Attribution theory in brief. Social attribution. Locus of control attributions

Day by day we meet a large number of people, observe their behavior, think about them, try to understand what they are saying. It may seem to us that we see not only whether a person is short or tall, fat or thin, what color his eyes or hair are, but also whether he is stupid or smart, respectable or not, whether he is happy or sad...

What meaning do we attach to certain events? How do we explain our behavior or the behavior of loved ones? For example, why is a person angry, angry, maybe something happened? All this explains the concept of attribution. What is it and how to use it? Let's try to figure out these questions together.

Definition

From a scientific point of view, attribution is a process in which people use certain information to make inferences about the causes of events or the behavior of other people. During the day, it is common for a person to make numerous conclusions about his own behavior, as well as the thinking of others. Simply put, attribution is all those ordinary thoughts and actions we make without awareness of the underlying processes and biases that lead to certain conclusions.

How it works

There are 2 types of attribution for explaining the behavior of other people. First, we can explain the action of one person in relation to another. Secondly, behavior in relation to the situation. For example, if a student is quiet and modest on the first day of class, we can conclude that shyness is the cause of this. This is a dispositional attribution (towards the person). Or we can assume that the cause of shyness is lack of sleep or personal problems of the student (situational). So, attribution in psychology is the conclusions that people make about the causes of events and the actions of other individuals. People make them to understand and explain certain processes. And these conclusions, in turn, influence interactions with others.

Examples

For example, you take an exam and do well, but your friend fails. We can conclude that you are smart because you completed the task, but at the same time it is easy to assume that your friend did not succeed because he spent the whole night in some club and was simply not able to pass the material. Human psychology is designed in such a way that he will attribute a certain property to you as a result of successfully passing an exam, and vice versa to your friend.

Attribution Types

Attribution theory

It attempts to explain how and why ordinary people reach certain conclusions, as well as how they explain events and their causes.

1. Fritz Heider (1958) believed that people are naive psychologists trying to understand the social world, they tend to see cause-and-effect relationships even where there are none. However, nevertheless, the scientist put forward two main theories of the emergence of attribution:

when we explain the behavior of others, we try to build on internal attributions, such as, for example, we associate a person’s behavior with his naivety or reliability;
When we try to explain our own behavior, we tend to rely on external (situational) attributions.

2. Edward Jones and Keith Davis (1965) believed that people place special emphasis on intentional behavior (as opposed to random or mindless behavior). explains the process of creating internal attribution. That is, in their understanding, attribution is the commission of certain actions due to the connection between the motive of a person’s behavior and the behavior itself.

3. Harold Kelly's (1967) covariance model is the most famous attribution theory. He developed a logical model for assessing a particular action, which should be attributed to one characteristic: a person - to the internal one, and the environment - to the external one. The term "covariation" means that a person has information from several sources, which he received at different times and in different situations, as a result of which he draws a conclusion about the observed event and its causes. Kelly believes that there are three types of causal information that influence our judgments:

consensus;
distinctiveness;
subsequence.

So we see two events happening at the same time, and therefore we believe that one causes the other. This explanation of the causes of events is called nothing less than social attribution. Each of us can observe this phenomenon in everyday life.

Attribution error

The fundamental fallacy is a common type of cognitive bias in Essentially, it is the emphasis on internal personality characteristics to explain behavior in a particular situation rather than on external situational factors. The flip side of this mistake is that people tend to underestimate the role of the situation in their behavior and emphasize their own role. This, in turn, illustrates several types of cognitive deviations. For example, a person walks and carries full bags of groceries, which may interfere with the passage of other people. If a passing cyclist bumps into this person, he may think that the driver is extremely rude and has no respect for those passing by. In this case, the person fails to consider situational factors such as his bags taking up more space than he thinks, thereby forcing people to bump into him. To avoid the fundamental attribution error, a person must put himself in someone else's shoes and think about what he might do in the same situation.

Defensive attribution

The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term that refers to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of protecting himself from anxiety. As a rule, defensive attributions occur if a person witnessed a particular disaster. In such situations, attribution of responsibility and drawing of one's own conclusions will depend on the severity of the outcome of the failure and the levels of personal and situational similarity between the person and the victim. An example of a defensive attribution is the well-known hypothesis “good things happen to and bad things happen to bad people.” Everyone believes this because they feel vulnerable in situations they cannot control. At the same time, it leads to blaming the victim even in a tragic situation. After all, when people hear that someone died as a result of a car accident, they assume that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and try to convince themselves that the accident would never happen to them. However, oddly enough, some people believe that positive events happen to them more often than to others, and negative ones, accordingly, less often. For example, a smoker believes that he is less likely to get lung cancer than other smokers.

Application

We apply all the above psychological terms and theories in real life. For example, a feeling of helplessness, “adding to” a story, an image of a person, criticism and self-criticism are all a consequence of one or another type of attribution. So, let's summarize. Attribution is the process of inferring the cause of events or behavior due to human curiosity or in an attempt to avoid uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous situations.

Attribution and self-attribution

In many respects, the process of self-attribution is a special case of the more general perceptual and cognitive processes through which we judge the reasons for other people's behavior. How, for example, do we refer to any type those people with whom we deal in our daily social interactions? How do we judge what other people think or feel? Or what they really are? In general, how do we guess about reasons people's behavior? To understand human behavior and the laws of interpersonal influence, it is absolutely necessary to know the answers to these questions.

It is clear that people are trying to “figure out” other people. Fritz Heider (Heider, 1958), the founder of psychological research in the field called attribution theory suggested that humans have a vital need to believe that the environment is controllable and predictable. We strive to understand why people do certain things so that we can predict what will happen. us will happen in the future, and manage these events. In addition, our thoughts about others should naturally influence our behavior in relation to them.

Who are you and where are you? Generally speaking, when we try to understand why a person did a certain thing - behaved noble or unrestrained, bought an expensive stereo system or started using drugs - we can consider the reason for his behavior either some trait of his character or some features of the situation , in which this person was located. Dispositional(or internal) attribution explain the observed behavior by reasons

pressing within the individual. Dispositional attribution is the assumption that behavior reflects some unique quality of a given person. If we believe that someone works hard because their personal attitudes, religious beliefs, or character and personality traits require it, then these are all examples of dispositional attributions. It is assumed that the behavior is due to an internal reason, for example: “Tanya worked hard on the project simply because she likes to work.”

Situational(or external) attribution, on the contrary, they indicate factors in the social and physical environment that cause a person to behave in a certain way. For example, if we see someone working hard and attribute this behavior to a desire to earn money, a good grade, or praise, then this is a situational attribution. The reason is considered to be a factor external to the individual, for example, “Tanya worked a lot on the project because she really wanted to receive the bonus promised by her boss.” When explaining behavior by situational reasons, it is assumed that most people in a similar situation would have acted in the same way and would have come to the same results. In other words, a person's behavior says more about the nature of the situation than about the individual himself. In addition, situational attribution is equivalent to the assumption that in the absence of these situational factors the person would not have performed the act that we observed.

Let's clarify the difference between dispositional and situational attributions with an example. Suppose a certain Joe the Candidate gives a speech advocating for stricter regulations on air pollutant emissions from coal-fired factories as a measure to prevent acid rain. One of his listeners, Joan, approves of his views on environmental protection: “I can vote for this guy, he has the right ideas about how to solve the acid rain problem.” Joan’s friend Mary, who is listening to the speech with her, winces and looks at Joan in surprise: “Listen, Joan, this guy just wants to please the audience. He promises to introduce these regulations to win the votes of all the environmentalists in our college. But don’t think he’ll take any real action.” Mary arrived at a situational attribution: he is doing this to win over the audience. Joan chose a dispositional attribution: the content of the candidate's speech is explained by his environmentally correct attitudes; Therefore, she concluded that his position on other environmental issues would be equally correct in the future.

