Thursday, December 4, 2008

Uncertainty Avoidance and Fundamental Attribution Error

A cultural measure of the degree to which people tolerate risk and unconventional behavior. Extent to which cultures socialize members to accept ambiguous situations and to tolerate uncertainty. Do we avoid risk? or we prefer to take it? On what do we base our decision making and reaction, how do we react to something we do not fully understand?



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.

The term was coined by Lee Ross (Ross, 1977)[1] some years after a now-classic experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris (1967)[2]. Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

Jones wrote that he found Ross's term "overly provocative and somewhat misleading", and also joked, "Furthermore, I'm angry that I didn't think of it first." More recently some psychologists, including Daniel Gilbert, have begun using the term "correspondence bias" for the fundamental attribution error (Gilbert & Malone, 1995[3]; Gilbert, 1998[4]).

Author Malcolm Gladwell provides a more soft-spoken definition of the fundamental attribution error: he defines it as extrapolation from a measured characteristic to an unrelated characteristic. He cites as an example "a typical study [that] showed that 'how neat a student's assignments were or how punctual he was told you almost nothing about how often he attended class or how neat his room or his personal appearance was'" (Gladwell, 2000, p.72)[5]. By basing his definition on the comparison of one behavior with another behavior rather than one motivation with another motivation, Gladwell avoids the entanglements of complex questions about the "essence" of a person. - from here



The picture to the side shows how easy it is to make attribution errors. Judgments about why an event occurred or why someone behaved in a certain way are called attributions. When attributing something or someone, people often tend make mistakes. This is usually known as fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias. This error is the tendency to overestimate the
extent to which a person’s behavior is due to internal and dispositional factors and to disregard external or situational factors.

The picture above illustrates this error. The picture shows of a lady who is giving a man money because she thinks that he is homeless. In doing so, the lady is attributing his disposition to that the fact that he is out on the street and in shabby demeanor that he is homeless. However she is not considering other external factors that could have led him to be out on the streets. The fact that he is a home - a - phobic is something that the lady did not account for when assessing his situation
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