Types of Errors People Make when They Think about the Behaviour of Other People - Essay Example

What types of errors do people make when they think about the behaviour of other people? Can these errors be avoided, and how? Date Introduction Over the years, the area of social psychology has been fascinated with the manner in which the actual, imagined or even the implied presence of significant others continuously shape and influence the thoughts, feelings, as well as the behaviour of people. In that respect, social psychologists conceive behaviour to be a function of the interactions between mental states and the immediate social situations surrounding the individual; both personal/internal factors and situational/external factors can help explain people’s behaviour. Attribution theory in the field of social psychology has been very fundamental in shading light to the manner in which people think about their own and others’ behaviour (Borkowski & Allen 2003); the theory provides a framework that explains the manner in which people interpret their own and other people’s behaviour. The theory proposes that people tend to interpret both their own, and others’ behaviour by assigning attributes to these behaviours (Bardwell, 1986); however, people are more likely to commit a number of errors in the process of explaining their own and others’ behaviour, thereby leading to misattributions (Toplak, West & Stanovich, 2011). This paper aims to highlight the types of errors that people often do make when they think about the behaviour of others, and to examine whether or not it is possible to avoid these errors, and the manner in which people can avoid them with reference to social psychology research. Having an awareness of the errors people make in making attributions is necessary to understand how people think about others, and the manner in which one can prevent committing some of those errors to enhance attributions of behaviour. Cognitive biases It is natural for human beings to want to explain the root causes and progression of behaviour and events that happen in their close proximity and in life in general, what is generally known as attribution in social psychology and explanatory attribution in particular. Individuals often make or give explanatory attribution in order to conceptualize the world around them, especially the behaviour of other people i.e. they seek to understand why certain individuals behave the way they do. In that respect, when making explanatory attributions, individuals speculate about the possible causes of behaviour and establish judgments as to what might be the root cause of the observed behaviour. When people think of the behaviour of others, it is clear that they are more likely to perceive them in certain ways, which are, to a certain level, somewhat irrationally fixed, especially because they often have certain pre-established perceptions or presuppositions, which do get in the way of reality concerning the behaviour of other people (OBrien, 2003). These preconceived notions that influence people’s judgments, the tendencies to think in certain restricted ways thereby deviating from the standard of rationality, are known as cognitive biases (Besharov, 2003); in other words, cognitive preconceptions often impede good judgment because they lead to systematic deviations from reasonableness or logic (Paulauskas, 2013). Cognitive biases have been attributed to the shortfalls in the rules individuals apply to process information in their minds, mostly mental shortcuts, otherwise known as heuristics, which the brain uses to establish decisions or judgments (Stewart, 2005). Largely, the way individuals think of other people’s behaviour is usually determined by their various cognitive biases, which eventually lead them to making gross errors in the way they perceive others (Prentice, 2004). Interestingly, people may not always be what others think they are and their behaviour will not always fit in those predetermined explanations because individuals’ thinking about other people’s behaviour is always constrained by cognitive biases. In that respect, to be able to understand other people effectively, individuals need to start by overcoming their own cognitive biases, which lead to misattributions; it is preferable to come up with more concise and accurate explanations of the behaviour of other people by keeping an open mind about them and their behaviours. The fundamental attribution bias The most pervasive error people make in response to the behaviour of others is referred to as the fundamental attribution error, which denotes the tendency to overemphasize the role of dispositional factors at the expense of situational ones, in the process of making attributions regarding other people’s actions (Follett & Hess 2002). The fundamental attribution error is arguably the most common type of cognitive bias that is core to the theory and principles of social psychology since it illustrates a vast majority of other concepts concerning cognitive biases. For instance, this error illustrates the fact that people do not think about their own behaviour in the same light with the behaviour of others, as well as the fact that the brain always genuinely seeks to understand a situation the behaviour observed in that context in a logical way. A classic example of this type of error is the fact that individuals are likely to attribute the bumping of a person into a co-worker on their way to a meeting to the person’s carelessness or hastiness rather than considering the situation that the person could have bumped into the co-worker because they were actually running late. The opposite of the fundamental attribution error is the actor-observer bias, which entails overemphasizing situational explanations of an individual’s behaviour while ignoring their personality or