Another example shows how a tendency toward situational or dispositional analysis of behavior can reflect personal biases. When comparing top players in professional basketball, it is often said that Player A achieved his position through hard work, while Player B achieved success because he has natural athletic talent. If a sports commentator expresses such an opinion, then most often it is safe to say that player A is white and player B is black. In this case, the implication is that a black man did not have to train and work hard to become a star; he was from the very beginning endowed with everything necessary for success. Try to say

Michael Jordan or any other dark-skinned professional athlete that he achieved success “through natural talent alone” and you will see how he reacts to your “compliment”.

How we make decisions . Prominent attribution theorist Harold Kelley (1967) believes that when deciding whether to attribute observed behavior situationally or dispositionally, we consider three factors. We focus on personalities person, i.e. we are inclined towards dispositional attribution when three conditions are met. Firstly, very often this happens when a person’s behavior obscene, that is, it differs from the typical one characteristic of most people who find themselves in a similar situation. For example, you see a student who is rude to a teacher who is respected and loved by everyone. You are much more likely to attribute this atypical behavior to some negative quality of this particular student (“stupid, arrogant boor,” “pathologically hostile type”) than to any situational factors (for example, a remark made by the teacher).

Second, dispositional attributions are more likely to be made when the actor (whose behavior we are observing) is known to behave in that way frequently. Consistent Behavior that is repeated over and over again characterizes the person, not the situation. For example, if Terry Always comes to class on time, then you explain this by the fact that she is a punctual person - or by her obsessive need to not be late. You will find that her behavior reflects a personality trait rather than a reaction to situational factors that change from time to time. Situational reasons are possible; Maybe during classes on some subject, the teacher immediately after the bell locks the door and takes a roll call, thus identifying truants. But if the behavior is consistent, then it is most often attributed to dispositional factors. In fact, personality theory psychologists consider consistency of behavior across situations to be one of the defining aspects of personality traits.

The third circumstance that encourages dispositional attributions is the same type of behavior in many different situations in which a variety of stimuli are present; in other words, when behavior undifferentiated (nondistinctive), that is, it occurs not only in a situation of a certain type. For example, you might suspect that Terry actually has an internal compulsive desire for punctuality if she is not only never late for class, but also always arrives on time everywhere, even to parties where being late is perceived as the norm and is considered “good manners.” Since neither these situations themselves, nor the stimuli present in them, in your opinion, can be regarded as the causes of the observed behavior, we can only assume that it had an internal cause.

one of your classmates of the opposite sex complimented you, admiring your insight. You made a couple more remarks, and both times your comments aroused the wild delight of this (by the way, very pretty!) person. And why would this be? You think: “Others never flatter me (non-normative behavior). And this sweet lady is giving me compliments for the third time (consistency of behavior). That's funny...” But you also remember hearing this same person indiscriminately praise many other members of the opposite sex in your class when they were discussing something in class (undifferentiated behavior). All three of your observations - and especially the last one, about this person flattering everyone of the opposite sex - suggest a dispositional attribution, which, sadly, does nothing to stroke your ego. This person loves to flirt, or at least is the type of person who gets carried away by everyone who attracts their attention - more precisely, those of them who belong to the opposite sex.

Now let's look at how changing just one piece of information about that person can affect your attribution or even your subsequent behavior. If this person never compliments other students, that is, his praise is differentiated and applies only to you, then you will most likely come to the conclusion that the classmate who praises you likes you. That’s the way he’s built, that he likes the way you’re built! Well, that's better.

What, exactly, is happening to you? In the previous example, where we were talking about why you received an “unnormative” compliment from a classmate, two possible scenarios arose, leading to different attributions: either this person is generally prone to flirting, or he liked exactly you. In this case specifically dispositional attribution was predetermined by the fact that we recognized the behavior of a pleasant person of the opposite sex as differentiated. Some other considerations also allow us to come to the conclusion about what kind of person we have in front of us, what specific features he has. Sometimes this conclusion turns out to be correct, and sometimes not.

We can use the information contained in the results that we believe a person's behavior produces (Jones and Davis, 1965). Imagine a very busy student who rarely gets to go to the movies. To understand why she chose to watch movie A and not go to movie B, we must first exclude from consideration all common characteristics - such as ticket price, start time, distance to the cinema, etc. The difference between these films is that , that movie A has a science-fiction plot, and movie B is nominated for an Oscar. Now we can make a reasonable conclusion that the student chose film A because she really loves science fiction films.

Turning to the heuristics that we encountered in the previous chapter gives us another “sign” that allows us to judge which dispositions this behavior reflects. Just as we learn certain “rules” of behavior, we also become familiar with certain cause-and-effect relationships, which we can later use without thinking. Kelly (1972) calls

these connections are culturally determined causal schemes. Let's give two examples.

Question. Why did twelve-year-old Marty suddenly become so naughty?

Answer. He's just going through a period right now.

Question. Why is dad in such a bad mood today?

Answer. Perhaps he was having trouble at work again.

Causal explanations are not always justified. The principles of attribution we have described imply a fairly rational, logical observer. When a person performing an action behaves in the same way as everyone else, the observer concludes that this behavior is to a very large extent determined by the situation. If the behavior of an actor leads to non-standard consequences, then the observer looks for a clue to the motives of behavior in these consequences. These are perfectly reasonable decision rules. And people do take into account in their reasoning such factors as normativity, consistency and differentiation of behavior, as well as the usual/unusual nature of its results. This is supported by studies in which subjects were presented with various behavioral scenarios (similar to the story of a student flattering his classmates), differing only in the presence of the mentioned factors, after which the subjects chose the most likely cause of the behavior (see McArthur, 1972; Ferguson and Wells, 1980).

On the other hand, causal attributions are sometimes not well founded. When processing information in the process of assessing the causes of behavior, certain types of assumptions may be made. distortions. One such distortion arises from the tendency to simplification. An example is the use of causal schemas. It is possible that Marty did not become disobedient because “he is going through such a period now.” Maybe he joined a new peer group or got into trouble at school. Generally speaking, people tend to point to one or two reasons for behavior, when in fact there are often many such reasons. Another bias involves a phenomenon that social psychologists call salience effect. This is the tendency to attach greater importance to those factors that are most striking and attract attention, for example, bad news.

The salience effect was demonstrated in the following experiment: Subjects observed a rehearsed conversation between two experimenter's assistants, whom we will call Anne and Blair (Taylor and Fiske, 1975). Subjects in one group made observations while standing behind Blair, facing Anne. Their visual attention was focused on Anne. Subjects in the second group watched from the opposite position: they were behind Ann, facing Blair. Subjects in the third group saw both Anne and Blair equally well. When the subjects were later asked who set the tone of the conversation—changed the subject, won arguments, and the like—those who could see the faces of both experimenter's assistants gave Anne and Blair approximately the same ratings. At the same time, subjects from other groups who heard the same conversation, interpreted it completely differently. Those whose attention was focused on Anne argued that she was the “conductor” of the conversation.

Yes, while subjects who paid attention mainly to Blair believed that she played the main role in the conversation. In other words, the perception of causes is literally a matter of perspective.

A clear predominance of dispositions. In addition, there is an attribution bias that occurs so often and has such important consequences that it has been called fundamental attribution error(Ross, 1977). Whenever we observe behavior and try to understand what causes it, our judgments may be subject to two types of interrelated biases. If the reason for a behavior is not obvious, then we tend to revaluation the role of dispositional factors and underestimation situational factors. Following the progress of a “behavioral drama,” we overly readily focus on the personality traits and character traits of the characters, but we do not want to take into account the features of the stage space in which and on the basis of which the action unfolds. Our culture is characterized by the “cult of the ego,” in which special attention is paid to individual initiative and personal responsibility for successes and failures, sins and misdeeds. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are more inclined to see a person who finds himself in a certain situation than the situation that makes the person the way we see him. In fact, one of the most important truths that social psychology has taught us is that human behavior is influenced by situational variables much more than we usually think or are willing to admit (see Watson, 1982, etc.).

