AGS Sunday Seminar 15 February, 2004-02-15
At Gavan’s Place
Presented by our Distinguished Guest Presenter .. Mr Brett
MacDonald.
“ATTRIBUTIONS - A WAY OF PERCEIVING THE WORLD”
Attributions can be thought
of as inferences that people draw about the causes of events, other's
behaviour, and their own behaviour; so if a car overtakes you in a reckless
manner there could be all sorts of reasons that could motivate the driver to
risk life and limb.
Some of these could be
....................
Curiously, the term
wasn't really investigated formally until 1958 by Fritz Heider, who described
how people make attributes. He assumed
that people make attributes so that they would understand some of their experiences.
Heider asserted that people tend to locate the cause of behaviour either within
the person or outside the person - environmental influences. Internal aspects
include: abilities, traits, dispositions, and feelings. Explanations for their
experiences may guide people in changing their behaviour to improve the
outcomes. Also people sometimes make distorted attributions to maintain their
self-image or to discount evidence that contradicts beliefs that they cherish.
People form attributions
under particular circumstances: These include: when unusual circumstances grab
their attention, when events have personal relevance for them, and when others
behaviour in unexpected ways.
Internal and external
attributions can have dramatic consequences on everyday interactions. How you
react to a person's anger may be dependent on whether you believe that they are
having a bad day or that they dislike something about you - the ripples flow
into the future and influence how you treat that person henceforth.
Kelly's Covariation
Model
Kelly built on the model
of Heider and created other dimensions for attributes. These other dimensions
are:
1. Distinctiveness: is a
person's behaviour toward you, the target, caused by something particular to
you - high distinctiveness, or something general?
2. Consistency: is the
way a person behaves toward you the 'same' over time - high consistency, or
does it vary over a period?
3. Consensus: do other
people react to you in the same way as the target person - high consensus, or does
the actions of the target different from others?
When these dimensions
are coupled with the internal and external labels a powerful tool comes into
place to make judgments that influences decisions. For example, high
consistency can be associated with both internal and external attributes, while
high distinctiveness aligns with external attributes, and high consensus with
internal attributes.
Specifically, if a
person seems irritated each time they see you each time they encounter you in a
given situation, say in negotiations but other people do not then they are low
in consensus, low in distinctiveness, and high in consistency.
Therefore you would have
good ground to assume that their behaviour is centred around what they are
experiencing rather than your influence, this being so you may be less inclined
to take offence and be more at ease in the situation.
Others have added to the
factors that influence what we assume to be attributes, these include:
stability/unstable, controllability, and global/specific. An example being a
person with clinical depression could be described as having low control,
stable, global attributes, while a person who is depressed because of some
event would have unstable, high control, and specific attributes.
These attributes are not
'cut and dry', and are graded rather than 'either/or. They serve as markers for
decision-making - a guide, not a rule.
TASK: think of an event
that has meaning for you that involves another person's behaviour and assign
the above attributes to that person, but in doing so mention some of the
considerations you would need to make BEFORE forming a decision that could hurt
you and the other person.
Some Problems
With Attributes
We need to be aware that
attributes are only inferences. The initial causes of behaviour may never be
known, what we are doing is guessing. Over time and many situations, however,
some trends have emerged that appear to with the use of attributes, here are
some of these - with these there appears to be a meta trend, what would you say
it could be?
a) Fundamental
Attribution Error:
In this case an observer
will emphasis internal attributes over external attributes particularly for the
OTHER person when something goes wrong, if it is a good thing the opposite
occurs. Imagine that you see someone trip over in the street out of the comer
of your eye, it is more likely they would be labelled clumsy (internal), rather
than tripping on a piece of loose paving (external). Curiously if it were the
observer who tripped it would probably be explained by the paving rather than
clumsiness.
b) Defensive
Attribution:
This can be seen to be
similar to the first one. Here there is a tendency to blame victims for their
misfortune, so that one feels less likely to be victimised in the same way. How
often have you heard someone ask, after a girl is attacked at night, "What
was she doing out at that hour?".
c) Self Serving Bias:
This occurs when people
try explain success or failure, in this case successes are related to your
skill etc, while failure is related to misfortune, illness etc. Some people
even invest in their future feeling by saying for example how much the leg
hurts BEFORE, so that if they do well it's overcoming obstacles and if they
fail it's because of the injury.
Question to consider: How conscious/aware are we when we display these biases, keeping
in mind that there may be various levels of awareness etc.?
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