Introduction Social Psychology is a part of psychology, which studies human behavior in the society. Overall, this section of the science is one of the most useful parts of psychology. People have to know which variables affect their behavior and change them if they are not appropriate. In my essay I discuss three theories of social psychology such as: fundamental attribution error, cognitive dissonance and obedience to authority. Fundamental Attribution Error Fundamental Attribution Error is one of the social psychology theories. This error explains the inappropriate judgment of other individuals (Wortman & Loftus, 1992). People would rather describe behavior of others according to their internal force without thinking about external reasons. Usually, people do not know many factors, which can affect someone and they would like to make a conclusion based on stereotypes or other experiences before. There are might be two phases of Fundamental Attribution Error. The first one is to make quick reasoning about someone’s behavior based on his or her personality. If the person sees a mistake in judgment, he or she can go the next level of analyze. The second phase is to understand deeper and more accurate the reasons for behavior of others. Because of this time taking process people do not consider the second phase as necessity. One of my personal experiences of Fundamental Attribution Error happened in Prague. One of my friends came late for meeting with me in early morning, and I had an opinion that this person is not punctual and lazy to dress up earlier. One week later I came late for different meeting with exactly the same friend, but I tried to explain my delay with other reasons; such as my tram was broken. After that, I asked... ... middle of paper ... ...nd contraction of muscles better. We cut frog’s legs to see how they move. I did not want to follow these instructions, as it was very brutal for me and I felt sorry for animals. My teacher repeated that I have to do this experiment in order to received additional points to my grade. Even thought I did not want to create any pain for frog I made this experiment. Obedience to authority can explain many wrong decisions in humans’ history. For me it is more a fear to be punished by the authority than to be afraid of this person. It is more appropriate for people who know their authority to use it in inspiration and supporting someone’s ideas and behavior. Conclusion On my opinion, the most powerful theory is cognitive dissonance as it affects our mental state. Due to my research the social psychology can be very effective in studying and in changing humans’ behavior.
In the short film, The Lunch Date, the white woman who misses her train commits fundamental attribution error. Fundamental attribution error is defined as the overestimation of a person's personality and the underestimation of the situation. For example, after the woman in the short film misses her train, she enters a restaurant to order a salad. She leaves her food on her table to get a fork; when she comes back, she finds that a black man is eating her salad. She believes that he is a homeless man who just stole her food, but in reality she just sat at the wrong table. She commits fundamental attribution error by judging the black man's outward appearance, and assuming that the black man did not pay for the salad.
Social psychology is one of the many variations of psychology. By definition, social psychology is how humans influence each other’s way of behaving and thinking. Under social psychology, there are various ways to define human behaviour and understand why we behave in a particular manner. These approaches deal with multiple concepts such as conformity, obedience, and social influences. They help answer questions about our behaviour and actions, while also analyzing our cognitive processes in certain situations. Social experiments conducted throughout history have also led to more understanding in the aforementioned areas. With these understandings of social behaviour, society can benefit and become aware of themselves and their mentalities.
In the movie Twelve Angry Men, tells the story of an ongoing debate within a jury whether to find the defendant guilty or not for murdering his father. While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but realize that there was a lot of techniques used by the juries and lawyers to sway the vote in either directions. I was able analyze the movie using social psychology as my main tool. I could relate the movie to the topic of social psychology by comparing it to Asch’s experiment and the act of conformity and the act of persuasion.
Fundamental attribution error is defined by Aronson (2013, p. 89) as “the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to under estimate the role of situational factors”. Attributions are only inferences and the attributions we assign to certain events may not always be the correct explanation. Contradictory as it may seem, Aronson (2013) explains that attribution theory describes the way in which people justify the causes of their own and other people’s behavior. I found out the meaning of fundamental attribution error one morning at work. I answered the phone at work only to be accosted by an irate wife of a client who was carrying on about her white bedroom rug that had a few stains on it. In an attempt to rectify the situation I made several suggestions on how she could prevent these stains from becoming worse but apparently my suggestions fell on deaf ears, because her dialog only became more accusatory and caustic. I managed to end the call by promising to have the rug cleaned and advising the nursing staff to be more conscientious when handling Mr. C . I immediately judged her to be “crazy “ and “ obsessive” and the rest of my staff agreed that Mrs. C. was indeed an unreasonable, ranting lunatic. For four days I continued to believe that Mrs. C.’s telephone rant was in fact due to her cranky, lunacy (an internal attribution) and ridiculous over attention to minor details. In fact, I hate to admit this, but I believe she should have been grateful for the nurses who came to her home to help her husband, since he was a very large, heavy man that required complex care.