And without adequate consideration of the influence of these subtle situational forces - such as roles, rules, uniforms, symbolism or group consensus - we risk falling prey to them. This happens because we overestimate the strength of our character that allows us to resist the influence of unwanted forces, and we underestimate the pressure of the situation that forces us to submit to these forces. Let's return to the classic Milgram experiments described in the previous chapter, which demonstrated the mechanisms of submission to authority. As already noted, before the start of the study, 40 psychiatrists predicted the results of these experiments and decided that only less than 1% of the subjects - only “abnormal” individuals - would obey the experimenter to the very end, that is, they would agree to “punish” the defenseless victim with an electric discharge in 450 volts. Psychiatrists' attributions were dispositional, since people in this profession constantly use such attributions and get used to it. And even when the results of experiments are obvious, and they show again and again that the majority of people participating in such experiments obey the rules of the game and inflict increasingly stronger electric shocks on the “student,” students, as a rule, stubbornly continue to believe that they themselves are not such as those subjects. Again, the prevailing tendency is to explain behavior by dispositional reasons, although it is obvious that in this case situational attribution is necessary: if the reactions of the majority of subjects to a particular situation are atypical, then some powerful forces must be involved in this situation that cause such reactions.

The fundamental attribution error has been repeatedly demonstrated in scientific studies, which have shown how rarely a situation is “at fault” for a particular behavior. During the study, the subject of which were judged

In order to test students' opinions about their own and others' intelligence, subjects participated in a special quiz: one person asked questions, and the other tried to answer them (Ross et al., 1977). The researchers randomly assigned the roles of “leaders” and “competitors” to students. Students assigned to the role of presenters were asked to come up with the ten most difficult questions on any topic, with the only condition being that they had to know the correct answers to these questions. Thus, the contestants clearly found themselves at an extremely disadvantageous position. One could hardly expect them to be well informed about what the presenters are interested in or what they are knowledgeable about. Therefore, round after round, the contestants had to admit in dull voices that they did not know the answers to many questions. And round after round, the students who observed these interactions attributed more intelligence and erudition to the presenter, denying these qualities to the contestant - although the rules of the game were brought to the attention of the students and they knew very well who chooses the topics of the questions. The observers were clearly committing a fundamental attribution error. They did not take into account the significant head start that the presenters received.

The main conclusion that follows from the results of this and many other experiments is that we often not taken into account properly the influence of situational variables on the behavior we observe in others, even if we still recognize that the situation played some role. This finding is supported by the phenomenon of “victim-blame shifting,” in which a person is held responsible for being homeless, unemployed, or a victim of violence, while the influence of social and political factors is paid lip service to (Ryan, 1971). Conservative lawyer Mona Charen, who wrote speeches for President Reagan, articulated in her article exactly how the above view becomes part of political philosophy. She writes about the crack craze sweeping through cities in the central United States: “Seeing people ruining their lives by using drugs, conservatives conclude that the problem is that addicts lack self-control and has nothing to do with the situation in society.” "(Charen, 1990, p. 3).

Self-perception and self-attribution

Most often, you are faced with behavior that is demonstrated not by an abstract “actor”, but by yourself. When you do something, you are almost always aware of your actions and therefore can reflect on them - just as you might reflect on the actions of another person. Do the laws of attribution we just described apply to self-perception? Of course, much of our behavior is planned in advance and therefore does not require any ex post explanations, which are closely related to the attributional process. In addition, our internal states, including our attitudes and emotions, often cause us to behave in a particular way in a particular situation. In such cases we know Why we behaved exactly this way and not otherwise. On the other hand, as you remember from the previous chapter, some types of behavior do not require preliminary comparison with a person’s attitudes or mental states. We have looked at cases where unconscious habits and subtle situations

tive pressure jointly shapes a person’s behavior, and in such a way that he does not notice it. According to self-perception theories Daryl Boehm (Bern, 1972), in cases like this "actor" explaining his behavior, he can reason attributively, as if from the position observer behavior of the “actor”.

Boehm argues that most human behavior is not the product of prior reflection on inner feelings and attitudes. Quite often the opposite happens. People infer what their internal states or feelings were—or what they should have been—by recalling their past behavior and the situational factors that affected them then. For example, imagine a female Wall Street lawyer who often gives away all the change from her pockets to street beggars on her way to and from work. One day over lunch, the conversation turns to life in New York, and a colleague asks our heroine whether she thinks she should give to the poor. This question puzzles her because she has never really thought about it. However, as far as she remembers, every day she gives money to beggars (consistent behavior). Besides, no one had ever forced her to do this; if she wanted, she could look away and walk past (no obvious situational pressure). And finally, now that she thinks about it, the impact of the situation does not seem particularly strong to her, because a lot of people pass by these unfortunate people (no normative pressure). It becomes clear to our generous heroine that since she behaves this way, it means that she has a positive attitude towards giving to the poor. She is truly a generous person.

If this example reminds you of one of the explanations given in the previous chapter about the foot-in-the-door effect, you have made the correct generalization. Self-perception theory provides a plausible explanation for why people who have done a small favor for others then want to do more for them. Having provided help, such people conclude that they are always ready to help others.

We are what we do. One ingenious experiment showed that thinking about one's past behavior can have a profound effect on one's self-image (Salancik and Conway, 1975). College students filled out a questionnaire: they had to choose from the 24 statements proposed in it those that would describe their own behavior. Some statements spoke of actions that testified to the religiosity of the person who committed them, while others described actions of an anti-religious nature. Students were randomly divided into two groups and given questionnaires containing statements that were similar in content, but slightly different in the wording of the statements. Students from the first group were asked to make statements about actions characteristic of religious people, as a rule, using the adverb “sometimes” (for example: “Sometimes I attend church or synagogue”). Most of the statements about the behavior characteristic of non-believers were formulated using the adverb “often” (for example, “I often refuse to listen to the religious sermon that concludes the daily television program”). In the questionnaires intended for the second group, on the contrary, the adverb “often” was included mainly in statements about actions typical of religious people (“I often refuse to attend classes on religious holidays”), and the adverb “foreign”

when” was included in most statements about the behavior of non-believers (“Sometimes I refuse to discuss religious issues with my friends”).

The researchers believed that, in general, students would be reluctant to agree that statements using the word “often” were appropriate for their self-descriptions. Most items on the questionnaire described behaviors that college students typically do infrequently. Conversely, it might well be that utterances containing the adverb “sometimes” would be more likely to be rated as self-descriptive because they were about actions that most students do at least occasionally and can easily remember doing. . Exclusively due to differences in wording, students from the first group (statements like “religious” behavior - sometimes) will consider “true” (“Yes, that’s about me”) more statements about actions characteristic of religious people than students from the second group (statements like “anti-religious” behavior - sometimes).

This is exactly what happened, but these are still “flowers”. The “berries” turned out to be that students from the first group, compared to students from the second group, subsequently rated themselves as more religious people, which is consistent with the theory of self-perception. While filling out the questionnaire, students from the first group came to the conclusion that they sometimes commit actions typical of religious people - and recalled many of these actions in the past. From these memories, indicating that such behavior is characteristic of religious people, they drew a conclusion about their piety. Students from the second group encountered the opposite picture, because they remembered that they sometimes committed actions characteristic of non-believers, and began to perceive themselves as not very religious people. In their self-perception, the important quality of religiosity underwent significant changes in a short time just by reading and rating a few phrases describing behavior. College students began to consider themselves more or less religious people, depending on how their self-perception underwent transformation under the influence of this, frankly, insignificant situational manipulation.

The power of emotions: Self-attribution processes are especially likely to influence the experience of emotions. Strong emotions have one common feature: they cause increased physiological arousal, characterized by increased heart rate, sucking in the pit of the stomach, nervous tremors, etc. Usually, thanks to these sensations, we are aware of our emotions, and its cause is clearly deduced from a specific situation. For example: “My heart is pounding and my palms are sweating. I’m angry and jealous because I just saw my beloved with someone else.” However, sometimes physical sensations and situational signals contradict each other, as a result of which we are faced with an attributional problem and try to understand for ourselves: what is this feeling? Classic self-attribution theory suggests that if the causes of an internal state of arousal are sufficiently ambiguous, then the experienced emotion will reflect what obvious aspects of the external situation suggest.

