SPY - Attribution Theory and Person Perception Lesson

Learning Targets:

  • Apply attribution theory to explain motives.
  • Articulate the impact of social and cultural categories on self-concept and relations with others. 
  • Anticipate the impact of self-fulfilling prophecy on behavior. 

AP psychology course and exam description, effective fall 2020. (n.d.). https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-psychology-course-and-exam-description.pdf

Social Thinking

Social psychology describes how individuals think, feel, and behave in various social situations. Social thinking or cognition refers to how we form expressions or opinions of other people, how we interpret their behavior, and how behavior is affected by attitudes. Sometimes we are required to draw conclusions about complete strangers in a limited amount of time. When this happens, we use what is called "thin slicing" to quickly make tough decisions based on behavior, especially in unknown situations. The advantage to thin slicing is that it is easy to mentally organize information, the disadvantage is it causes us to ignore unique qualities.

Person perception describes the mental process we use to form judgments and draw conclusions about the characteristics of others..png

Person Perception

Person perception describes the mental process we use to form judgments and draw conclusions about the characteristics of others. It is an active and subjective process that occurs in some types of interpersonal interactions. Each interpersonal interaction has three components:

  • Characteristics of the person you are assessing
  • Your characteristics as the perceiver
  • The specifics of the situation

Attribution

Attribution refers to the inferences we make about someone's behavior, including our own. Your attributions create strong influences on how you perceive others. We attribute behaviors to one of two influences: the situation or the person's disposition.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to underestimate the impact of a situation in explaining another's behavior and to then overestimate the impact of personal disposition in explaining our behavior. We tend to spontaneously attribute the behavior of others to internal personal characteristics while ignoring or underestimating the effects of external situational factors. This is especially true in odd situations. However, when we are the actor, a phenomenon called actor-observer discrepancy or bias occurs. This describes the tendency to attribute our own behavior to external causes because we have more information on the potential causes. The bottom line, we are sensitive to the causes of our behavior, but not to the causes of others' behavior.

Effects of Attribution

  • Blaming the Victim - Blaming innocent victims of crime, disaster, or severe injury to themselves.
  • Just World Hypothesis - The assumption that the world is fair and therefore people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

 

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