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Immortalist...

Posted: Sun May 11, 2008 7:12 pm

Guest

Attribution is a concept in Social Psychology referring to how
individuals explain behaviors of others. ...The two main types of
attributions are internal and external attributions. When an internal
attribution is made, the cause of the given behavior is assigned to
the individuals personality, attitudes, character, or disposition.
When an external attribution is made, the cause of the given behavior
is assigned to the situation in which the behavior was seen. The
individual producing the behavior did so because of the surrounding
environment or the social situation. These two types of attribution
lead to very different perceptions of the individual engaging in a
behavior. Personal is Internal and SItuational is external...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28psychology%29

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (also known
as correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for
people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based,
explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing
situational explanations. In other words, people have an unjustified
tendency to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind" of
person that person is rather than on the social and environmental
forces influencing the person. Overattribution is less likely, perhaps
even inverted, when people explain their own behavior; this
discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

In psychology, people are known to display an actor-observer bias,
when actors tend to attribute their own behavior to their
circumstances (i.e., situation causes), but tend to attribute the
behaviors of those we observe to their dispositions (i.e., person
causes). It is a kind of attributional bias, and therefore also a
cognitive bias.

Simply put, the actor-observer bias can be expressed as, "If others do
it, it's their fault; if I do it, it's not my fault, it's because of
the situation I'm in."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-observer_bias

Immortalist...

Posted: Sun May 11, 2008 8:28 pm

Guest

On May 11, 10:32 pm, Malrassic Park <malen... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:

Quote:

On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist

reanimater_2... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
These two types of attribution
lead to very different perceptions of the individual engaging in a
behavior. Personal is Internal and SItuational is external...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28psychology%29

Doesn't it say there are two kinds of internal attribution, the moral
and the psychological?
--

I think this area of social psychology attempts to argue that
"attribution" is like "naming a cause" or a worse term "blaming" since
it is good to point to causes of our perceptions of self and others.
When I do something wrong or make mistakes I am driven to see it as
cause by the situation, but when others make a mistake I am driven to
see it a somehow a result of their "disposition" or skill set or
something like that. Here read this all the way through, (just
joking);

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology_%28psychology%29

Dispositional attribution is the explanation of individual behavior as
a result caused by internal characteristics that reside within the
individual, as opposed to outside (situational) influences that stem
from the environment or culture in which that individual is found.

For example, dispositional optimism is an tendency that applies
generally across situations, but situational optimism is having hope
and expecting a good outcome in a specific situation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositional_attribution

Situated cognition describes a perspective of human cognition that
asserts learning happens as human beings interact with the living
world. The situativity theory of cognition comes together in the
family of research presented here. Although modes of inquiry,
perspectives, and politics within the field vary, a commitment to un-
situate thinking from inside the head does not.

Situated cognition, also referred to as the situativity theory of
cognition (Greeno, 1998), is a theory of thinking as mainly "on the
fly" and "in the moment," rather than off line and mainly in our
heads. It is a context and situation-bound theory of cognition—a
theory that claims thinking is complex, radical, individual, yet
inextricably bound to, and motivated by, the conviviality social human
interaction affords.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition

http://www.umpi.maine.edu/~stump/socialpsy.html

Quote:

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

Malrassic Park...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 12:32 am

Guest

On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist
<reanimater_2000 at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:

Quote:

These two types of attribution
lead to very different perceptions of the individual engaging in a
behavior. Personal is Internal and SItuational is external...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28psychology%29

Doesn't it say there are two kinds of internal attribution, the moral
and the psychological?
--

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

ZerkonX...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 7:04 am

Guest

On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700, Immortalist wrote:

Quote:

The two main types of
attributions are internal and external attributions.

Better expressed:

Attributions are (falsely) classified into two main types.
The classification process demands a false division for the purpose of
study.

The 'internal' and 'external' are not as separate as this needed
cognitive process tells us. For instance, the quality of the environment,
let's say 'water', directly effects all internal processes. Internal
disposition, which can be the product of anything from upbringing to
developmental stage, can effect all perception of the environment.

Despite this there is a need to sort things out if a person, or as it
turns out a society, becomes ill and destructive to itself and/or others.
So these classification schemes hopefully will help. They may not however
in that it stamps blind spots onto the observer or clinician.