And if the situation is interpreted incorrectly, then the result is misattribution. In one classic study, people were asked

or agree to be given electric shocks of increasing intensity, ostensibly to test their ability to tolerate pain (Nisbett and Schachter, 1966). Some subjects were pre-given a drug that supposedly caused increased heart rate and other symptoms of agitation. In fact, the “drug” was sugar pills. However, these subjects withstood stronger electric shocks than those who did not receive the “drug”: the electric shock caused them less severe pain. They mistakenly attributed their agitation not to its real cause - excitement due to the anticipation of the discharge and the subsequent pain - but to the “normal” effects of the “drug”.

Similar misattributions were observed in an experiment examining the influence of arousal on subjects' responses to insults (Zillman and Bryant, 1974). One group of experiment participants performed physical exercises that required significant stress, while others did relaxation exercises. After some time, a short break was announced. When the break ended and the subjects began exercising again, a man (actually the experimenter's assistant) entered the gym and began making insulting remarks. Those who exercised vigorously expressed more anger at the personal insult they received than those who had simply relaxed. Apparently, the residual arousal from the exercise was “superimposed” on the arousal caused by the insult, resulting in the subject feeling an extremely strong feeling of anger. The conclusion suggests itself. How do you think this principle works during group gatherings where speeches are usually preceded by marching, singing and shouting?

“A fundamentally wrong idea” - about ourselves. You may have noticed that all the examples discussed so far have one thing in common: in attributional reasoning about themselves, people made some inaccuracies. They seemed to ignore real reasons for your behavior. For example, students did not pay much attention to the adverbs cleverly built into the wording of the questionnaire items, while they largely determined the nature of the conclusions about their own religious feelings. They committed a fundamental attribution error, underestimating the role of the situation in shaping behavior, in this case their own assessments of their attitude towards religion.

Perhaps even more surprising from this point of view were the results of the quiz study described above. As we remember, the observers concluded that the “competition test subjects” were significantly less erudite than the “leading test subjects” who asked them tricky questions. Observers lost sight of the deliberate “unfairness” of the rules of the game: the presenters had the right to choose the topics of questions. We know that even the competitors were unable to properly assess the impact of this situational limitation, since they assessed their own knowledge as lower than the knowledge of the students who asked them questions. Another victory of the situation over people!

We should not be too harsh on these people, as situational factors can easily go unnoticed. This is exactly what we are talking about. Situation-driven behavior can influence our attitudes and self-image primarily because seemingly mundane situations can nevertheless have a very powerful impact.

Self-knowledge and self-perception: which is stronger? The process of self-perception - with all its pitfalls - usually begins in cases where, in the words of Boehm (Bern, 1972), "internal guidelines are weak, ambiguous or impossible to interpret." If you can't name your favorite color because you've never thought about it, then you may have to analyze your behavior to come to an appropriate conclusion. What color clothes do you wear most often? What color predominates in the design of your room or apartment? On the other hand, if you you know what is your favorite color, you do not need to analyze your own behavior to draw conclusions about your color preferences.

Often, “strong internal signals” are simply clear and clearly conscious judgments about oneself, i.e. knowledge about oneself. With this kind of knowledge, people rely less on self-attributions, as the study following the religious speech experiment described above demonstrated with extreme clarity. The researchers repeated it, again using the verbal magic of adverbs to make subjects remember their own actions that were characteristic of “supporters” or “opponents” of an opinion. Two changes were made to the experimental procedure: firstly, ecology, rather than religion, was chosen as the topic of the statements; secondly, the students were not randomly distributed into two groups, but in accordance with the structure of their existing attitudes regarding ecology. Students in one group had consistent and clearly defined attitudes on environmental issues. Students from the other group had attitudes toward environmental protection that were not particularly consistent and not well thought out. The experiment gave completely clear results, which are presented in Fig. 3.1. Students from both groups were affected by the peculiarities of the wording of the questionnaire items, which had such surprising power. When assessing statements about environmental behavior, students were more likely to choose statements that used the adverb “sometimes” in their self-descriptions than statements that used the more extreme adverb “often.” However, it turned out that the nature of the wording of the questionnaire items influenced installations only those students who had “weak” attitudes before the experiment. Students who had consistent, “strong” attitudes before completing the questionnaire did not change them and continued to adhere to their original positions. The researchers concluded that “subjects with consistent attitudes had strong beliefs in their views and a clear sense of themselves as pro-environmentalists, so they did not need to 'infer' their attitudes from currently available information about their behavior” (Chaiken and Baldwin, 1981, p. 9). Those who initially had weak attitudes did what Boehm would have predicted: they accepted their actions as the basis for their new attitudes.

I didn't know until I was asked. Clearly, people do not continually form new attitudes and beliefs based on self-perceptions and beliefs about their present or past behavior. Processes of self-perception occur mainly when we have a “need to understand the structure

Rice. 3.1. Self-perception processes occur when attitudes are weak

People very often try to answer the question of why others act this way and not otherwise; they try to find the reason for such behavior or describe the circumstances that developed in a certain way and prompted another person to commit an act that should be assessed as positive or negative, right or wrong. Developed by social psychologists social attribution theory states that when describing the behavior of other people, a person, as a rule, is guided by a certain common sense. However, such an approach to analyzing the behavior of another person often leads to what is called attribution errors. These errors are related to the phenomenon stereotyping, those. People tend to describe the behavior of another person in many ways under the influence of certain stereotypes familiar to them. But in this case, capable manipulators easily deceive their interlocutor, communication or business partner, replacing their true motives and goals with stereotypical actions.

As research in this area shows, people more often blame circumstances for their failures, while the failures of others are explained by the personal qualities of those people who do not achieve success in life or find themselves in ridiculous or dangerous situations ( causal attribution ).

Very often, when interacting with other people and assessing his contribution to the common cause, a person explains the result obtained (positive or negative), based on the concept causes. In this case, two socio-psychological types of people can be distinguished. In the scientific literature they are called internals And externalities. The former believe that they owe their successes or failures to themselves, the latter see the reason for their own successes or failures in other people. This model is called locus of control it was developed by American social psychologist Julian Rotter.

Socio-psychological attitude

One of the basic concepts of social psychology, which is directly related to communication and interaction of people, is the concept socio-psychological attitude. For psychology, the concept installations (attitude ) is classic. It first began to be used at the beginning of the last century thanks to the works of W. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, who in 1918–1920. studied the process of adaptation of Polish emigrants to the United States. Later, describing the structure of the socio-psychological attitude, the American psychologist M. Smith proposed to consider it as consisting of three components: cognitive (cognitive), affective (emotional) conative (behavioural). Today, the study of socio-psychological attitude as a fundamental psychological phenomenon is no longer carried out. However, this concept is very widely used as an explanatory principle, a psychological mechanism that allows one to analyze and describe what happens to people in the process of social influence and interaction, in particular, as a result of the influence of advertising on the consciousness and behavior of the consumer.

Example

In the mid-1990s, when our country was moving from a planned economy to a market economy, completely new types of business activity appeared for us, and in particular advertising. Most entrepreneurs in those days had very vague ideas about the criteria for its economic and psychological effectiveness. Then one could encounter a huge number of psychological mistakes that were made in the production of advertising products. For example, in newspaper advertisements, of which there were a lot in those years, advertisements for the sale of goods and services were usually accompanied by slogans and drawings, the task of which, according to advertisers, was to create an additional positive emotional impression and, accordingly, enhance the effect of advertising on consumers.

In such newspapers one could find a large number of advertisements for chewing gum, toothpaste or, say, chocolate bars. At this time, a person contacted the Psychological Agency for Advertising Research (PARI) with a request to answer the question: why out of three types of advertising for the same products that his company does, only one works well? He provided three types of promotional materials that depicted the candy bar in different ways. At the same time, the manager asked to give him a substantiated scientific explanation of this phenomenon and to propose a method for quantitative assessment of the psychological effectiveness of advertising materials.

