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Attribution Theory & Person Perception
A manager reviews an employee's poor quarterly report and immediately concludes the employee is lazy and incompetent, without considering that the employee had been managing an unusually heavy workload and a family crisis during that period.
Which of the following best describes the manager's thinking?
Self-serving bias
Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer bias
The just-world hypothesis
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A social psychologist conducted a study to examine how people explain their own successes and failures. Eighty university students completed a series of 20 anagram puzzles. After finishing, participants were told (randomly and regardless of actual performance) that they had either succeeded or failed on the task.
Participants then completed a questionnaire asking them to explain their performance. Explanations were coded as either internal (e.g., ability, effort) or external (e.g., task difficulty, luck). The results are shown in the table below.
Outcome told to participant | Internal attribution (%) | External attribution (%) |
|---|---|---|
Success | 79 | 21 |
Failure | 28 | 72 |
Based on the data in the table, which of the following concepts do the results most directly illustrate?
Self-serving bias
The fundamental attribution error
The actor-observer bias
Cognitive dissonance
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In study 1, participants explained their own success or failure on an anagram task. Results showed:
Outcome told to participant | Internal attribution (%) | External attribution (%) |
|---|---|---|
Success | 79 | 21 |
Failure | 28 | 72 |
In study 2, different participants watched a video of another person failing the same anagram task. They attributed that person's failure primarily to low ability rather than task difficulty.
Comparing these two studies, which of the following concepts best explains why people attribute their own failures to external factors but attribute others' failures to internal factors?
The fundamental attribution error
Self-serving bias
The actor-observer bias
Confirmation bias
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