A good example of this is ADD or ADHD or whatever the fave designation is
these days. It is now known without question that diet and extra-
curricula activities (eg Sugar and TV) trigger hyper behavior. So a
school psychologist, one eye on a normative behavioral chart another on
the dervish kid, will see behavior as a purely 'internal' attribute. The
fact that this kid had two bowels of Count Chocula and watched 1/2 an
episode of Power Rangers before school is off their scope maybe even of
no interest before the parents are called. Maybe this has changed.

Immortalist...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 8:56 am

Guest

On May 12, 10:00 am, Malrassic Park <malen... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:

Quote:

On Sun, 11 May 2008 23:28:30 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist

reanimater_2... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On May 11, 10:32 pm, Malrassic Park <malen... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist

reanimater_2... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
These two types of attribution
lead to very different perceptions of the individual engaging in a
behavior. Personal is Internal and SItuational is external...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28psychology%29

Doesn't it say there are two kinds of internal attribution, the moral
and the psychological?
--

I think this area of social psychology attempts to argue that
"attribution" is like "naming a cause" or a worse term "blaming" since
it is good to point to causes of our perceptions of self and others.
When I do something wrong or make mistakes I am driven to see it as
cause by the situation, but when others make a mistake I am driven to
see it a somehow a result of their "disposition" or skill set or
something like that. Here read this all the way through, (just
joking);

I'm just asking about moral and psychological attribution because
Objectivism is rife with this error, often confusing the two into one
jumbled mass of verbiage which sounds coherent only to Randroids.

Well I don't know what Rand thought about social psychology but here
is an Objectivist trying to explain Objectivism out of a corner
produced by an experiment that shows that a diffusion of
responsibility can sometimes lead to strange and embarassing
consequences. I say sometimes because in some experiments, like on a
subway train everyone has sense of being teamed somehow and will help
an injured person while out in the streets they will walk right by an
injured person.

http://ios.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=25&h=53

I think this article sets the distinction of team/not-team
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878670,00.html

Quote:

--

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Immortalist...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 9:05 am

Guest

On May 12, 5:04 am, ZerkonX <Z... at (no spam) X.net> wrote:

Quote:

On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700, Immortalist wrote:
The two main types of
attributions are internal and external attributions.

Better expressed:

Attributions are (falsely) classified into two main types.
The classification process demands a false division for the purpose of
study.

The 'internal' and 'external' are not as separate as this needed
cognitive process tells us. For instance, the quality of the environment,
let's say 'water', directly effects all internal processes. Internal
disposition, which can be the product of anything from upbringing to
developmental stage, can effect all perception of the environment.

Here is a section about the attribution error from a Social Psychology
textbook. Please point out where the author does what you say and
produces a false classification. And what about the experiments, do
they constitute any sort of evidence?

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

The Fundamental Attribution Error. The term fundamental attribution
error refers to a general human tendency to overestimate the
importance of personality or dispositional factors relative to
situational or environmental influences when describing and explaining
the causes of social behavior. We have already seen one example of
this tendency—correspondent inference. That is, when explaining why
Sam took a specific political position or performed a specific
behavior, we tend to use personality characteristics (he believes
strongly in the issue; he is lazy) as opposed to situational factors
(he was assigned that position; he was very tired that day). This may
lead us to believe that there is more consistency of motive and
behavior in the world than actually exists.

Another example of the fundamental attribution error is provided by an
experiment conducted by Gunter Bierbrauer. In this experiment,
subjects witnessed a reenactment of a person's performance in Stanley
Milgram's famous experiment on obedience to authority (described in
Chapter 2). Recall that in this experiment, Milgram constructed a
situation that elicited high rates of obedi-ence;vin this case, the
behavior involved administering severe electric shocks to a "learner."
Like most subjects in the original Milgram experiment, the person in
Bierbrauer's reenactment showed a high level of obedience,
administering the maximum level of electric shock. After showing the
reenactment, Bierbrauer then asked his subjects to estimate how many
of Milgram's subjects in general would be obedient in this situation.
The results showed that subjects consistently underestimated the
actual degree of obedience. Specifically, Bierbrauer's subjects
estimated that only 10 to 20 percent of the people in this setting
would give the maximum shock of 450 volts. In actuality, as you will
recall, Milgram found that 65 percent of the subjects administered
this level of shock. In other words, Bierbrauer's subjects assumed
that this person was an aberration—that his behavior reflected
distinguishing personal dispositions (i.e., that he was particularly
aggressive or obedient). They failed to attribute his behavior to the
power of the situation to produce this behavior in most people.