It should be noted that both in those years and today, advertisers and advertisers do not really trust psychology as a science when it comes to advertising, although most people think that psychology plays almost a decisive role here. Entrepreneurs still prefer to create advertising products based not on experiments, but on previous successful experience of an advertising campaign or the intuition of an advertiser. This happens largely because, on the one hand, psychological research requires time and money, and on the other hand, the recommendations of psychologists who do not have experience in advertising and marketing very often turn out to be ineffective.

So, three drawings were provided for examination.

1. "Bar in a package." It didn't sell very well with that kind of advertising.
2. "Cutaway bar." Here its inner layers were visible - caramel, nuts, chocolate. These bars sold best, which was apparently explained by a cognitive effect: the image of the layers expanded the buyer’s understanding of the product and contributed to its high rating according to the criterion of information content ( cognitive component of attitude ). In the same way, for example, water filters sold better if their advertisements featured filter layers and indicated the materials from which they were made.
3. "Bitten candy bar." Striving for maximum realism in the advertisement, the artist not only presented the cross-sectional structure of the product, but also depicted the teeth marks of a person who seemed to have bitten off part of the candy bar. It probably seemed to the artist that this type of advertising should best influence the consumer. Perhaps in the process of working on the drawing, the image of a person enjoying food disappeared, but traces of his teeth remained.

To assess psychological effectiveness, advertising was considered from the point of view of the theory of socio-psychological attitudes. A specially selected group of subjects was offered several tests to assess the cognitive, affective and conative components of the attitude that advertising should create in a person’s mind, influencing his consumer behavior. By cognitive tests Bars with layers demonstrated took first place in the ranking.

As already noted, this made it possible to enhance the emotional impression of the product and make the image of the bar “tastier” than the one where it was shown in the wrapper. By affective test The first places were taken by a bar in packaging and with an even cut in the middle. In last place was a bar with teeth marks: it clearly caused unpleasant emotional sensations among respondents. Likewise conative component test showed that buyers do not feel an irresistible desire to buy this product: the image of teeth marks caused them a feeling of disgust, and not at all a desire to try the bar and feel pleasure, as the artist initially believed.

As the analysis showed, the components of the socio-psychological attitude in the advertisement of a bitten chocolate bar are in conflict with each other. This means that it was not possible to create a socio-psychological attitude toward purchasing the product. As a result of the research, a methodology was developed that made it possible to evaluate advertising based on a model of socio-psychological attitude and compare various advertising materials, evaluating them by components.

It should be noted that initially psychologists had high hopes for the theory and concept of socio-psychological attitude. They believed that this would make it possible to study the mechanisms of social influence and explain exactly how individual human behavior is regulated in conditions of communication with other people. Methods for assessing socio-psychological attitudes and measuring scales have been widely used not only in scientific research, but also in practice. However, in the mid-1930s. Publications appeared that questioned both the attitude theory and the very possibility of explaining human behavior on its basis.

In particular, in 1934, Richard LaPierre, a psychologist from Stanford University, conducted an experiment in which he established the fact of a discrepancy between a person’s actual behavior and his socio-psychological attitudes. This phenomenon is called Lapierre's paradox. It turned out that the socio-psychological attitudes that a person, in his own words, follows, in many cases do not coincide with his real behavior, i.e. knowledge of an individual’s attitudes does not allow one to predict in advance his actual behavior. In those years, social psychologists and sociologists actively developed questionnaires to record socio-psychological attitudes, since the generally accepted opinion was that in real life people behave exactly as they report in answers to questionnaires. However, Lapierre showed that the attitudes expressed by a person must be assessed only as a “symbolic response to a hypothetical situation,” i.e. In many cases, survey results cannot predict people's actual actions.

Example

R. Lapierre conducted his research in two stages. At the first stage, he assessed the real behavior of people, for which, accompanied by a young Chinese couple, he made a car trip across the United States. The journey lasted about three years. During this time, they traveled around the Pacific coast of the United States, covering a distance of 16,000 km, visiting 67 hotels and 184 restaurants. At the same time, Lapierre carefully recorded the attitude of all hotel and restaurant employees towards the Chinese couple. Moreover, neither his companions nor the hotel staff knew anything about the research and behaved completely naturally.

Six months after the end of the trip, LaPierre sent out a questionnaire to all the places they managed to visit, where the central question was whether the owners and employees of these establishments would agree to host a Chinese couple. The researcher received responses from 81 restaurants and 47 hotels (about half of the establishments they visited). At the same time, Lapierre sent the same letters with questions to those places where the travelers had not been, but which were in the same regions. Another 32 hotels and 96 restaurants responded to him. It must be emphasized that in the 1930s. Americans had an extremely negative attitude towards people from Asian regions (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.). Therefore, almost 90% of the owners of restaurants and hotels that Lapierre and his companions visited, as well as those to which the scientist sent letters after the trip, responded that they “do not serve the Chinese.”

Despite criticism from many experimental psychologists regarding the research procedure, the results of R. Lapierre’s experiment were included in all textbooks on social psychology. They are still considered classic today, although scientists still argue both about the results of the study and about the adequacy of the methodology for its implementation.

Lapierre's paradox is important to take into account primarily when conducting mass public opinion polls. Since sociological questionnaires, as a rule, provide information about social attitudes, i.e. symbols, If we follow the terminology of Lapierre himself, then the result should be considered as symbolic. In addition, Lapierre drew attention to the fact that respondents’ answers about their attitude to something in the political sphere should also not be clearly linked to people’s actual behavior. A person’s reaction to a symbolic (conditional) situation, i.e. an attitude determined using a questionnaire cannot provide an accurate prediction of what a person’s behavior will be in a real situation. A person’s real attitudes can only be determined by studying his behavior in a real social situation, i.e. under experimental conditions.

Social contagion

One of the most important problems in social psychology is social influence, or impact. In this regard, an interesting phenomenon was discovered and described in 1982 by American psychologists James Wilson and George Kelling. They called the result of their research “the theory of broken windows” and expressed it very figuratively: if someone breaks a window in a house and no one inserts a new one, then soon there will not be a single intact window left in that house. In other words, people, having discovered disorder or destructive behavior of others, begin to see this as an opportunity to continue what they started, but they are the first to not violate accepted norms and behave in a “civilized” manner. Within the framework of applied psychology, this explains the psychological mechanism of looting, and within the framework of fundamental science, it explains the psychological mechanisms mental infection in social settings. To test this theory, researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands conducted several experiments.

Example

Residents of the city, coming for shopping, parked their bicycles near the wall of the store. The researchers attached a flyer from a defunct sporting goods store to each bicycle and removed trash cans from the store. When the wall next to which the bicycles were parked was clear, of the 77 cyclists, only 25 (33%) threw the advertisement onto the sidewalk. The researchers then painted the wall with incongruous designs. In this case, 53 out of 77 people (69%) have already littered the advertisement, which is statistically significant. Many similar experiments have been carried out, observing the conditions for their correct conduct. All of them confirmed this phenomenon.

Gradually, the "broken windows theory" became widespread. In accordance with it, first in New York, and then in other US cities, then in Europe and South Africa, authorities began to create and implement special programs to work with the population and the urban environment. They promptly removed spontaneous rubbish dumps on the streets, cleared walls of graffiti, repaired benches and playgrounds, etc. Thus, they managed to achieve not only a significant increase in the level of cleanliness in the cities, but also a general reduction in crime rates. In general, people began to behave more civilly. Obviously, this confirms the idea expressed many years ago by the English philosopher Francis Bacon that it is “the opportunity to steal that makes the thief.”

