Essay on Attributions
Attribution is a psychological term for a mechanism of explaining the behavior of another person. In particular, it may be attributing to social objects (individuals, groups, or social community) some characteristics that are not represented in the field of perception. The need for attribution is based on the fact that the information that a person can get through observation is insufficient for adequate interaction with the social environment and needs to be “filled-in”. Attribution is the main way of this “filling-in” the gaps in the directly perceived information (Myers, 2012). However, this process inevitably associates with fundamental attribution error, which consists in the tendency to explain acts behavior of other people though their personal traits (so-called “inner disposition”), and one’s own behavior through external circumstances (so-called “external disposition”) (Feenstra, 2013).
Thus, a person is inclined to explain one’s successes bydisposition, and failuresby situation with just the opposite treatment to successes and failures of others. Thus, someone else’s delay is often attributedto poor punctuality or absent-mindedness, whereas one’s own delay is explained by, for example, traffic jams or having to stay late hours the day before. Such an error leads to serious problems, distorting a person’s self-perception, impeding the process of self-assessment, analysis and correction of one’s own behavior. Partly, the fundamental attribution error is the result of the fact that when we observe someone’s behavior we focus our attention on the person, and the situation becomes relatively invisible. When we act ourselves, our focus is on the situation: we react to it, and it becomes clearer. Locus of control also affects attribution error. For example, people with an internal locus of control are rather likely to attribute the results to internal factors and less prone to errors of attribution, and at the same time, they are also more likely to experience feelings of guilt for the events that are happening to them (Myers, 2012; Feenstra, 2013).
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