 This is part 3 of lecture 4. In this part we're going to start off by talking about attribution theory, which is one of the most impactful and biggest concepts in social psychology and in this course as well. So pay attention. This theory is sort of a description in the way in which people explain the causes of behavior of both their own behavior as well as the behavior of others. In the lecture 1 we already talked about sort of the golden rule in social psychology and the golden rule made up by Kurt Lewin is that behavior of people is always a combination of the person and the environment. But once we witness behavior we always want to know which is causing it really. So is this behavior more the consequence of the person due to the person or is it more the consequence of the situation this person finds him or herself in. So look at the following situation. A young girl hands in her homework, her assignment to the teacher. She's late when handing it in. So in the first part of the picture the teacher is making a dispositional attribution or an internal attribution and this means that he is describing or ascribing the behavior to the person saying wow she's really late, she's lazy. So he sort of blames the student, the girl, for handing in the assignment late. An internal attribution, a dispositional attribution. So that basically means the same. You make an attribution based on the person and ignore the situation this person finds him or herself in. So in the second part of this sort of little small strip you see that there's a different response of the teacher. Again the student hands in the assignment late and the teacher thinks to himself wow she's really late. Maybe there's a family issue. This would be an external attribution. So instead of focusing on the person, blaming the person, you sort of acknowledge that this person might be in a situation which caused the behavior. Okay, so there's a big risk when it comes to looking at behavior in this way that we misattribute, that we miss something. And what often happens is that when we see behavior we ascribe it to the person and we tend to ignore the situation. And this has a lot of consequences. Here you see two different scenarios. For example, if a teacher has a certain expectation of a student, so for example a teacher thinks to himself this student has very smart siblings. So I think she'll be very smart as well. What then happens is that the teacher behaves in a way that sort of is in line with his expectation. We know this by now. So he starts smiling more to the student. He gives the opportunity to give the answers to the questions and indeed the student responds enthusiastically thereby confirming this idea. So another example, if you see for example one of your colleagues behaving in sort of raising his voice to someone else, you can have two different lines of thinking. You can either attribute it to the person thinking, wow, this colleague is very hostile and your reaction might be, I don't like this person. I don't want to engage with this person. Well, if in the same situation you might be thinking to yourself, wow, this man must be poorly evaluated, unfairly treated. Thereby I understand his response, I understand his anger and I do want to engage and interact with this person. So here again, you see examples of self-fulfilling prophecies. Something we talked about extensively before and we will repeat to this issue because it's so key to understanding social behavior. So how we attribute behavior, whether we ascribe it to the person or the situation, impacts our judgment a lot and also our behavior. And this is also something that we as researchers need to be very careful with. Sometimes this goes wrong and this also has to do with the bad research practices I talked about when we discussed methodology and lecture two. So experimenters can also be biased, researchers can be biased. For example, if I have a certain idea in mind of how the world works, this might inadvertently steer my behavior. So let's think back of one of the research questions we already talked about. For example, if I want to look at flirting behavior of both males and females. And I have this idea in my mind that males are actually more flirtatious than females. And with this expectation I go to a bar and I witness behaviors. My expectation might steer my judgment. I might be way more prone to seeing males flirting than females flirting. And this would be experiment or bias. So I will probably confirm my hypothesis. I will probably see more males flirting than females flirting. And that might be due to the fact that males indeed flirt more than females, but it might also have to do something with my own mind, with my own brain. Therefore, as researchers, it is very important that we do not make our own observations. So if I have a certain hypothesis, I will not go to the bar myself, you know, sorry for me, but I cannot go to the bar and do this research myself. I have to send somebody else in that doesn't share this expectation, that is not aware of my hypothesis, and then is really objective in seeing that behavior. This is really important. So if the researcher, if the person making the observations is unaware, and the subject, so the participants are also unaware of the hypothesis, this is called a double blind procedure. And this is also something that is really important when it comes to studies on medicine, for example. If a medicine is tested, it's really important that both the patients do not know whether they receive either a treatment pill, a test pill, or a control pill, a placebo. They shouldn't know this because this can steer their judgment on how they are doing. If you know that you got a placebo, you might be, you know, less enthusiastic about your own progress and your own symptoms than when you know you get the test pill. So the patients should be blind to their condition, but also the doctor who gives the pill should also be blind to the condition. So this is the double blind procedure, a way to protect also science and research from all these processes that we talked about. So the self-defeating prophecy is the confirmation bias. Okay, so we want to do a good job. If we look at behavior, we want to do our very best to make sure that we understand what is going on. And researchers have been thinking about how can we do this? And one theory that's been posed is the co- variation model. And this is a model that really tries for people to objectively look at the behavior of others. So where can we look for what are the cues that gives us information on the causes of behavior? And according to the co-variation model, there are three