fundamental attribution error

Examples of fundamental attribution error in the following topics:

• Attribution

  • A few common such biases include the fundamental attribution error, the self-serving bias, the actor-observer bias, and the just-world hypothesis.
  • This perspective is called the fundamental attribution error and may result from our attempt to simplify the processing of complex information.
  • The fundamental attribution error is so powerful that people often overlook even obvious situational influences on behavior.
  • People from individualist cultures are more inclined to make the fundamental attribution error and demonstrate self-serving bias than people from collectivist cultures.
  • The fundamental attribution error explains why when someone cuts us off we assume he or she is bad-natured, but when we cut someone off we believe it is because the situation required it.

• Social Psychology

  • The field is also concerned with common cognitive biases—such as the fundamental attribution error, the actor-observer bias, the self-serving bias, and the just-world hypothesis—that influence our behavior and our perceptions of events.

• Memory Distortions and Biases

  • Bartlett attributed this tendency to the use of schemas.
  • Intrusion errors are frequently studied through word-list recall tests.
  • Intrusion errors can be divided into two categories.
  • The second type of intrusion errors are known as intra-list errors, which consist of irrelevant recall for items that were on the word study list. 
  • Evaluate how mood, suggestion, and imagination can lead to memory errors or bias

• Surveys and Interviews

  • Since surveys are a standardized measure, they are relatively free from several types of errors.
  • There can be discrepancies between respondents' stated opinions and their actual opinions that lead to fundamental inaccuracies in the data.
  • Qualitative data are the result of categorizing or describing attributes of a population such as hair color, blood type, or ethnic group.
  • Quantitative data are the result of counting or measuring attributes of a population, such as money, pulse rate, weight, or populations.

• Specific Learning Disorder

  • Individuals with dysgraphia typically show multiple writing-related deficiencies, such as grammatical and punctuation errors within sentences, poor paragraph organization, multiple spelling errors, and excessively poor penmanship.
  • In addition, the learning difficulties cannot be attributed to other sensory, motor, developmental, or neurological disorders.
  • Dysgraphia is often characterized by grammatical and punctuation errors within sentences, poor paragraph organization, multiple spelling errors, and excessively poor penmanship.

• 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.
  • This cartoon illustrates how culture creates a fundamental framework for our perceptions and emotions.

• Mischel's Cognitive-Affective Model of Personality and the Person-Situation Debate

  • Mischel's experiments suggested that an individual's behavior is not simply the result of his or her traits, but fundamentally dependent on situational cues—the needs of a given situation.
  • This argument contradicted the fundamental tenet of trait theory that only internal traits, not external situations, should be taken into account.
  • Rather than treating situational factors as "noise" that caused errors of measurement in personality, Mischel encouraged researchers to incorporate situational findings into their experiments and look for the consistencies that characterize an individual in a variety of contexts.
  • Mischel's research in personality led him to develop the cognitive-affective model, which argues that an individual's behavior, rather than simply being a result of traits, is fundamentally dependent on situational cues—the needs of a given situation.

• 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).
  • Categorization is fundamental in language, prediction, inference, decision making, and other environmental interactions.

• Defining Intelligence

  • An early theory of multiple intelligence is attributed to Edward Thorndike, who in 1920 theorized three types of intelligence: social, mechanical, and abstract.
  • A few years later, Robert Sternberg proposed the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, which proposes three fundamental types of cognitive ability: analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence.

• Classifying Abnormal Behavior: The DSM

  • Current diagnostic guidelines have been criticized as having a fundamentally Euro-American outlook.
  • This has been attributed by many to the expanding power and influence of pharmaceutical companies over the last several decades.