Ib Psychology Hl Paper (Errors in Attribution)

Errors in Attribution It is human nature for us to think about other people’s actions and intentions and then process what they mean. In this way, we form attributions, which help us understand others’ purposes and objectives. There are two main types of attributions. The first is dispositional attribution, which are assumptions that are made based on someone’s behaviour where a person assumes the behaviour is caused by someone’s personality or character. The second type is a situational attribution, which is an assumption that takes into the account a situation the other person was in at the time.
However, there can also be errors in the way that we process that information. The error that will be explored in this paper is the correspondence bias, which is also known as the fundamental attribution error, since it is made so often. There are four causes of correspondence bias; firstly, observers are often unaware of the situational factors, so they cannot adjust their primary impressions. Secondly, we often have expectations of behaviour of others that cause us to rely on dispositional attributions. Another cause is that even if situational factors are brought into the equation, our primary impression that led to the dispositional attributes is not adjusted satisfactorily. The last reason is that we often have unrealistic expectations of how people will respond to a situation; they imagine that they themselves would not make the same choices if they were in that situation, though this is often untrue. The correspondence bias occurs when people attribute dispositional factors instead of attributing situational ones.
The following four experiments, although conducted almost four decades apart, both explore the correspondence bias and when and why people make it. All experiments’ results were measured on Likert-scales, which is a like a survey that scale that rates and quantifies feelings. Based on these scales and the statistics formed in the experiments the