Question

In your essay, discuss key concepts in attribution theory, such as the fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, and the just-world hypothesis. Give examples of each of these concepts.

Answer 1

Attribution Theory
Attribution refers to explaining something indicating a cause. That is, this theory is concerned with how individuals interpret events and how this relates to their thinking and behaviour.
Attribution theory assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do, that is, attribute causes to behaviour. A person seeking to understand why another person did something may attribute one or more causes to that behaviour. A three stage process underlies an attribution.
                a. The person must perceive or observe the behaviour.
                b. Then the person must believe that the behaviour was intentionally performed.
               c. Then the person must determine if they believe the other person was forced to perform                                           the behaviour or not.

Fundamental attribution error
Fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are.

For example, imagine you are taking a college course. You observe that there is a student in the class that has been very quiet during the entire term. The student does not even talk during the class discussions. You conclude that the student is a very quiet and shy person. In this example, it is possible that we may wrongly assume that the student's quiet behaviour reflects his or her
personality, and we may fail to adequately consider some situational factors that could explain the student's behaviour. For example, we may not consider that the person may find the course very boring, or the person is experiencing difficulty and does not feel like talking in class.

Self-Serving Bias

A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favourable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more responsibility for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their ego from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a professional in a good profile and having good intelligence level, but attributes failing to clear an interview because of the un-professional approach of the interviewer or company might be exhibiting the self-serving bias.

Just world hypothesis

The just world hypothesis posits that when people do fall victim to misfortune, others tend to look for things that might explain their circumstances.
Rather than attributing a bad turn of events to bad luck, people tend to look at the individual's behaviour as a source of blame.
Conversely, this belief also leads people to think that when good things happen to people it is because those individuals are good and deserving of their happy fortune.
The classic example of this tendency is found in the book of Job in the Bible. In the text, Job suffers a series of terrible calamities and at one point his former friend suggests that Job must have done something terrible to have deserved his misfortunes.