Errors In Attribution Research

Intro:
Humans are very social and have a need to understand why things happen and why and how people behave in different situations. Heider (1958) proposed a theory that people try to work out theirs and others behaviour by applying attributes to them. According to Heider there are two types of attribution, situational and dispositional. Dispositional factors are physiological such as mood, personality beliefs, situational factors are external factors that influence behaviour. The 2 main errors of attribution I will be discussing are fundamental attribution error (FAE) and self service bias (SSB).

(FAE) is when people try to interpret someone else's behaviour they often overestimate the role of dispositional factors, and often underestimate
A study done by Lau & Russel (1980) supports this theory, they handed out a survey to coaches and players which asked them questions on their personal performances. They found that American football coaches and players tend to attribute success to internal (dispositional) factors, for example skill, good shape and talent. They also found that when asked about their failures they tend to attribute them to external (situational) factors such as weather, other players and injuries. Cross cultural research has suggested that this is more common in individualist cultures such as the US and most european countries. Silvia and Duvel (2002) proposed that humans are more likely to make internal attributions if they believe they can improve the situation in future. SSB also depends largely on emotion and the person's mood, if they are sad it could reverse the theory. Some ideas as to why humans do SSB are that, attributing our success to dispositional factors boost our self-esteem and in turn often makes us perform better. Dissociating ourselves from failure however can protect our confidence and self-esteem. A study that relates to this is Johnson et al (1964), the aim of this study was to see the affects of pupils learning on teachers SSB. Participants were psychology students, they were asked to teach 2 children how to multiply by 10 & 20 through a one way intercom. Work sheets were made up so as though pupil A gave all the correct answers on both the papers (10 times table and 20 times table), whilst pupil B did poorly on the first paper but improved on the second paper but overall failed the test. The teachers were then asked as to why Pupil B did so poorly, they found that the teachers attributed the children's failure to the pupils