348 ChapteR 10 Behavior in Social and Cultural Context
AttributionsSituational Dispositional“Why is Aurelia so mean and crabby lately?”“She’s under pressure.”“She’s self-involved and clueless.”Fundamental Attribution Error(May lead to)Ignoring in uence of situation
on behavior and emphasizing
personality traits alone.You are about to learn...
• two general ways that people explain their own
or other people’s behavior—and why it matters.
• three self-serving biases in how people think
about themselves and the world.
• why most people will believe outright lies and
nonsensical statements if they are repeated
often enough.
• whether certain fundamental political and
religious attitudes have a genetic component.Social Influences on
Beliefs and Behavior
Social psychologists are interested not only in
what people do in social situations, but also in
what is going on in their heads while they are
doing it. Those who study social cognition exam-
ine how people’s perceptions of themselves and
others affect their relationships and also how the
social environment influences their perceptions,
beliefs, and values. Current approaches draw on
evolutionary theory, neuroimaging studies, sur-
veys, and experiments to identify universal themes
in how human beings perceive and feel about one
another. In this section, we will consider two im-
portant topics in social cognition: attributions and
attitudes.Attributions LO 10.6, LO 10.7
People read detective stories to find out who did
the dirty deed, but they also want to know why
people do bad things. Was it because of a ter-
rible childhood, a mental illness, possession by a
demon, or what? According to attribution theory,
the explanations we make of our behavior and the
behavior of others generally fall into two catego-
ries. When we make a situational attribution, we are
identifying the cause of an action as something
in the situation or environment: “Joe stole the
money because his family is starving.” When we
make a dispositional attribution, we are identifying
the cause of an action as something in the person,
such as a trait or a motive: “Joe stole the money
because he is a born thief.”
When people are trying to explain someone
else’s behavior, they tend to overestimate person-
ality traits and underestimate the influence of the
situation (Forgas, 1998; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In
terms of attribution theory, they tend to ignore
situational attributions in favor of dispositional
ones. This tendency has been called the fundamen-
tal attribution error (Jones, 1990).social cognition An
area in social psychology
concerned with social
influences on thought,
memory, perception, and
beliefs.
attribution theory The
theory that people are
motivated to explain their
own and other people’s
behavior by attributing
causes of that behav-
ior to a situation or a
disposition.
fundamental attribu-
tion error The tendency,
in explaining other peo-
ple’s behavior, to overes-
timate personality factors
and underestimate the
influence of the situation.
Were the people who obeyed Milgram’s
experimenters and the student guards in the prison
study sadistic by nature? Were the individuals who
pocketed the money from a mailbox on a dirty
street “born thieves”? Those who think so are
committing the fundamental attribution error. The
impulse to explain other people’s behavior in terms
of their personalities is so strong that we do it even
when we know that the other person was required
to behave in a certain way (Yzerbyt et al., 2001).The fundamental attribution error is especially
prevalent in Western nations, where middle-class
people tend to believe that individuals are respon-
sible for their own actions and dislike the idea that
the situation has much influence over them. They
think that they would have refused the experi-
menter’s orders to harm another person and they
would have treated fellow-students-temporarily-
called-prisoners fairly. In contrast, in countries such
as India, where everyone is embedded in caste
and family networks, and in Japan, China, Korea,
and Hong Kong, where people are more group
oriented than in the West, people are more likely
to be aware of situational constraints on behavior,
including their own behavior (Balcetis, Dunning, &
Miller, 2008; Choi et al., 2003). Thus, if someone
is behaving oddly, makes a mistake, or commits
an ethical lapse, a person from India or China,
unlike a Westerner, is more likely to make a situ-
ational attribution of the person’s behavior (“He’s
under pressure”) than a dispositional one (“He’s
incompetent”).
A primary reason for the fundamental attribu-
tion error is that people rely on different sources
of information to judge their own behavior and
that of others. We know what we ourselves are
thinking and feeling, but we can’t always know
the same of others. Thus, we assess our own
actions by introspecting about our feelings and
intentions, but when we observe the actions of
others, we have only their behavior to guide our