Fundamental Attribution Error

The Fundamental Attribution Error is when people are explaining someone else’s behavior to mainly focus on the personal factors (traits) of the person and underestimate the impact of the situation the person is in (Ross et al., 1977).

There was a study conducted by Lee Ross and his colleagues which demonstrated the fundamental attribution error in a setting of a quiz game with spectators. Participants of the study were randomly assigned (by the flip of a coin) to play the role of either the questioner or the contestant. The experiment gave the task of the questioners to write 10 challenging questions of things they specifically knew about (Ross et al., 1977).

Questions like: Who was the founder of e-Bay? What team won the NHL Stanley Cup in 1976?

With such specific questions, the contestants of the games only managed to answer about 40% of the questions correctly. After the game though, all participants (questioners, contestants, and observers) rated the questioners’ and contestants’ general knowledge on a scale from 0 to 100.

The questioners appeared more knowledge than the contestants, because of the fact that they were the one choosing questions they specifically knew about-not because they were in fact more knowledgeable or smarter than the contestants. In fact there was no difference between the questioners and contestants on an objective test of general knowledge. 

All three types of participants rated the questioners as being more knowledgeable than the contestants. In fact the spectators of the quiz game rated the questioners as above average in their general knowledge and rated the contestants as below average. Even the contestants  rated themselves as below average in general knowledge and rated their partners’ general knowledge as higher than average.They overlooked the situation of the questioners making up the questions and overestimated the questioner’s knowledge, a personal cause (Ross et al., 1997). 

Despite knowing about the situations a person is in and its impact on their behavior in general people fall prey to the fundamental attribution error even when they are aware of the situation and its impact on another’s behavior (Miller et al., 1981).

People’s behavior in general is more influenced by the situation they are in (Ross et al., 1997). 

My Example:

My sister, is a very social, friendly, and outgoing person. She like meeting new people and she likes talking to people, a trait we share. Last year my sister visited me here in Texas for a few days.

I gave her a heads up that it takes a while for my friends to feel comfortable around people and so when they first meet new people they tend to be rather quiet because they’re uncomfortable. When she met my friends for less than 5 minutes, she tried to talk to them like she would do with anyone she has known for a while. My friends honestly did not say much to her and overall were very quiet.

As soon as we left, my sister’s first words were to me were “they’re very shy” In less than five minutes of knowing a group of people my sister thought she had figured out the reason for my friends quiet behavior.  She attributed their quiet behavior to their supposed shy personalities, not the situation of meeting someone new.

Even now, though I have explained to my sister several times that my friends were only quiet around her because they didn’t know her, she still doesn’t believe that my friends can be talkative, loud, and at time outgoing. 

(Word Count-579)

References

Miller, A. G., Jones, E. E., & Hinkles, S. (1981). A robust attribution error in the personality domain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 587-600.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1997). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322-336.

First Impressions/Rapid Assessments

May i be frank
first impressions can be tough
and when i saw you i knew it
if your size weren't enough
your last answer just blew it!
and so my dear
so short and stout
you'll never be in
so were kicking you out!
~Lyrics (The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crab from the Musical/Motion picture Hairspray

First Impressions can be difficult whether you’re going for a job interview, meeting your significant partner’s family, auditioning for a dance show (Hairspray), or simple meeting a new person.

First impressions are important and can last.

People often make snap judgments when meeting a new person, whether they like it or not. In fact people can make accurate first impressions with just seeing a photograph of a person's face for fractions of a second (Willis, J. & Todorov, A., 2006). 

Along with the fact that people make rapid assessments of other people, it has also been shown that people make these rapid assessments based off of knickknacks in a person’s dormitory or office, books on their shelves, and music that they have on their phones or ipods (Gosling. S., 2008). It has also been shown that fictional characters with “old-generation names like Walter, Dorothy, and Edith were judged to be less popular and intelligent than younger-generation names like Kevin, Michael, and Lisa (Young et al., 1993). Even voice pitch can influence a person's judgment as both men and women who spoke in higher pitched voices were judged to be more feminine (Ko et al., 2006). 

Though we all do this, it can seem rather superficial when we think about what we judge people on right away and how quickly we do it. Despite the superficial aspect of our judgments is the idea of how accurate we can be in our judgment of someone’s face for a fraction of a second or a minute or two in their room.

We can do this because we are not blank slates that just absorb and process all the information about someone we just met, we meet people and experience new things with prior knowledge and experiences that we interpret and integrate information based off of. We are active perceives.

We have schemas; mental frameworks in our head that come from past experiences that we use to filter and process information. Our schemas help us process complicated information, by simplifying and organizing it. 

Example: 

 

One time while visiting my old hometown on the east-coast I saw a girl who was wearing brightly rainbow colored striped stockings, a dark jean skirt, a bright green corset like shirt, purple like red hair, and very distinctive large butterfly fairy wings. Seeing as it wasn’t Halloween, I quickly thought the girl was weird, different, wants to be seen as different, artsy, smart, not ‘popular’, and liked attention.

I have never spoken to this girl or have ever seen her before or again, but I’m pretty certain of what kind of person she is based on my own personal schemas.

If someone were to tell me that she was dressed like that for a specific reason-for an art class or favor for a friend, I might change my opinion of her. But is someone was to tell me that this girl was quiet, shy, and didn’t like attention, I wouldn’t believe them because in my personal schema of a shy and quiet person do not wear an outfit like the one she was wearing.

I’m more than likely never going to this girl again, but in the few minutes that I saw her I made a rapid judgment of her based on her outfit, and more than likely I am accurate on that judgment. 

(Word count 555)

References

Gosling, S. (2008). Snoop: What your stuff says about you. New York: Basic Books.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. F. (2011). Perceiving persons: Observations: The elements of  social perception. Social Psychology, 8, 81-83. 

Ko, S. J., Judd, C. M., & Blair, I. V. (2006). What the voice reveals: Within-and between-category  stereotyping on the basis of voice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 806-819.

Willis, J. & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.

Young, R. K., Kennedy, A. H., Newhouse, A., Browne, P., & Thieseen, D. (1993). The effects of names on perceptions of intelligence, popularity, and competence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23, 1770-1788.