there are two consequences of the attribution process, the internal and external attribution. Internal

assumes that the cause of behaviour is within the person and the external that the cause of behaviour is outside of the person , for example other people or other factors within the environment.

   Attribution theory is concerned with how individuals understand events and how this relates to their behavior , stating that people try to determine why other individuals do what they do by giving causal explanations. A person that seeks to understand the reason why another person did something may attribute more than one causes to that behavior.          

   During attribution there are three stages a person must undergo in order to finalize their explanation, firstly the person must observe the behavior, secondly the person must be sure that the event that took place was intentionally performed and then the person have to end to a conclusion if the other person was forced to behave in such a way or not. Considering those three stages we can explain attributional bias which affects the way people determine what or who was responsible for an event or action, for instance people involved in an action see things from a different point of view from the observers who were not involved. This is known as the actor – observer effect , the observer understands the situation from a different point of view, generally is the tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes but the other people’s behavior to internal causes. Nisbett , Caputo , Legant  and Maracek in 1973 showed evidence about this effect, asked their participants to rate their best friend, their father, an admired friend , a well known television presenter and themselves with combined adjectives such as tense\calm and happy\sad. They had two choices, to choose one of the adjectives or argue that it depended on the situation the person was in. The results were that participants described themselves stating that most of the times depends on the situation but for the other people they stated an adjective.

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   Attribution biases support that people have a tendency to overestimate the power of personal characteristics and underestimate the power of situational issues when they make attributions, researchers called this condition as the “fundamental attribution error”. Fein, Hilton and Miller in 1990 argued that people will not underestimate situational factors to conclude behavior if the other person has strong reasoning for the control of his true attitudes. Also individuals have the tendency to see their own behavior as normal and therefore they explain the “unusual” behavior of others as a result of their personal character known as the egocentric bias. ...

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