In this video I consider how we explain the causes of events and behaviors and whether we focus on disposition or situation. The Fundamental Attribution Error suggests that we have a tendency to focus on dispositional explanations and ignore situational factors. This was demonstrated in Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz’s 1977 study with quizmasters and contestants. The reasons for why we commit this fundamental attribution error include speed and ease, the actor–observer bias, and our culture’s emphasis on self–reliance or fate. Lastly I describe how the just-world bias may also play a role, as we have a desire to believe that the world is a fair place. While a just world would be great, this assumption can lead us to blame victims and assume that people get what they deserve.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to think about how we understand the causes of people’s behaviors. Do we focus on dispositional explanations or situational explanations?

Now in the unit on personality we mostly focused on dispositional factors; we thought about the ways that people can differ in things like traits and then we applied those differences to trying to understand differences in behaviors or differences in events that occurred. And yet we saw this person-situation controversy; we recognized that when we see a particular behavior it’s hard to tell how much of that is being caused by something about the person the disposition and how much of it is being caused by the situation that the person is in. And so now in this unit on social psychology we’re going to focus more on understanding the role of the situation on people’s behaviors.

This brings us to what’s called attribution theory. This is how we attribute the causes of events. How do we understand what’s causing an event to occur? Is it the disposition of the person or is it the situation that the person is in? And when we attribute the causes of behaviors, we have a tendency to commit what’s called the fundamental attribution error. This is a tendency to attribute causes to dispositional factors and we have a tendency to ignore the situational factors that might be just as important or more important to understanding the actual cause of the behavior or the actual cause of the event.

So for instance if I watch someone walking down the street and I see this person trip and fall I might immediately assume that this person is clumsy. When I want to understand what caused this event, it’s easy to just say, “well it’s something about the person. The person is clumsy and the person is careless, and that explains why they fell”. I might ignore the relevant situational factors. I might ignore the fact that maybe there was a loose stone on the sidewalk, or maybe there was something slick on the ground that caused the person to slip and fall. I ignore those situational factors and I have a tendency to focus on disposition.

Similarly if my students are turning in their homework and a student who didn’t turn in the assignment, I might immediately assume that this student is lazy, right? That’s a dispositional explanation for why has this event occurred and I might ignore more relevant situational factors. Maybe the student was visiting his grandmother in the hospital all night and had no chance to complete the assignment, or maybe the student was working on other assignments for other classes that all just happened to be due on the same day. And so the student was actually very hard-working not lazy. But because all of these assignments ended up being due at the same time, because of this situation it was impossible for the student to complete everything.

Now one study investigating this fundamental attribution error was conducted by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz in 1977 and what these researchers did was they had a quiz game. The participants observed two people playing this game and the two people were randomly assigned to the role of quizmaster or to the role of contestant and the observers were aware of this random assignment. And the goal of the quizmaster was to create a trivia question that the contestant wouldn’t know the answer to. They basically said, you know, “think of some random fact that you know that most people don’t know. And then, well, you’ll ask the contestant, we’ll see if they know the answer”.

And after observing this, the participants have a tendency to rate the quizmasters as being more knowledgeable and this is despite the situational knowledge that they have. So when we want to explain, why is it that the quizmaster knew the answer and the contestant didn’t, it’s pretty clear it’s for situational reasons. The reason is that was what the quizmaster was allowed to do. They were the one creating the question, so of course they’ll know the answer. They were told to try to pick a question that the contestant won’t know. So the situation is really the reason why the quizmaster knew the answer and the contestant didn’t. And yet the participants still tended to rate the quizmasters as being more knowledgeable. They thought it was something about the person.

They focused on the disposition and this helps to explain why we might think of game show hosts as being particularly knowledgeable, even though rationally we know that they’re not coming up with the answers to the questions. You know other people are giving them the answers, that’s why the game show host, you know, that’s why Alex Trebek always knows the answer. It’s not that he’s incredibly knowledgeable, it’s that, you know, they’ve told him the answers.

And similarly we have a tendency to attribute disposition to actors when it comes to the roles that they play. We have a tendency to think of them as actually having the traits of the characters that they portray, even though again, rationally we know that they’re not, you know, spontaneously coming up with this dialogue. It’s being written by writers. They’re being told what to say, they’re being told how to react to particular situations, and so they don’t necessarily have the traits of the people that they portray. And then we have this tendency to assume that they do. This is part of the reason why Leonard Nimoy titled his first autobiography “I am NOT Spock”.

So why do we make this fundamental attribution error? Why is it that we tend to assume dispositional factors when we want to understand why things happen? Well one reason that I already alluded to is that it’s easy. It’s very quick; we see something happen and we just immediately say “well what explains it? The person”, right? Somebody falls, “they’re clumsy”, somebody doesn’t turn in homework “they’re lazy”. It’s very easy and it doesn’t involve any further effort.

Whereas a situational explanation is slow. We have to think about all the possible things in the situation that might have influenced this behavior. This takes effort, we have to actually investigate some of the situation, right? And that’s hard to do. In fact, some of those situational factors might not be apparent to us or we might not have any access to that knowledge.

This brings us to what’s called the “actor–observer bias“. And this is the idea that the events that occur are different to the actor versus somebody just observing the event. So if you’re the actor in an event, the situational factors are obvious to you. If you’re the person walking down the street, you can tell when a, you know, loose brick moves under your foot. You can tell when there’s a slippery surface and you feel your foot slide on it. But somebody just watching you, the observer, doesn’t have access to this situational information. They don’t really know. The situational factors are less apparent to the observer, so the actor observer bias is this idea that situational factors stand out to actors. So when things happen to us, we tend to be fully aware of the situational factors and we tend to focus on these situational explanations.

When I ask that person, you know, “why did you fall?” They’re very likely to say “well, there was a loose brick” or “there was something slippery on the ground”. But when we observe we tend to focus on the actors. When we watch events unfolding we tend to focus on the people involved and that means when we want to come up with an explanation, it’s easier to focus on the people involved rather than on situational factors that we were paying less attention to.

And the last thing we can consider is larger explanations things like cultural emphasis on fate versus self–reliance or interdependence versus independence, individualist versus collectivist cultures, that I talked about in a previous video. So if we are in a culture that tends to focus on fate as being the explanation of events, then maybe we’re less likely to commit this fundamental attribution error. And we also want to understand why bad things happen to good people. Now fate might be one explanation, but another tendency that we have is to engage in what’s called the “just world bias” and this is that we want to believe that the world is a good, just place; that things are fair that bad things only happen to bad people. Good things only happen to good people.

It would be great if the world actually worked that way. Now we know that it doesn’t work that way, we have a tendency to wish that it did. We have a tendency to want to believe the world is just and what that leads us to, unfortunately, is a tendency to blame victims. Because what it means is if something bad happened to somebody then we’d like to think they deserve it. That’s, you know, that would be better, right? If good people never had bad things happen to them, that would be a bit better. Bad things only happen to bad people. But this means we have this tendency to blame victims, because it’s discomforting to recognize that it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are bad things can still happen to you.

It doesn’t matter that you’re the greatest person in the world, you can still get hit by a bus through no fault of your own. You can still be the victim of a crime, right? You can be the victim of an accident. You can suffer from an incurable illness and there was maybe nothing you could have done to prevent it. And so we have this tendency to go back to this just world bias, to think that “well, you know, if we’re just a good person then we won’t be the victim of a crime” or “if we’re careful then we’ll never be involved in an accident” or “if we have good karma we won’t get cancer”. But unfortunately this isn’t how the world actually works and this tendency to think this way might lead us to this fundamental attribution error. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!