dispositional factors. For instance, an individual may attribute their studying to an upcoming examination rather than to the fact that they are generally ambitious and hardworking; whereas individuals are fond of overemphasizing situational factors in explaining their own behaviour, others are more likely to link their behaviour to dispositional factors. The fundamental attribution error arises due to the focus of individual’s attention, which in most cases is always on the person in the situation thereby yielding personality centred attributions (McPherson & Young 2004). Furthermore, the extent to which individuals take responsibility for their own actions also determines whether they are more likely to attribute people’s behaviour to their personality. Individuals can avoid this error by putting themselves in the other person’s situation, and thinking about what they would do if ever they were in that exact position; by doing so, individuals may actually unearth crucial situational factors that could explain the behaviour in a more reasonable manner than before. The hostile attribution bias This bias error occurs when individuals tend to relate other people’s behaviour to hostility (Choe et al. 2013); for instance, an individual may witnesses others whispering to each other and assume they are talking about them, thereby attributing that behaviours to hostile intentions rather than thinking their behaviours could actually be potentially benign. Children are mostly prone to making the hostile attribution bias error since they may not easily understand other people (Halligan et al. 2007); there is high probability that people who are more likely to interpret other’s behaviours as hostile are also aggressive, and could easily respond to the perceived aggressors with violence (Viana et al. 2012). The hostile attribution bias can and does influence aggressive behaviours by way of reactive aggression since people that interpret the intent of others who seem to create negative feelings for them as hostile, particularly in the absence of social cues to clarify intent will often tend to react in aggressive manner as self-protection (Godleski & Ostrov 2010). There are several ways to avoid committing the hostile attribution bias; for instance, individuals can do so by reducing the ambiguity of their intent, changing personality traits, as well as being aware that people may not always mean harm, and the fact that they think others may become or are hostile does not automatically mean that they may aggress. By reducing ambiguity of intent, individuals clarify to the other person that their behaviour is generally benign thereby dispelling attributions of hostility, and since the hostile attribution bias is inevitably linked to personality traits, altering individual internal disposition or attitudes is likely to reduce the predisposition to this error remarkably. The self-serving bias The self-serving bias is yet another error that individuals often make in making attributions of the behaviours of other people; this error entails the tendency to relate successes to internal attributes and failures to external attributes respectively (Weary et al. 1982). For instance, if an individual becomes so successful at work to the point of getting a promotion, they are more likely to interpret the promotion as being due to positive internal factors such as hard work, intelligence, commitment, and so forth. On the other hand, if an individual is fired from their employment, they are more likely to attribute that to external factors such as their stern looking, witch-hunting boss or the difficult or oppressive organizational environment rather than to their own personalities or internal dispositions. However, whereas most people are more likely to commit this error, the exception is people who suffer from depression, low self-esteem, or negative thoughts and/or feelings, who are more likely to commit the flipside of this bias; that is, they are more likely to associate success to external factors and failure to internal factors. Generally, people often make the self-serving bias since they seek to enhance their own ego and self-confidence, thereby failing to evaluate their own performance and progress critically; however, it is not proper for individuals to ignore their failures. The danger of overemphasizing successes and minimizing failure is that an individual does not recognize their mistakes and therefore does not learn from them; furthermore, the self-serving bias is more likely to result to self-handicapping, whereby individuals actively seek out only those safe situations where they are more likely to succeed rather than risking failure through daring engagements. Like all the other errors, individuals can solve the self-serving error by recognizing and appreciating their own failures as well as successes, particularly because failures offer invaluable lessons of the mistakes that one is making, which if avoided can yield better outcomes for success in the situation at hand. Ultimately, the Attribution theory analyses the manner in which individuals interpret people’s behaviours, proposing that people tend to interpret both their own, and others’ behaviours by assigning attributes to these behaviours; studying the errors people make in attributions is necessary to understand how people think about others, and to prevent some of those errors to enhance attributions. Individuals generally interpret their own and others’ behaviours by drawing explanations from both the situational/external factors or from the dispositional/internal factors; several factors determine how individuals make attributions for behaviours, including their views of the world, previous experiences, as well as their knowledge of the behaviours in question. 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