The foundations of this theory were laid by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider, a member of the research laboratory of Kurt Koffka. Heider outlined his concept in the book “Psychology of Interpersonal Relations” (1958). Later, American psychologists Harold Kelly, Edward Johnson, Lee Ross and others worked on this theory.
Nevertheless, even today, many businessmen and heads of government agencies, when making important decisions, are often guided solely by the results of sociological surveys, without considering other methods of obtaining information, which would be correct from a psychological point of view. But the fact is that people simply do not realize the reasons for their actions. As A. N. Leontyev noted, in answers about the reasons for their actions, people most often do not report motives, encouraging them to act in a certain way, but only motivation.

Attribution theory

Who are you and where are you? Generally speaking, when we try to understand why a person did a certain thing - behaved nobly or unrestrainedly, bought an expensive stereo system or started using drugs - we can consider the reason for his behavior either some trait of his character or some features of the situation , in which this person was located. Dispositional(or internal) attribution explain observed behavior by reasons that lie within the individual. Dispositional attribution is the assumption that behavior reflects some unique quality of a given person. If we believe that someone works hard because their personal attitudes, religious beliefs, or character and personality traits require it, then these are all examples of dispositional attributions. It is assumed that the behavior is due to an internal reason, for example: “Tanya worked hard on the project simply because she likes to work.”

Let's clarify the difference between dispositional and situational attributions with an example. Suppose a certain Joe the Candidate gives a speech advocating for stricter regulations on air pollutant emissions from coal-fired factories as a measure to prevent acid rain. One of his listeners, Joan, approves of his views on environmental protection: “I can vote for this guy, he has the right ideas about how to solve the acid rain problem.” Joan’s friend Mary, who is listening to the speech with her, winces and looks at Joan in surprise: “Listen, Joan, this guy just wants to please the audience. He promises to introduce these regulations to win the votes of all the environmentalists in our college. But don't think he'll take any real action." Mary arrived at a situational attribution: he is doing this to win over the audience. Joan chose a dispositional attribution: the content of the candidate's speech is explained by his environmentally correct attitudes; Therefore, she concluded that his position on other environmental issues would be equally correct in the future.

Michael Jordan or any other dark-skinned professional athlete that he achieved success “through natural talent alone” and you will see how he reacts to your “compliment”.

How we make decisions. Prominent attribution theorist Harold Kelley (1967) believes that when deciding whether to attribute observed behavior situationally or dispositionally, we consider three factors. We focus on personalities person, i.e. we are inclined towards dispositional attribution when three conditions are met. Firstly, very often this happens when a person’s behavior obscene, that is, it differs from the typical one characteristic of most people who find themselves in a similar situation. For example, you see a student who is rude to a teacher who is respected and loved by everyone. You are much more likely to attribute this atypical behavior to some negative quality of this particular student (“stupid, arrogant boor,” “pathologically hostile type”) than to any situational factors (for example, a remark made by the teacher).

Second, dispositional attributions are more likely to be made when the actor (whose behavior we are observing) is known to behave in that way frequently. Consistent Behavior that is repeated over and over again characterizes the person, not the situation. For example, if Terry Always comes to class on time, then you explain this by the fact that she is a punctual person - or by her obsessive need to not be late. You will find that her behavior reflects a personality trait rather than a reaction to situational factors that change from time to time. Situational reasons are possible; Maybe during classes on some subject, the teacher immediately after the bell locks the door and does a roll call, thus identifying truants. But if the behavior is consistent, then it is most often attributed to dispositional factors. In fact, personality theory psychologists consider consistency of behavior across situations to be one of the defining aspects of personality traits.

The third circumstance that encourages dispositional attributions is the same type of behavior in many different situations in which a variety of stimuli are present; in other words, when behavior undifferentiated (nondistinctive), that is, it occurs not only in a situation of a certain type. For example, you might suspect that Terry actually has an internal compulsive desire for punctuality if she is not only never late for class, but also consistently arrives on time everywhere, even to parties where being late is perceived as the norm and is considered “good manners.” Since neither these situations themselves, nor the stimuli present in them, in your opinion, can be regarded as the causes of the observed behavior, we can only assume that it had an internal cause.

The observer can immediately obtain information about normativity, consistency and differentiation (distinctiveness) behavior. Thus, when solving the dilemma of “situation or disposition?”, we usually weigh various factors. Suppose that, after you expressed your opinion in class, one of your classmates of the opposite sex complimented you, admiring your insight. You made a couple more remarks, and both times your comments aroused the wild delight of this (by the way, very pretty!) person. And why would this be? You think: “Others never flatter me (non-normative behavior). And this sweet lady is giving me compliments for the third time (consistency of behavior). That's funny...” But you also remember hearing this same person indiscriminately praise many other members of the opposite sex in your class when they were discussing something in class (undifferentiated behavior). All three of your observations - and especially the last one, about this person flattering everyone of the opposite sex - suggest a dispositional attribution, which, sadly, does nothing to stroke your ego. This person loves to flirt, or at least is the type of person who gets carried away by everyone who attracts their attention - more precisely, those of them who belong to the opposite sex.

What exactly is happening to you? In the previous example, where we were talking about why you received a “non-normative” compliment from a classmate, two possible scenarios arose that led to different attributions: either this person is generally prone to flirting, or he liked you specifically. In this case specifically dispositional attribution was predetermined by the fact that we recognized the behavior of a pleasant person of the opposite sex as differentiated. Some other considerations also allow us to come to the conclusion about what kind of person we have in front of us, what specific features he has. Sometimes this conclusion turns out to be correct, and sometimes not.

We can use the information contained in the results that we believe a person's behavior produces (Jones and Davis, 1965). Imagine a very busy student who rarely gets to go to the movies. To understand why she chose to watch movie A and not go to movie B, we must first exclude from consideration all common characteristics - such as ticket price, start time, distance to the cinema, etc. The difference between these films is that that film A has a science fiction plot, and film B is nominated for an Oscar. Now we can make a completely reasonable conclusion that the student chose film A because she really loves science fiction films.

Question. Why did twelve-year-old Marty suddenly become so naughty?

Answer. He's just going through a period right now.

Question. Why is dad in such a bad mood today?

Answer. Perhaps he was having trouble at work again.

Causal explanations are not always justified. The principles of attribution we have described assume a fairly rational, logical observer. When a person performing an action behaves in the same way as everyone else, the observer concludes that this behavior is to a very large extent determined by the situation. If the behavior of an actor leads to non-standard consequences, then the observer looks for a clue to the motives of behavior in these consequences. These are perfectly reasonable decision rules. And people do take into account in their reasoning such factors as normativity, consistency and differentiation of behavior, as well as the usual/unusual nature of its results. This is supported by studies in which subjects were presented with various behavioral scenarios (similar to the story of a student flattering his classmates), differing only in the presence of the mentioned factors, after which the subjects chose the most likely cause of the behavior (see McArthur, 1972; Ferguson and Wells, 1980).

Clear predominance of dispositions. In addition, there is an attribution bias that occurs so often and has such important consequences that it has been called fundamental attribution error(Ross, 1977). Whenever we observe behavior and try to understand what causes it, our judgments may be subject to two types of interrelated biases. If the reason for a behavior is not obvious, then we tend to revaluation the role of dispositional factors and underestimation situational factors. Following the progress of a “behavioral drama,” we overly readily focus on the personality traits and character traits of the characters, but we do not want to take into account the features of the stage space in which and on the basis of which the action unfolds. Our culture is characterized by the “cult of the ego,” in which special attention is paid to individual initiative and personal responsibility for successes and failures, sins and misdeeds. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are more inclined to see a person who finds himself in a certain situation than the situation that makes the person the way we see him. In fact, one of the most important truths that social psychology has taught us is that human behavior is influenced by situational variables much more than we usually think or are willing to admit (see Watson, 1982, etc.).

