Critically discuss the claim that people tend to explain the
A prevailing area in social psychology is that of attribution theory. Attribution evaluates behaviour; seeking explanations for the decisions that people make about why particular events occurred or why certain individuals acted the way they did. A common sense approach taken by Heider (1958, cited in Augoustinos, 1995) views people as 'naive scientists' deducing the causes of events around them as holding cause and effect relations. People tend to attribute behaviour to a single cause residing either within the actor; 'dispositional,' or outside in the situation; 'situational.' Ross (1997, cited in Hogg & Vaughan, 2002) identified the 'fundamental attribution error,' this refers to a tendency to focus to much on behaviour itself and not enough on the situation or context; overemphasising dispositional causes and underestimating situational ones, even where strong situational pressures exist. In studies aiming to provide empirical support for attribution theory; in particular fundamental attribution error, the focal point was that of the attributions made by the observer of another persons' behaviour. Jones & Nisbett (1971, cited in Kimble, 1990) highlighted an important issue, this is the process by which the actors make at
Subsequent studies have failed to replicate the effect shown by Storms (1973) and worse have found explainers actually gave fewer person attributions for salient agents (Taylor & Fiske, 1975, cited in Knobe & Malle, 2002). The first of their hypothesis consisted of two parts; i 'actors wondered more often about unintentional than intentional behaviours, whereas observers wondered more often about intentional than unintentional behaviours;' ii 'actors wondered more often about unobservable than observable behaviours, whereas observers wondered more often about observable than unobservable behaviours. ' Due to this sharp distinction Parker explains that attributions may be screened out that might be made a person to such things as social relations or shared knowledge. This suggests that we will make dispositional attributions to whoever is our focus of attention in any situation. This highlights the importance cultural differences and the difficulty of producing a universal attribution theory, creating a great misunderstanding for cross-cultural interpersonal, this has been shown by Evans-Pritchard (1937, cited in Hogg & Vaughan, 2002) where the people of West Africa have a dual theory of causality, where common sense proximal causes operate within the context of witch craft as the distal cause and an internal/external distinction would make little sense (Hogg &Vaughan, 2002). There are many theories of attribution biases each with their own explanations, all are supported in themselves but create problems when compared, for example the self serving biases states that attributions are made for the self-esteem of the person and so can be made both internally and externally depending if they are positive or negative behaviours. Parker (1989) discusses the distinction of the two categories; 'person' and 'situation,' suggesting they are too 'sharp. This study provides a deeper understanding of the underlying factor of attributions. Knobe and Malle (2002) argue that the distinction between reasons and other person factors is not properly addressed, casting doubt on the view that there is a general tendency for observers to give more person attributions than actors do. People from different cultures often make very different attributions, approaching the task of social attributions in different ways (Smith & Bond, 1993, cited in Hogg & Vaughan, 2002). This suggests the need for the study of naturally occurring explanations, of which only a few researchers have attempted with little success (Holtzworth-Munroe & Jacobson, 1988, cites in Knobe & Malle, 1997). Based on the actor-observer effect Storms (1973, cited in Brown, 1986) predicted that if an actor in conversation with a stranger and an individual observing the conversation were asked to explain the actors' behaviour they will disagree. It is unclear on precise definitions of the distinguished attributions proposed by Jones and Nisbett, for example 'dispositional' might be used to refer any factor that lies within the person such as emotions, or it might be used to refer to specific relative stable person factors such as personality traits. Questionnaire assessments of attribution styles also are limited to behavioural events selected by the experimenters, not the participants themselves (Fincham & Bradbury, 1992, cited in Knobe & Malle, 1997). Specifically they state that observers tend to use more trait explanations and actors use more reason explanations.
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Acceptance Essays