As observers, we frequently lose sight of the fact that each
individual plays many social roles and that we might be observing only
one of them. Thus, the importance of social roles can be easily
overlooked in explaining a person's behavior. For example, I know a
psychology professor whom I will call Dr. Mensch. The students adore
Dr. Mensch. When they describe him on teacher evaluations and
informally, they use words such as warm, caring, concerned about
students, approachable, charismatic, brilliant, and friendly. However,
Dr. Mensch's professional colleagues have a different image of him,
especially those who have given professional talks when he was in the
audience. Like the students, they see him as brilliant, but they also
describe Dr. Mensch as intense, critical, tough, argumentative, and
relentless.

Who has the right impression—the students or the professional
colleagues? Is he really a tough critical person who is simply putting
on an act in order to appear to be warm and caring in front of his
students? Or is he really a warm and caring individual who pretends to
be tough when confronting other psychologists? These are the wrong
questions. The fact is that my friend is capable of a wide range of
behaviors. Some social roles tend to pull behavior from one part of
the spectrum; other social roles tend to pull behavior from a
different part of the spectrum. The students see Dr. Mensch in only
one role—that of teacher. He is a very good teacher, and the job of a
good teacher is to get the best out of the student; this usually
requires warm and caring behavior. The students have accurately
described my friend's behavior within this role. On the other hand,
the role of a useful professional colleague sometimes requires
adversarial behavior. In order to discover the truth, a good
professional often will strongly press an argument to see how far it
will go. This frequently results in sharp, intense, and relentless
criticism. Thus, Dr. Mensch's professional colleagues also accurately
describe the behavior that they see. However, both students and
professional colleagues make a fundamental attribution error when they
assume that the behavior they observe is due entirely to some
personality characteristic; rather, it is based largely on the way Dr.
Mensch perceives the requirements of his social role. This is not to
say that personality is irrelevant. Not everyone is capable of the
wide array of behaviors manifested by Dr. Mensch. But to assume that
he is either tough or warm is to ignore the power of the social role.

A clever experiment by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz
illustrates how the impact of social roles can be underestimated in
explaining behavior. They set up a "quiz show" format in which they
randomly assigned subjects to one of two roles: (1) a questioner,
whose task it was to prepare difficult questions for (2) a contestant,
whose task it was to answer them. An observer watched this simulated
quiz show and then estimated the questioner's and the contestant's
general knowledge. Try to put yourself in the role of the observer.
What do you see? Well, unless you are very careful, you will see one
very smart, knowledgeable person and one rather stupid person.

But please take a closer look. Notice how these two roles constrain
the behavior of the participants. The questioner is likely to come up
with some fairly difficult questions based on esoteric knowledge: "In
what baseball park did Babe Ruth hit his second to last home run?"
"What is the capital city of Lithuania?" and "What is the date of
Thomas Jefferson's death?" By simply asking these questions, the
questioner looks smart. On the other hand, the contestant is faced
with answering these difficult questions and is likely to miss a few.
This makes him or her look a little stupid. And this is exactly what
Ross and his colleagues found. The observers felt, that the
questioners were far more knowledgeable than the contestants. However,
since everyone was randomly assigned to their roles, it is extremely
unlikely that all of the questioners were actually more knowledgeable
than all of the contestants. What is most interesting is that the
observers knew that the participants had been randomly assigned to
these roles. Yet they failed to consider the impact of these social
roles in making their judgments about the quiz show participants and
fell into the trap of attributing what they saw to personal
dispositions.

If the fundamental attribution error were limited to judgments about
college professors and quiz show participants, it probably would not
be much of a cause for concern. However, its implications are far-
reaching. Consider a common reaction of most Americans to a person
using food stamps at a supermarket: "She is lazy; if she just tried
harder, she could get a job." Or consider this characterization of a
convicted burglar: "He is a terrible human being; what type of villain
could commit such acts?" Both descriptions could conceivably be
accurate, but what is more likely is that they represent the
fundamental attribution error in action. Although this is not the
place for a full discussion of the situational determinants of poverty
and crime, there can be many factors other than personal
characteristics that can explain why a person is poor or commits a
crime. These include lack of job opportunities, illiteracy, economic
recession, the lack of positive role models in one's neighborhood, and
growing up in a dysfunctional family.

