External Situational Attribution Theory

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Attribution theory is a psychological explanation of how people define their and others behavior. According to Heider, there are two general categories of behavioral attributions. The first one is external situational attribution and the other is internal dispositional attribution. For example, if a person got rejected after asking someone out on a date, the three dispositional factors could be that she rejected because she is rude, has a very high self-esteem, or loves rich people. The three situational factors could be that she has a boyfriend, is very conservative, or she is very young. In fact, people might have the tendency to explain an experienced behavior with many different ways, which includes biases and error. For example, self-serving…show more content…
This term explains the misunderstanding of a behavior’s statistical approach to serve one’s average. For example, for an Aries person, the monthly horoscope correctly for half of the year months; indeed, this person will start to believe in horoscopes without considering that the other half of year’s month are getting predicted wrong by horoscopes. Another reason of people believing horoscopes is the confirmation bias. Confirmation Bias is the tendency to interpret information in a way that serves one’s preconceptions. In horoscopes, people usually interpret the text in the way that they want. For example, “you will find the person who will give you peace and puts an end to your difficulties” this text could mean for many people death and for others could mean life comfort. In fact, our attribution about causes of the behavior is different depending on the situation and how it is related to us. This leads us to the error and biases in our attribution, which justifies our mistakes by using external and internal factors. Attributions about other people’s behavior is also is prone to error and biases. This biases usually tends to find the negative and bad aspects of the internal or the external factor the reason of others…show more content…
In social perception chapter, Dutton and Aron explains the connectivity between our emotions and the attribution, by a term, Misattribution of arousal. Misattribution of arousal defines as “Attributing arousal produced by one cause to another stimulus in the environment.” (261), which simply mean a behavioral emotional response comes from one’s attribution. For example, if you are getting followed by thieves, you will become scared. Suddenly a beautiful lady will show up in front of you. You will think it is safe to ask her for help, but she turns to be one of the bad guys. Also, in contrast, you may find a fair looking lady that really wants to help you, but you will choose to run away because of your think that she might be a thief. Attributions could be not logical. for example, The just-world phenomenon , which referee to people’s tendency to believe people get what they deserve; that is not absolutely hundred percent correct .This phenomenon could lead to unrespuncible behaviors. Another consequences of our attribution are the biases that we talked about in this essay, which defiantly leads to unpredictable negative

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