The fundamental attribution error has been repeatedly demonstrated in scientific studies, which have shown how rarely a situation is “at fault” for a particular behavior. In a study of students' judgments of their own and others' intelligence, subjects participated in a quiz in which one person asked questions and another attempted to answer them (Ross et al., 1977). The researchers randomly assigned the roles of “leaders” and “competitors” to students. Students assigned to the role of presenters were asked to come up with the ten most difficult questions on any topic, with the only condition being that they had to know the correct answers to these questions. Thus, the contestants clearly found themselves at an extremely disadvantageous position. One could hardly expect them to be well informed about what the presenters are interested in or what they are knowledgeable about. Therefore, round after round, the contestants had to admit in dull voices that they did not know the answers to many questions. And round after round, the students who observed these interactions attributed more intelligence and erudition to the presenter, denying these qualities to the contestant - although the rules of the game were brought to the attention of the students and they knew very well who chooses the topics of the questions. The observers were clearly committing a fundamental attribution error. They did not take into account the significant head start that the presenters received.

The main conclusion that follows from the results of this and many other experiments is that we often not taken into account properly the influence of situational variables on the behavior we observe in other people, even if we still recognize that the situation played some role. This finding is supported by the phenomenon of “victim-blame shifting,” in which a person is held responsible for being homeless, unemployed, or a victim of violence, while the influence of social and political factors is paid lip service to (Ryan, 1971). Conservative lawyer Mona Charen, who wrote speeches for President Reagan, articulated in her article exactly how the above point of view becomes part of political philosophy. She writes about the crack craze sweeping through cities in the central United States: “Seeing people ruining their lives by using drugs, conservatives conclude that the problem is that addicts lack self-control and has nothing to do with the situation in society.” "(Charen, 1990, p. 3).

Self-perception and self-attribution

Most often, you are faced with behavior that is demonstrated not by an abstract “actor”, but by yourself. When you do something, you are almost always aware of your actions and therefore can reflect on them - just as you might reflect on the actions of another person. Do the laws of attribution we just described apply to self-perception? Of course, much of our behavior is planned in advance and therefore does not need any ex post explanations, which are closely related to the attributional process. In addition, our internal states, including our attitudes and emotions, often cause us to behave in a particular way in a particular situation. In such cases we know Why we behaved exactly this way and not otherwise. On the other hand, as you remember from the previous chapter, some types of behavior do not require preliminary comparison with a person’s attitudes or mental states. We looked at cases where unconscious habits and subtle situational pressures work together to shape a person’s behavior without him noticing it. According to self-perception theories Daryl Boehm (Bern, 1972), in cases like this "actor" explaining his behavior, he can reason attributively, as if from the position observer behavior of the “actor”.

Boehm argues that most human behavior is not the product of prior reflection on inner feelings and attitudes. Quite often the opposite happens. People infer what their internal states or feelings were—or what they should have been—by recalling their past behavior and the situational factors that affected them then. For example, imagine a woman lawyer on Wall Street who, on her way to and from work, often gives away all the change from her pockets to street beggars. One day at lunch, the conversation turns to life in New York, and a colleague asks our heroine whether, in her opinion, she should give to the poor. This question puzzles her because she has never really thought about it. However, as far as she remembers, every day she gives money to beggars (consistent behavior). Besides, no one had ever forced her to do this; if she wanted, she could look away and walk past (no obvious situational pressure). And finally, now that she thinks about it, the impact of the situation does not seem particularly strong to her, because a lot of people pass by these unfortunate people (no normative pressure). It becomes clear to our generous heroine that since she behaves this way, it means that she has a positive attitude towards giving to the poor. She is truly a generous person.

If this example reminds you of one of the explanations given in the previous chapter for the foot-in-the-door effect, you have made the correct generalization. Self-perception theory provides a plausible explanation for why people who have done a small favor for others then want to do more for them. Having provided help, such people conclude that they are always ready to help others.

The power of emotions. Self-attribution processes are particularly likely to influence the experience of emotions. Strong emotions have one common feature: they cause increased physiological arousal, characterized by increased heart rate, sucking in the pit of the stomach, nervous tremors, etc. Usually, thanks to these sensations, we are aware of our emotions, and its cause is clearly deduced from a specific situation. For example: “My heart is pounding and my palms are sweating. I’m angry and jealous because I just saw my beloved with someone else.” However, sometimes physical sensations and situational signals contradict each other, as a result of which we are faced with an attributional problem and try to understand for ourselves: what is this feeling? Classic self-attribution theory suggests that if the causes of an internal state of arousal are sufficiently ambiguous, then the experienced emotion will reflect what obvious aspects of the external situation suggest.

And if the situation is interpreted incorrectly, then the result is misattribution. In one classic study, people were asked to consent to being given electric shocks of increasing intensity, ostensibly to test their ability to tolerate pain (Nisbett and Schachter, 1966). Some subjects were pre-given a drug that supposedly caused increased heart rate and other symptoms of agitation. In fact, the “drug” was sugar pills. However, these subjects withstood stronger electric shocks than those who did not receive the “drug”: the electric shock caused them less severe pain. They mistakenly attributed their agitation not to its real cause - excitement due to the anticipation of the discharge and the subsequent pain - but to the “normal” effects of the “drug”.

Similar misattributions were observed in an experiment examining the influence of arousal on subjects' responses to insults (Zillman and Bryant, 1974). One group of experiment participants performed physical exercises that required significant stress, while others did relaxation exercises. After some time, a short break was announced. When the break ended and the subjects began exercising again, a man (actually the experimenter's assistant) entered the gym and began making insulting remarks. Those who exercised vigorously expressed more anger at the personal insult they received than those who had simply relaxed. Apparently, the residual arousal from the exercise was “superimposed” on the arousal caused by the insult, resulting in the subject feeling an extremely strong feeling of anger. The conclusion suggests itself. How do you think this principle works during group gatherings, where speeches are usually preceded by marching, singing and shouting?

“A fundamentally wrong idea” - about ourselves. You may have noticed that all the examples discussed so far have one thing in common: people made some inaccuracies in attributional reasoning about themselves. They seemed to ignore real reasons for your behavior. For example, students did not pay much attention to the adverbs cleverly built into the wording of the questionnaire items, while they largely determined the nature of the conclusions about their own religious feelings. They committed a fundamental attribution error, underestimating the role of the situation in shaping behavior, in this case their own assessments of their attitude towards religion.

Perhaps even more surprising from this point of view were the results of the quiz study described above. As we remember, the observers concluded that the “test subjects - competitors” were significantly less erudite than the “test subjects - presenters”, who asked them tricky questions. Observers lost sight of the deliberate “unfairness” of the rules of the game: the presenters had the right to choose the topics of questions. We know that even the competitors were unable to properly assess the impact of this situational limitation, since they assessed their own knowledge as lower than the knowledge of the students who asked them questions. Another victory of the situation over people!

Self-knowledge and self-perception: which is stronger? The process of self-perception - with all its pitfalls - usually begins when, in the words of Boehm (1972), "internal guidelines are weak, ambiguous or impossible to interpret." If you can't name your favorite color because you've never thought about it, then you may have to analyze your behavior to come to an appropriate conclusion. What color clothes do you wear most often? What color predominates in the design of your room or apartment? On the other hand, if you you know what is your favorite color, you do not need to analyze your own behavior to draw conclusions about your color preferences.

Often, “strong internal signals” are simply clear and clearly conscious judgments about oneself, i.e. knowledge about oneself. With this kind of knowledge, people rely less on self-attributions, as the study following the religious speech experiment described above demonstrated with extreme clarity. The researchers repeated it, again using the verbal magic of adverbs to make subjects remember their own actions that were characteristic of “supporters” or “opponents” of an opinion. Two changes were made to the experimental procedure: firstly, ecology, rather than religion, was chosen as the topic of the statements; secondly, students were distributed into two groups not randomly, but in accordance with the structure of their existing attitudes regarding ecology. Students in one group had consistent and clearly defined attitudes on environmental issues. Students from the other group had attitudes toward environmental protection that were not particularly consistent and not well thought out. The experiment gave completely clear results, which are presented in Fig. 3.1. Students from both groups were affected by the peculiarities of the wording of the questionnaire items, which had such surprising power. When assessing statements about environmental behavior, students were more likely to choose statements that used the adverb “sometimes” in their self-descriptions than statements that used the more extreme adverb “often.” However, it turned out that the nature of the wording of the questionnaire items influenced installations only those students who had “weak” attitudes before the experiment. Students who had consistent, “strong” attitudes before completing the questionnaire did not change them and continued to adhere to their original positions. The researchers concluded that “subjects with consistent attitudes had strong beliefs in their views and a clear sense of themselves as pro-environmentalists, so they did not need to infer their attitudes from currently available information about their behavior” (Chaiken and Baldwin, 1981, p. 9). Those who initially had weak attitudes did what Boehm would have predicted: they accepted their actions as the basis for their new attitudes.