I do not mean to imply that a criminal should not be held accountable
for his or her actions. Criminals are responsible for what they do and
should be held accountable. But by focusing on personal rather than
situational factors, we will advocate different policies for dealing
with social problems such as poverty and crime. For example, the
attribution "this criminal is a fiend" will result in a policy of
spending more money on bigger and stronger prisons and doling out
longer prison sentences. Perceiving the causes of crime as due largely
to unemployment, poor role models, and illiteracy will result in
policies such as increased spending for better schools and better
teachers and tax credits to businesses that invest in poverty-stricken
areas. Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that dispositional
factors such as laziness, clumsiness, or vicious-ness do not exist.
They do. I am merely pointing out that most of us, most of the time,
are too prone to invoke a dispositional attribution when the cause of
the behavior may well be situational. At the very least, our knowledge
of the fundamental attribution error should alert us to the
possibility that our dispositional attributions may not always be
correct and that we should take seriously the motto of the novelist
Samuel Butler: "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

Quote:

Despite this there is a need to sort things out if a person, or as it
turns out a society, becomes ill and destructive to itself and/or others.
So these classification schemes hopefully will help. They may not however
in that it stamps blind spots onto the observer or clinician.

A good example of this is ADD or ADHD or whatever the fave designation is
these days. It is now known without question that diet and extra-
curricula activities (eg Sugar and TV) trigger hyper behavior. So a
school psychologist, one eye on a normative behavioral chart another on
the dervish kid, will see behavior as a purely 'internal' attribute. The
fact that this kid had two bowels of Count Chocula and watched 1/2 an
episode of Power Rangers before school is off their scope maybe even of
no interest before the parents are called. Maybe this has changed.

Immortalist...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 9:06 am

Guest

Conclusion: Of What Value Are Self-Biases?

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

When we treat mental processes as objects and discover that the
overwhelming majority of people engage in such behavior as egocentric
thought and the self-serving bias, it would be easy to conclude that
(1) humans are pathetic, irrational, silly organisms who blind
themselves from seeing things as they are, and (2) self-biases should
be eliminated at all cost. Such conclusions would be a gross
oversimplification. First, as mentioned earlier, although we humans
frequently engage in biased thinking, we are also capable of clear,
rational thought. Moreover, self-biases can serve important purposes.
The individual who believes that he or she is the cause of good things
will try harder and persist longer to achieve difficult goals. Such
efforts can result in new scientific discoveries, great works of art,
or political agreements that can be of great benefit to millions of
people.

An interesting example of this kind of process emerges from the
results of a study of basketball players done by Robert Grove and his
colleagues. Grove found that winning teams attributed their success to
stable causes, while teams that lost attributed their failure to
unstable causes like flukes, bad breaks, and the like. This bias can
be beneficial (at least in the short run) because it allows losing
teams to avoid being psychologically devastated by setbacks, to hang
in there and continue playing in the face of a string of defeats.

There may be even more important temporary benefits to self-biases as
well. That's what Shelley Taylor found." She interviewed hundreds of
people who had faced tragic or near-tragic events. Her interviewees
included rape victims, cancer patients, and others with life-
threatening illnesses. She found that, far from destroying these
individuals, the tragic event had given most of them a new lease on
life. This was especially true if they held overly optimistic
perceptions concerning their chances of recovery from disease or
believed that they could control the likelihood of future
victimization. The belief that one can overcome tragic obstacles—even
if this belief was an illusion—led these people to adopt better health
practices and to develop coping strategies for dealing with stress
that had a salutary effect on their lives.

Similarly, Martin Seligman has found across a variety of studies that
an optimistic style of thinking—believing that a defeat is due to bad
luck and can be overcome by effort and ability—leads to more
achievement, better health, and an improved mental outlook. In brief,
engaging in egocentric thought and self-serving attributions has an
array of benefits. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind
that these positive consequences are not without their price—and as
you have undoubtedly gathered, the major price is a somewhat distorted
picture of the self and the world in general.

