ATTRIBUTION THEORY OF FRITZ HEIDER
Introduction
This article starts off by a man having his wife serve on a jury in a federal case involving conspiracy, racketeering, drug dealing, armed robbery, and extortion. There were seven defendants and one that escaped from police custody. The key government witness was an ex-gang member named Larry who was called “the Canary” by the defendants because he turned informer. For two months Jean, the wife, listened to Larry’s testimony and tried to figure out whether his account of the incident was credible or not. A question in her mind was that whether his behavior on the stand was that of pathological liar, a rejected pal seeking revenge, a petty crook who would say anything to save his own skin, or and honest witness dedicated to the truth?
All this falls into Fritz Heider’s attribution theory saying that we all tend to rationalize in the same way. Fritz said that the theory of attribution is the process of drawing inferences. This would be seeing a person act and immediately reaching a conclusion that goes beyond mere sensory information. Example: Larry yawns while on the stand. Your immediate conclusive reaction would be “is he bored, afraid, tired, or indifferent”. In the article it says that Heider would see us as naïve psychologist bringing common sense to bear on an interpersonal judgment. It also says that we can’t help it to make these judgments. This is because we make personality judgments in order to explain otherwise confusing behavior.
Heider says that there’s another reason for making causal inferences from behavior. The reason is because we want to know what to expect in the future. He says prediction is a survival skill. Example: Jean comes face-to-face with one of the defendants, in her jury trail, outside a train station. Mildly anxious, she quickly turned aside. Accurate attributions can help us know which people might do us harm.
The article also talks about attribution as being a three-step process through which we perceive others as causal agents. The three-step process talked about includes perception of the action (You saw it), judgment of intention (You/they meant to do that), and attribution of disposition (What you think of the action).
Analysis
To begin, in the case with Jean trying to figure out whether Larry’s story was credible and how to categorize his behavior. In my opinion I would think him turning informer
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As the deliberation continues it becomes obvious that the members of the jury are basing their findings on their past experiences. Juror #1 Martin Balsam, #2 John Fiedler, and #9 Joseph Sweeney, do not like to deal with confrontation so these laid back slackers just go with the flow. E.G. Marshall, Juror #4 is a stock broker that only knows how to rationaliz...
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Day by day children are being exposed to these images intentional or unintentional but how do these images affect them. Scientists at Cambridge University conducted a researched that showed sexually explicit images affect the brain the same way as alcohol or drugs. Dr. Voon discovered that when exposed to these images the pleasure center of the brain known as the ventral striatum is activated, and stimulated the same way it will when an alcoholic sees a drink. The Ventral striatum, a subcortical structure of the brain is known for emotional and behavioral function which makes it a very important part of the brain, if compromised in any way it could lead to mental problems including obsessive compulsive disorder and depression .(Can pornography use become an actual brain addiction). This can be even more damaging to children as their brain is still developing.
How the Attribution Theory in an attempt to assign meaning/understanding to events on the basis of eith...
Pornography is defined in the Encarta Encyclopedia as films, magazines, writing, photographs, or other materials that are sexually explicit and intended to arouse sexual excitement in their audience. Deriving from the Greek words porne ("prostitute") and graphein "(to write"), the word pornography originally referred to any work of art or literature dealing with sex and sexual themes, or meaning "depictions of the activities of whores." Pornography is one of the most controversial forms of expression.
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