attribution

Examples of attribution in the following topics:

• Attribution

  • Attribution theory explores how individuals attribute, or explain, the causes of their own and others' behaviors.
  • To do this, we make either explanatory or interpersonal attributions.
  • Attributions can also be classified as either internal or external.
  • Internal attributions emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations, while external attributions emphasize situational factors.
  • Research shows that culture affects how people make attributions.

• Descriptive Research

  • Descriptive research refers to the measurement of behaviors and attributes through observation rather than through experimental testing.
  • These studies are used to describe general or specific behaviors and attributes that are observed and measured.

• Cultural Influences on Perception

  • Another example is how Eastern cultures will perceive successes as being arrived at by a group effort, while Western cultures like to attribute successes to individuals.
  • Two theories of social perception are Attribution theory and Social Comparison theory.
  • Attribution theory, also called actor-observer bias, focuses on the attribution or causes of an action.

• Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective on Personality

  • The humanistic perspective of personality theory is a holistic psychological perspective that attributes human characteristics and actions to free will and an innate drive for self-actualization .
  • In this way, people are not reduced to one particular attribute or set of characteristics, but instead, are appreciated for the complex beings that they are.

• Introduction to Memory Storage

  • The multi-trace distributed memory model suggests that the memories being encoded are converted to vectors (lists of values), with each value or "feature" in the vector representing a different attribute of the item to be encoded.
  • A single memory is distributed to multiple attributes, so that each attribute represents one aspect of the memory being encoded.

• Dissociative Disorders

  • The disorder must lead to some kind of impairment in social, occupational, or daily life functioning, and the symptoms must not be attributed to normal cultural or religious practices (or fantasy play in children).
  • Reality testing must remain intact, and the symptoms must not be attributed to substance use or another mental illness.
  • The cause of the sudden increase of cases is not clear; it may be attributed to an actual rise in cases, or it may be attributed to the increased awareness, which revealed previously undiagnosed cases.

• Compliance

  • Ingratiation can include flattery, opinion conformity, and self-presentation (presenting one's own attributes in a manner that appeals to the target).

• Social Perception

  • It is closely related to the social cognitions of attention, or concentration on specifics of the environment, and attribution, or explaining the behavior of one's self and others.
  • Theory of mind refers to an individual's system of assumptions used to attribute mental states to his or her self and others, as well as predict behavior.

• Nature vs. Nurture

  • A significant issue in developmental psychology is the relationship between the innateness of an attribute (whether it is part of our nature) and the environmental effects on that attribute (whether it is influenced by our environment, or nurture).

• Understanding Concepts

  • Framing is the process of selective influence over an individual's perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases.
  • If a friend rapidly closes and opens an eye, we will respond very differently depending on whether we attribute this to a purely "physical" frame (she blinked because she had dust in her eye) or to a social frame (she winked because she wanted to communicate something).