ingredients, three things that we should look for when we watch participants' behavior. The first thing is consensus. And consensus means, is this person the only one showing this behavior, or is everybody showing the behavior? For example, if you are in a concert hall and a person is screaming, is this the only person screaming? Like on Dam Square, on the commemoration day, there was one person screaming and everybody being silent. Then there's not a consensus. Then there's one person doing behavior that is really different from the rest. Well, if you're in a concert hall and everybody is screaming, then there's consensus. And that gives you information about something is going on probably in the situation that causes everybody to scream, probably maybe a big pop star hitting the stage. So then there's something in the situation that can explain the behavior and not in the person. So consensus is one factor. Is everybody doing it or is the person alone? The second factor is distinctiveness. And that means how unique is this behavior for this person? So if you see a person screaming in a pop concert, maybe this person is also screaming in the mall, is also screaming at home. This person is just always screaming. So then it's quite clear that this is something that has to do with the person, right? It's not distinctive. It's showing this behavior all the time. So this is just something this person does. And finally, consistency. And consistency means what does this person normally do in that situation? So for example, if this person goes to a stadium, he is always screaming. So this is something the person does in this specific situation. So these three components can help us understand the causes of behavior. Sort of an analysis of both consensus, distinctiveness and consistency. I'll give you another example just for you to get familiar with these three different aspects of the co-variation model. So let's imagine you have a meeting with your friend, Jack. And Jack tells you, you know what? I propose to Jill. And I'm going to marry Jill. And you might be really surprised because, you know, Jack was dating Jill, but you had no idea it was so serious. And Jack and Jill are both 18. So you're like, you're really young. What is going on here? So you can use the co-variation model to try to explain why Jack decides to marry Jill. If you would do that, you can, the first thing you look into is consensus. So consensus would be thinking to yourself, does only Jack want to marry Jill? Or does everybody want to marry Jill? Maybe Jill is just the best girl in the entire world. Maybe she is super popular and she has many people that want to marry her. So then it has something to do with Jill, that she's really popular. If no one wants to marry Jill and only Jack, you have to look further for what is going on here. So then distinctiveness. Maybe Jack tells you, I want to marry Jill. And you're like, oh my God, there we go again. This is his fifth proposal. He proposed to his last girlfriend and the girlfriend before and the girlfriend before. So he just really wants to get married. This is just Jack showing this behavior because he desperately wants to get married young. So this is just what he does. So this also gives you information about the motivation. Then finally, consistency. Maybe Jack comes up to you and says, I proposed to Jill and I was so drunk. I had no idea what I was doing. I forgot all about the proposal the day after. So this is giving you information on consistency. Would Jack propose again in the future? Or was this a one-time thing? Was this maybe a mistake? So you see an analysis like these, like this can help you come up with the judgment on the causes of behavior. And we can do a pretty decent job if we use this model. Unfortunately, we are often not so objective. And we are also often not so thorough when we are analyzing behaviors. And that is because we make errors, attribution errors, this is called. And we're going to now talk about two big errors that we make when it comes to thinking of causes of behavior. First of all, the self-serving attributions and secondly, fundamental attribution bias. So let's first look at explanations for our own behavior. What happens to us when we are looking at ourselves and we are showing certain behavior? So when it comes to our own behavior, we talked about this before, we are not so objective. We are actually really positive about ourselves. It's a way of sort of protecting our self-esteem, having good feelings about ourselves. So we are not so objective. And we tend to, if something, you know, you see this in a graph, if something good happens to us, we tend to take credit. If something bad happens to us, we tend to blame others. That's a way of, you know, dealing with life in a way that suits us. So if, for example, you passed an exam and you have a very good grade, you might be thinking to yourself, wow, I did a really good job there. It was really, I studied hard. I got a good grade. Yes, I really did good. And if you fail an exam, you're more likely to say to yourself, well, this exam was just radically different from the practice exam. And we were unprepared. And also, I slept really bad the night before. So all this causes in the surroundings that caused you to fail the exam. So we make, this is what we call self-serving attributions. We attribute behavior in a way that benefits us. If it's something good, that's us. You know, we did a good job. If it's something bad, it's not us. It's the others. It's other people. It's a situation. So this is what we do when we look at our own behavior. What happens, though, if we look at behavior of others? Well, then we are less positive. And typically, if good things happen to people, then we have this tendency to attribute behavior to the situation. And if something bad happens, we tend to attribute it to the person. And especially this last thing is important. So this is called the fundamental attribution error. This means that generally, when we look at other people's behavior, we tend to ignore the situation. So if someone comes in late for maybe a meeting that you have and this person might be in a car accident or in traffic jam or whatever, and you think to yourself, oh, this person is so lazy. But don't do this if it's us. If it's happening to us, we are very forgiving and we think about it wasn't us. It was not my fault. But when it's others, we are really brutal in making our judgments. And the fundamental attribution error basically means that we ignore the situation. We always say it's the person. And we, this has been studied a lot in also very clever experiments, I think. And in one experiment, there