To open the chapter, we are told to imagine a circumstance in which a man is interpreted as being late and disheveled. This is how manager judges you by what is readily apparent and an example of constructing social reality. The manager considers the evidence you present and makes an interpretation of the situation. If you still wish to get the job, you need to have him construct a new interpretation.
Before we go to see how social reality is constructed, let's look at one classic social psychological example in which people's beliefs led them to view the same situation from different vintage points and make contrary conclusions about 'what really happened.'
The study concerned a football game between two Ive league teams, Princeton and Dartmouth. Ultimately, Princeton won the tough game fraught with penalties and serious injuries to both sides. What was interesting is the different accounts of what happend from the newspapers of the two schools.
Philip writes : A team of social psychologists, intrigued by the different perceptions, surveyed students at both schools, showed them a film of the game and recorded their judgments about the number of infractions committed by each of the teams.Nearly all Princeton students judged the game as 'rough and dirty' and now saw it as 'clean and fair' and most believed that Dartmouth players started the dirty play. In contrast, the majority of Dartmouth students thought both sides were equeally to blame for the rough game and many thought it was 'rough, clean and fair'. Moreover, Princeton students 'saw' Dartmouth team commit twice as many as penalties as their own team. On the contrary, Dartmouth 'saw' both sides commit the same number of penalties.
What does this study indicate? This study makes clear that a complex social occurrence, such as a football game, cannot be observed in an objective and unbiased fashion. Social situations obtain significance when observers selectively encode what is happening in terms of what they expect to see and wanted to see.
This is exactly what China' internet users are expecting to see how Beijing office would retaliate against the US and Canada. As to what really happened to Huawei about the violation of circumventing the saction of Iran, nobody noted the truth.
To figure out how the Princeton and Dartmouth fans came to different interpretations of the same football game returns us to the realm of perception.
The principle in the football game is that people bring past knowledge to bear on the interpretation of current events.
Social perception is the process by which people come to understand and categorize the behaviors of others.
This chapter will largely focus on two issues, first it consider how people make judgments about the forces that influence other people's behavior, their causal attributions. Second, it discusses how processes of social perception can sometimes bring the world in line with expectations.
Let's get a handle of the origin of attribution theory.
Philip writes:One of the most important inferential tasks facing all social perceivers is to determine the causes of events. Everyone wants to suss out the whys of life and the whys lead to an analysis of possible causal determintants for some action, event,or outcome.
What is attribution theory? Attribution theory is the general approach to describe the ways the social perceivers uses information to generate causal explanations.
People who are intuitive psychologists tend to continually make causal analysis as part of their attempts at general comprehension of the social world. The questions that dominate most attributional analyses are whether the cause of behavior is found in the person or in the situation. We would like to figure out who is responsible for the outcome.If it is found in the person, we call it internal or dispositional causality, if found in the situation, we refer it to external or situational causality. People rarely have sufficient information to know for sure what caused someone to behave in a particular way and grapple with uncertainty by accumulating information from multiple events and using the covariation principle. It suggests that people should attribute a behavior to a causal factor if that factor was present whenever the behavior occurred but was absent whenever it didn't occur.
Herold Kelley suggested that people make this judgments by assessing covariation with respect to three dimensions of information relevant to the person whose acts they are trying to explain: distinctiveness, consistency and consensus.
Distinctiveness refers to whether this behavior is specific to a particular situation.
Consistency refers to whether the behavior occurs repeatedly in response to this situation.
Consensus refers to whether other people also produce the same bahavior in the same situation.
Author writes: thousands of studies have been conducted to refine and extend attribution theory beyond the solid foundation and many of this studies have concerned themselves with conditions in which attributions depart from a systematic search of available information. Four types of circumstances in which bias may creep into the attributions will be described later.
The fundamental attribution error
Case study: suppose you are going to meet a friend at 7.It's now 7:30 and the friend still hasn't arrived. How would you explain this event to yourself?
1. I'm sure something really important happened that made it possible for her to come here on time.
2. What a jerk? Couldn't she try a little bit harder?
These two choices indicate a situational and a dispositional attribution respectively. Research has shown that people are more likely to choose the second type, the dispositional explanation. Psychologists find that this tendency is so strong and Lee Ross labeled it the fundamental attribution error. FAE represents the dual tendency for people to overestimate dispositional factors and to underestimate situational factors when searching for the cause of some behavior or outcome.
After introducing FAE, let's look at a laboratory example of the FAE. This is what Ross and his colleagues created an experimental version of 'College bowl' type of quiz game in which participants became questioners or contestants by the flip of coin. The experimenters asked the questioners to invent some challenging questions and posed those questions to contestants. For sure, contestants tried in vain to answer the questions. At the end of the session, the questioners, contestants, and observers rated the general knowledge of both questioner and contestant. The result has been shown in a figure. Let's see what we can derive from the figures. As we can see, questioners seem to believer that both they and the contestants are average. Both contestants and observers, however, rate the questioners as much more knowlegable than the contestant and contestants even rate themselves to be a bit below average. From the beginning of this experiment, it is clear that participants get their roles by a random result of coin, hence, the situation confers a great advantage on the questioners. The contestants and observers ignore the way in which the situation allowed one person to look bright and the other to look dull. That's the FAE.
What can we to avoid FAE? Why should we be on a constant lookout for instances of the FAE? The author claimed that it often takes a bit of research to discover the situational roots of behavior. Situational forces are often invisible. For example, you can't see social norms, but you can see the behaviors they give rise to. Author suggests that the only way to void FAE is to take a step back when you are making a dispositional attribution that is negative to ask yourself, Could it be something about the situation that is bringing about this behavior? Such exercise is regarded as 'attributional charity'.
This advice may be particularly important to those who live in Western society because evidence suggests that the FAE is due, in part, to cultural sources. Research demonstrates that , as a function of the culture of interdepentce that most Eastern societies bear, members of non-Western cultures are less likely to focus on individual actors in situations. Another case of reporting of news events indicates that US writers tended to make strong dispositional attributions whereas Japan writers made stronger situational attributions. The study makes clear one way in which a cultural style of attribution is transmitted and maintained for all those who are exposed to the media in a particular culture.
Does it apply to China?
Self-serving bias
Let's turn to another startling finding in the College Bowl study. It was the contestants' negative evaluation of their own abilities. This suggests that people will make FAE error at their own expense. This leads to another important concept- self-serving bias- which leads people to take credit for their successes and while denying or explaining away responsibilities for their failures. It's found popular among people who tend to make dispositional attributions for success and situational attributions for failure. For example, "I won because of my ability" "I lost the competition because it was rigged."
Most of time people make favorable attributions to win short-term self-esteem.
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