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is a concept within social psychology that assumes when someone is aggressive, it is due to a flaw in their personality as opposed to a reaction to their personal circumstances (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2015). However, there is typically a situational reason for the other person’s behavior that is not taken into account through the FAE (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2015). I have been guilty of making the FAE myself; for example, I can think of two situations where my frustration led me to believe that there were flaws in my antagonists’ characters. Recently, my mother wanted me to assist my brother in scheduling classes for the semester. Since I was annoyed that my mother was insisting that I assist him when
As a manager/business leader, being aware of the Fundamental Attribution Error is applicable in a number of ways - are some of my employees struggling or succeeding because of who they are and what they're willing to do, or am I missing something about the context, the structure of their lives, the support that shapes their days and
The fundamental attribution error is an important concept in psychology. Social psychology studies people’s behaviors, believes and attitudes. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error or what is known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, means the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the person, rather than external factors, which could be in explaining the reasons behind that person 's behaviors. In other words, usually when you see somebody doing something, you usually tend to think it is more related to their personality instead of thinking about the situation the person might be in and they call that the first look. We all do that without being aware of it, sometimes you judge someone based of what he looks like, or where is he wearing and where is he standing without knowing what is the reason behind his attitude. We can be influenced by culture, books, films and other things that effect our way of seeing the others. From a general perspective, Fundamental Attribution Error explanations how the fundamental attribution error have focused on general worldviews for our behaviors, believes and attitudes.
Attribution theory correlates with how people exemplify events and how it affects their behavior and thinking. People making casual explanations is known as attribution theory. It was established over time from different social psychologists, especially Fritz Heider who played a major role in producing the theory in 1958. Heider wrote about attribution theory in his book called The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships. External attribution is when behavior is altered by influences outside of your control. Internal attribution is caused from an inside factor that falls within your control. Your behavior is not influenced and you feel responsible.
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).
Cognitive social psychology emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a critique of the dominant behaviourist movement and quickly became the main force behind the American school of Psychological Social Psychology. (Hollway, 2007). With its roots in mainstream psychology, cognitive social psychology has a primarily quantitative methodology, relying heavily on statistical methods in controlled conditions, and adheres to the hypothetico-deductive paradigm found in other sciences. The main focus of this form of social psychology is on how the individual behaves in controlled situations and this is examined through experiments and social psychometric data gathering.
Attribution is a psychological theory addressing the process by which individuals explain the causes of behaviour and events. This is linked to Weiner’s original attribution model and involves whether an individual attributes their successes to factors that are stable or unstable, and internal or external. Weiner’s attribution theory suggests that:
Weiner developed a theoretical framework that has become very influential in social psychology today. Attribution theory assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do, that is, interpret causes to an event or behaviour. A three-stage process underlies an attribution:
Attribution theory is the theory of why we attribute outcome X to causal factor Y – in short, who or what do we hold responsible for the outcome? Attribution theorists generally recognise two variables that influence our attribution: dispositional/situational, and
In conclusion, humans use attribution to explain causal relationships in the world and to explain these relationships situational or dispositional factors are used. The two errors in attribution that are most commonly made are the fundamental attribution which involves overestimating the role of dispositional factors and underestimating the role situational factors and self- serving bias which is when people take credit for their successes by attributing them to dispositional factors, and dissociate themselves from their failures by associating them situational factors.
In this experiment, we see how the first group judged the behavior through internal attributions. The second group however, watched a video that influenced their decision in attributing the circumstances and the situation rather than the individual traits of the character in the excerpt. This experiment is an example of how the Attribution Theory and Covariation Model affect the behavioral judgment of people.