Ironically, as we have seen, this distorted picture of the world is
frequently caused by a motive to justify ourselves and our behavior—to
interpret or distort the meaning of our actions so as to bring it in
line with what we would regard as consistent with the actions of a
morally good and sensible human being. For me, one of the most
fascinating aspects of the social animal is our touching need to see
ourselves as good and sensible people—and how this need frequently
leads us to perform actions that are neither good nor sensible. The
human tendency for self-justification is so important that it deserves
a chapter all to itself; it is to this chapter that we now turn.

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

Malrassic Park...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 12:00 pm

Guest

On Sun, 11 May 2008 23:28:30 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist
<reanimater_2000 at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:

Quote:

On May 11, 10:32 pm, Malrassic Park <malen... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2008 22:12:16 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist

reanimater_2... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
These two types of attribution
lead to very different perceptions of the individual engaging in a
behavior. Personal is Internal and SItuational is external...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28psychology%29

Doesn't it say there are two kinds of internal attribution, the moral
and the psychological?
--

I think this area of social psychology attempts to argue that
"attribution" is like "naming a cause" or a worse term "blaming" since
it is good to point to causes of our perceptions of self and others.
When I do something wrong or make mistakes I am driven to see it as
cause by the situation, but when others make a mistake I am driven to
see it a somehow a result of their "disposition" or skill set or
something like that. Here read this all the way through, (just
joking);

I'm just asking about moral and psychological attribution because
Objectivism is rife with this error, often confusing the two into one
jumbled mass of verbiage which sounds coherent only to Randroids.

--

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

Malrassic Park...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 11:30 pm

Guest

On Mon, 12 May 2008 11:56:46 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist
<reanimater_2000 at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:

Quote:

People's behavior is mainly a product of whatever social environment
they happen to be in at any given moment. They don't value
individualism or egoism, in fact for the most part they have no
principles.
--

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

Malrassic Park...

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 11:34 pm

Guest

On Mon, 12 May 2008 12:05:05 -0700 (PDT), Immortalist
<reanimater_2000 at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:

Quote:

The fact that this kid had two bowels of Count Chocula

Two "bowels"? Double the chocolate, double the fun!
--

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

dank...

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 12:40 pm

Guest

Immortalist wrote...

Quote:

Attribution is a concept in Social Psychology referring to how
individuals explain behaviors of others. ...The two main types of
attributions are internal and external attributions...

There really is only one type of attribution, and who the blame is
attributed to depends on who is paying the therapist's bill. If
you are paying him $500/hour for advice, then everyone else is at
fault, but if they are paying him $500/hour then you are at fault.

No reputable psychologist would risk losing a paying patient by
blaming him for his fucked up problems, so someone else must be
blamed instead. But often a patient is referred by family members
who find his personality annoying, and since they are the ones
paying for his therapy, his problems are the result of his own
personal character flaws. Psychologists are whores and will tell
WHOEVER IS PAYING what they want to hear.

Rick bari3(at)NOTatBbMaleBUTt at (no spam) Gmail•ComByteME...

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 7:07 pm

Guest

Simply OLD-rehashed
-Bookwarm crapola...
take a few NEW/OLD
PSYCHOdic(K) pills &
YO'self in da mourn-
ing...Get it?
If Ya don't get it,
Ya don't get it...
Get it ? ...etc.

Immortalist wrote:

Quote:

...

Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 6:55 am

Guest

On May 12, 7:04 am, ZerkonX <Z... at (no spam) X.net> wrote:

Quote:

A good example of this is ADD or ADHD or whatever the fave designation is
these days. It is now known without question that diet and extra-
curricula activities (eg Sugar and TV) trigger hyper behavior. So a
school psychologist, one eye on a normative behavioral chart another on
the dervish kid, will see behavior as a purely 'internal' attribute. The
fact that this kid had two bowels of Count Chocula and watched 1/2 an
episode of Power Rangers before school is off their scope maybe even of
no interest before the parents are called. Maybe this has changed.

Actually, ZerkonX's response demonstrates an interesting example of
attribution using ADD/ADHD as the example. To my awareness, I thought
that ADHD was not really influenced by sugar intake, although when
parents think that their children are eating sugar they rate them as
being more hyperactive, even if the childrens' behavior actually
doesn't change. (see http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/adhd/complete-publication.shtml#pub4
and http://addadhdadvances.com/sugar.html.

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