I didn't know until I was asked. It is clear that people do not continually form new attitudes and beliefs on the basis of self-perceptions and beliefs about their present or past behavior. Processes of self-perception occur mainly when we have a “need to understand the structure

Rice. 3.1. Processes of self-perception occur when attitudes are weak Commentary. The wording of the questionnaire items encouraged respondents to note the frequency of their behavior that was either pro-environmental or detrimental to the environment. For those respondents whose attitudes towards the environment were initially weak and insufficiently thought out, after filling out the questionnaire they became stronger in accordance with the ideas about themselves that developed during the process and under the influence of filling out the questionnaire. At the same time, respondents with initially strong, clearly expressed environmental attitudes were not affected by “behavior when filling out the questionnaire.” (Source: Chaiken and Baldwin, 1981.)

careful consideration of some new object of installation” (Fazio, 1987). When we are directly asked to express our opinion about something, or when we expect that in the near future we will have to directly encounter this object, we turn to memories of our own past behavior to “check” our beliefs. Under such circumstances, that is, when it is necessary to formulate our attitude “on the spot,” we sometimes attach very great importance to our own relevant behavior in the past.

It would be interesting to consider, in light of all the above, the story of the Wall Street lawyer. Her behavior towards beggars was always habitual to the point of automatism. A man with an outstretched hand turns to her with a request (“I don’t have a job and I’m hungry”); she takes a quarter dollar out of her coat pocket and gives it to the person asking. Her mind busy with completely different things - for example, current court cases. She never spent time forming an opinion on whether she should give to the poor, since she had no such need, and there were already plenty of topics to think about. Need for formation installation appeared only when she was asked a question on this topic. However, it can be assumed that she would still have to formulate an attitude about the advisability of giving to the poor the very next week (this was the summer of 1988), because then she would have received a Time magazine with the headline “To Give or Not to Give?” Not only social psychologists, but also the media create situations that push us to form attitudes: to make us decide on our views and “vote”, for or against.

Religious "self-conversion". In the first chapter of this book we described the “recruitment” of new adherents to the Moonist religious cult. People receive invitations and voluntarily agree to spend a weekend in a Mooney village, where their participation in group activities is encouraged in a way that creates an atmosphere of lightness and fun. Once newcomers find themselves in a Moonist haven and act like Moonies themselves, they may well conclude from their behavior that they like at least some of the Moonies' ideas, and that they themselves share these ideas. There are other factors that contribute to this self-attribution. Cult worshipers try to make the cult activity first appealing to newcomers and bring satisfaction - the so-called “love bombing”. Newcomers get pleasure and come to the conclusion that its source is the lifestyle of the cult worshipers; a positive attitude towards him arises. In addition, the newcomers provide all possible assistance to the Moonies: they work in the fields for some time and donate a little money. Some of our students' practical training programs include "going through the Moon treatment." Students who underwent such treatment in 1990 reported that they had to pay small sums for food, travel to the camp, and for weekend stays, the Moonies' way of tying newcomers into obligation, in a very "foot-in-the-door" spirit. .

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· Introduction.

· Attributions of locus of control.

· Other attributions.

· Attribution errors.

· The role of self-efficacy in attribution.

· Summary.

· References.

Introduction.

Despite the fact that theories of work motivation are usually divided into substantive and procedural, new theories have appeared in recent years. In particular, attribution theory. Understanding this theory is necessary to study work motivation within the framework of organizational behavior.

Not so long ago, attributions made by people began to be considered as an important element of motivation for work activity. Unlike other theories, attribution theory is a theory of the relationship between personal perception and interpersonal behavior rather than a theory of individual motivation. The variety of attribution theories is constantly increasing. However, a recent analysis of them allows us to conclude that they are all united by the following general assumptions.

1. We try to find meaning in the world around us.

2. We often explain people's actions by either internal or external reasons.

3. We do this largely based on logic.

Well-known theorist Harold Kelly emphasizes that attribution theory is concerned primarily with those cognitive processes by which a person interprets behavior as caused by (or attributed to) certain elements of the relevant environment. It deals with the “why” of motivation and behavior. Although most reasons, attributes, and “why” questions cannot be observed directly, the theory states that people rely on cognitive acts, primarily sensations. Attribution theory assumes that people are rational and have a need to identify and understand the causal structure of the environment. It is the search for these attributes that is the main characteristic of attribution theory.

Although the roots of attribution theory can be found in the work of the pioneers of cognitive theory (for example, in the work of Lewin and Festinger), among the ideas of cognitive assessment of de Charmas, in Boehm's concept of “self-perception”, its author is usually recognized as Fritz Heider. Heider believed that both internal forces (personal qualities such as ability, effort and fatigue) and external forces (properties of the environment, such as rules and weather), complement each other, determine behavior. He emphasized that these important determinants of behavior are perceived, not real. People behave differently depending on whether they perceive internal or external attributes. It is this concept of differential attribution that has important implications for work motivation.

Locus of control attributions.

Using the concept of “locus of control,” it is possible to explain a person’s behavior at work based on where, according to his feelings, control over the results he has achieved comes from: from within or from without. Employees who perceive internal control believe that they can influence their own performance through their abilities, skills, or efforts. Workers who perceive external control believe that they cannot regulate their own performance; they believe that they are controlled by external forces. Importantly, perceived locus of control may have differential effects on job performance and job satisfaction. For example, research by Rotter and his colleagues shows that skills influence behavior differently than opportunities provided by the environment. In addition, a number of studies have been conducted in recent years to test attribution theory—the locus of control model—in work settings. One study found that workers who perceive internal control tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, are more likely to hold managerial positions, and are more satisfied with participative management (based on the involvement of workers in management decisions) than workers who perceive external control.

Other studies have shown that managers who experience internal control are more effective, more attentive to subordinates, try not to work too hard, and think more strategically when completing tasks. The attribution process has also been found to play a role in organizational politics when forming coalitions. In particular, employees who form a coalition attribute more importance to internal factors such as ability and willingness, while individuals who are not part of a coalition are more likely to rely on external factors such as luck.

A practical conclusion that can be drawn from these studies is that managers who experience internal control outperform managers who experience external control. However, such generalizations are still not fully confirmed, since there are a number of contradictory facts. For example, after one of the studies it was concluded that the ideal manager may have an external orientation. Data obtained from the study indicated that externally controlled managers were perceived as more structured and analytical than internally controlled managers. In addition to its practical applications in the analysis of managerial behavior and performance, attribution theory has been shown to be quite suitable for explaining goal-setting behavior, leader behavior, and the reasons for poor employee performance. The review article concludes that locus of control is associated with job performance and a sense of satisfaction among organizational members and can act as a link in the relationship between motivation and reward.

Additionally, attributions are related to organizational symbolism, which essentially says that if you want to understand an organization, you need to understand its symbolic nature. From this perspective, most organizations are based on attributions rather than physical or observable reality. For example, research has found that symbols are an important source of information on which people form their impressions of the psychological climate.

Other attributions.

Attribution theory contains much that can help to better understand organizational behavior. However, in addition to external and internal locus of control, other parameters should be explained and studied in the future. For example, one social psychologist has suggested that the dimension of resilience (fixed or variable) should also be taken into account. It is possible, for example, that experienced workers may have stable internal representations regarding their ability and unstable internal representations regarding effort. In addition, these workers may well have stable external perceptions of task difficulty and unstable external perceptions of luck.