Misattribution Error Psychology
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messages) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. fundamental attribution error definition Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (February 2015) fundamental attribution error examples (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article relies too much on references to fundamental attribution error quizlet primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to ultimate attribution error remove this template message) In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining another person's behavior in a given situation. This contrasts with
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interpreting one's own behavior, where situational factors are more easily recognized and can be taken into account. Contents 1 Examples 2 Details 3 Classic demonstration study: Jones and Harris (1967) 4 Explanations 5 Cultural differences in the error 6 Versus correspondence bias 7 See also 7.1 Cognitive biases 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links Examples[edit] As a simple example, consider a situation where Alice, a driver, is about to pass through an intersection. Her light turns green and she begins to accelerate, but another car drives through the red light and crosses in front of her. The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or reckless driver. This will be an error if the other driver had a good reason for running the light, such as rushing a patient to the hospital. If this is the case and Alice had been driving the other car, she would have understood that
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Misattribution Theory
Day Psychology Journals Psych Writing GRE Psychology Articles misattribution synonym Psych Links Get Into Grad School Advertise Support Psychology Glossary A B C self serving bias D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error X Y Z Follow AlleyDog Misattribution First, let's define attribution, which is the process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events. Simply put, this is how we go about inferring behavior (our own and http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Misattribution those of others). Thus, misattribution is attributing an event to something with which it really has no connection or association. It's making an incorrect attribution. There are also more specific misattributions, such as Misattribution of Arousal and Misattribution of Memory. Add flashcard Cite Random Interested in a Graduate Psychology Degree? You can get free information about Adler University's graduate psychology programs just by answering a few short questions. Get Free Info Word of the Day Get the word of the day delivered to your inbox Want to study Misattribution? Check out Adler University © 1998-2016, AlleyDog.com. All material within this site is the property of AlleyDog.com. This material may not be reprinted or copied for any reason without the express written consent of AlleyDog.com.
Improved 20% by Nature Walk⢠Previous article: Why People's Names Are So Hard to Remember "Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/how-memories-are-distorted-and-invented.php they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so." -William James One evening in 1975 an unsuspecting Australian psychologist, Donald M. Thomson, walked into a television studio to discuss the psychology of eyewitness testimony. Little did he http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/sins.aspx know that at the very moment he was discussing how people can best remember the faces of criminals, there was someone encoding his own face as a rapist. The day after the television broadcast Thomson was picked up attribution error by local police. He was told that last night a woman was raped and left unconscious in her apartment. She had named Thomson as her attacker. Thomson was shocked, but had a watertight alibi. He had been on television at the time of the attack and in the presence of the assistant commissioner of police. It seemed that the victim had been watching Thomson on television just prior to being attacked. She had then confused his fundamental attribution error face with that of her attacker. That a psychologist talking about identifying the faces of criminals should be the subject of just such a gross memory failure - and at the very moment he was publicly explaining it - is an irony hard to ignore. Donald Thompson was completely exonerated but many others have not been so lucky. Gary Wells at Iowa State University and colleagues have identified 40 different US miscarriages of justice that have relied on eye-witness testimony (Wells et al., 1998). Many of these falsely convicted people served many years in prison, some even facing death sentences. Donald Thomson's ordeal, though, is a perfect example of Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter's fourth sin of memory (Schacter, 1999). Unlike the first three sins, which all involve being unable to access memories, this is the first sin that involves the creation of memories that are false in some way. When a memory is ‘misattributed' some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances. Daily misattributions While misattributions can have disastrous consequences, most are not so dramatic in everyday circumstances. Like the other sins of memory, misattributions are probably a daily occurrence for most people. Some examples that have been studied in the lab are: Misattributing the source of memories. People regularly say they read something in the newspaper, when actua
Psychology // The seven sins of memory EMAIL PRINT Feature The seven sins of memory Convention award-winner Daniel Schacter explained the ways that memory tricks us. By BRIDGET MURRAY Monitor Staff October 2003, Vol 34, No. 9 Print version: page 28 Despite memory's obvious benefits, it can also let us down, said Daniel Schacter, PhD, longtime memory researcher and chair of Harvard University's psychology department, at an APA 2003 Annual Convention session honoring the publication of his book, "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). "Memory, for all that it does for us every day...for all the feats that can sometimes amaze us, can also be a troublemaker," said Schacter of his book, which describes the seven major categories of memory foibles being investigated by psychologists. However, noted Schacter, the same brain mechanisms account for memory's sins as well as its strengths, so investigating its negatives exposes its positives. "We shouldn't think of these fundamentally as flaws in the architecture of memory," he explained, "but rather as costs we pay for benefits in memory that make it work as well as it does most of the time." At the session, during which Schacter received the APA Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) William James Book Award, he defined his book's seven sins. The first three are "sins of omission" that involve forgetting, and the second four are "sins of commission" that involve distorted or unwanted recollections. Transience--the decreasing accessibility of memory over time. While a degree of this is normal with aging, decay of or damage to the hippocampus and temporal lobe can cause extreme forms of it. Schacter cited as a somewhat facetious example former President Bill Clinton's "convenient lapses of memory" during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Clinton claimed in the hearings that he sometimes couldn't remember what had happened the previous week. Abs