were students in a classroom and they had to watch a presentation. And in this presentation, people saw someone taking a stance against the regime of Fido Castro. And beforehand, some of these students were actually assigned to give a speech. So they were assigned to speak on Castro on a certain, even either pro Fido Castro regime or anti Fido Castro regime. And others chose to give a Castro speech. So they had a free choice in whether or not they want to give a pro or anti Fido Castro speech. Afterwards, the students that were all in the room and they were all well aware of the fact that some of the students were assigned to give a speech, they had to come up with a judgment. And they had to say, had to make a judgment on, do you think this person is actually anti Castro or pro Castro? And interestingly, there were people who had a really hard time taking into account that some students were assigned to a certain group. So even when when students knew that the others were assigned, they ignored this. And they still thought people were either pro or against the regime of Fido Castro based on the presentations they gave. So they ignored the situation more or less. You might be wondering, why is this? Why do people do this? Why are we having such a hard time taking into account the situation that people are in? Well, there are several causes and I will describe a few with you. The first one is called perceptual salience. And with perceptual salience, we mean that the person is oftentimes way more salient, way more visible to us than the situation. And this has been studied already in 1975 by Taylor and Fisk in a study in which two people that were actually actors, part of the experiment, had a sort of a get acquainted conversation. This conversation was completely scripted. So it was the same for everyone. And there were people surrounding this conversation and these people surrounding it, they were the actual participants. And their perceptual salience differed. So some participants were looking at one actor and the others were looking at the other actor. And there were also two participants that saw both actors. Then they were asked several questions to the observers. And one of the questions was, who took the lead in a conversation? Who had chosen the topics? And keep in mind, all these conversations were scripted. So it should be pretty clear who took the lead and who gave, had the initiative in the conversations. But what the participants saw really dependent on their viewpoints. So the observers thought that the actor that they could see better had a greater impact on the conversation. So this person was more salient. If you could see actor A very well, you thought that this person took the lead. And if you saw actor B much better, then you thought that actor B was actually the one making the impact in the conversation. So this is an example of perceptual salience. What we see, what stands out, is often times the person and not the situation. So that's one cause of the fundamental attribution error. The second cause has to do with how our brain works. We talked about in lecture three that there are several ways of processing information. The automatic routes and the controlled routes. And if we are distracted or we are tired or we have other things in our mind, we tend to make more errors in our attributions. So the fundamental attribution error is actually more likely to occur if you're not really paying attention and you're relying on this automatic route for processing information. Because then you're relying on your on your instincts. And this is often the fundamental attribution error is actually also an example of a heuristic is sort of a mental shortcut in which we blame the person and ignore the situation. We can also recover from it a little bit. So if we take the time and we make the efforts of incorporating the situation, we can recover from it a little bit. But it is effortful. Then finally, the final thing I want to mention has to do with a question I raised in the very first lecture. I hope you remember this question. Why is it so hard for victims to speak up? So the reason I want to come back to this is because this has to do with the way how we look at others. If something happens to a person, for example, to a victim, we tend to ignore the situation as well. We tend to think it is the the person's fault. So it's the fault of the victim that something bad happens. This has to do with also a way of protecting ourselves. We have this by the idea that the world is a fair place. This is called a just world hypothesis. We want to believe this as well. So we want to believe that we are living in a world in which people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. So if something bad happens, it feels quite safe for us to think this is not that the world is a bad place. This person probably did something to cause this behavior. So this is also something we hear a lot in conversations surrounding me too and abuse and examples of victims lacking to speak up. It has to do with the way that we look at victims. We tend to blame victims for what happened to them. And this is also one of the causes of the fundamental attribution error. We ignore the situation and we think this person did it to him or herself. So we talked a lot about attributions, the self-serving attributions, the fundamental attribution error. Now I sort of want to integrate the two because what you see is that the way we look at our own behavior is really different from the way we look at other people's behavior. So if we are successful, we are geniuses. If another person is successful, well, this person just got lucky. This is what we also know as an actor- observer difference. So the way in which we look at our own behavior, so the observer attributes, can attribute behavior to the person and the actor attributes behavior to a situation. So if something good happens to us, we think this is something that we caused ourselves. If something bad happens, it's a situation. And this is actually also the root of many miscommunications. For example, in relationships in which the person that showed bad behavior, for example, being late to an appointment, notes that, you know, there was a situation, for example, a traffic jam that caused this person to be late. While the person that he is in interaction with only sees the fault of the person. So it's that you left the office too late. So this difference and all these attributions errors are the cause of many problems in relationships but also generally in interactions that people have with each other. So this is the last part of lecture four. Thanks for watching.