Look what I can do

I miss writing blog posts, but I've been pretty busy writing school assignments lately. I'd hate to go an entire month without posting anythying, an entire month name-wise, I've probably gone more than 30 days at a stretch by now. So, in the interest of posting something for April, here is one of my recent school assignments, I chose this one because of my concluding paragraph. You can take the boy out of the regular whimsical revolutionary blogging, but you can't take the whimsical revolutionary blogging out of the boy...

Making decisions based on judgment is at the heart of living. As we interact socially with people of various levels of familiarity, we are constantly making judgments of people whether we know it or not. We make our decisions based on appearance, observed behavior, or initial strains of conversation. The culture we are socialized into determines a lot about the judgments we make. Nationality, religion, political agenda, and fashion interests all play into the judgments we make about people. Social psychologists study these judgments and their accuracy in applying the term fundamental attribution error, which is that we are more likely to attribute a person’s behavior to internal causes rather than external causes, interestingly the opposite of how we tend to attribute our own behavior. This paper delves into the cultural influence evident in the fundamental attribution error and applies the theory to recent social psychological research.

When happening upon a scene in public, we often don’t know much about the setting and environment of that moment. When we see someone behaving a certain way in that setting we don’t necessarily know why they are doing what they are doing, or how they perceive the setting they are in. What do we do in this situation? We are going to make a judgment about the person, consciously or not, and we will more than likely attribute the actions of the person to their personality, not their environment (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010, p. 99). When we see a young woman by the fountain downtown with her arms up like wings, twirling in circles, we will most likely think she is an outgoing and unconventional, if not worse, person. What we are missing is the camera focused on her filming her antics for a school video project. According to Changingminds.org (2012), “this can be due to our focus on the person more than their situation, about which we may know very little. We also know little about how they are interpreting the situation.”

Various cultures reflect the fundamental attribution error in different ways. What makes this process so common is its focus on the person, rather than the situation, a common process among Western cultures. North America, primarily, represents Western cultural thinking, which is to focus on the individual and analytic thinking, while the countries of Eastern Asia focus on the bigger picture, including the environment in which something occurs (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010, p.104). Because of these differences, the fundamental attribution error is more frequently espoused in Western thinking societies. “Western culture exacerbates this error, as we emphasize individual freedom and autonomy and are socialized to prefer dispositional factors to situational ones” (Changing Minds, 2012). Other cultural factors, such as gender perceptions may play into the judgments we make. A man who is brought up in a misogynistic culture, upon seeing a woman in a traffic accident, will attribute the crash to the fact that she is a woman rather than seek for external influences in the accident, such as icy roads or vehicle malfunction.

An interesting study about attributing social behavior to personal qualities was conducted by Brumbaugh and Rosa in 2009. Looking at coupon use trends among different ethnoracial and socioeconomic groups, the researchers studied the results of embarrassment and cashier influence on the customer’s use of coupons. This study doesn’t involve the fundamental attribution error directly; instead it looks at the perception of the error in the minds of customers. In this case, the fundamental attribution error is made by a cashier, judging coupon use by different racial or economic groups as a reflection of the person, rather than their situation, in turn this judgment is perceived by the customer and leads to embarrassment and influences their use of coupons (Brumbaugh and Rosa, 2009). The researchers found that customer perceptions of judgment did affect coupon usage in statistically significant ways (2009). While the study’s purpose was not to identify or apply the fundamental attribution error to consumerism, the theory is applicable. We can see in this study how the judgments we make about a person without fully comprehending a situation, thereby attributing behavior solely to internal factors, can influence how we will treat that person.

The fundamental attribution error exists and is influenced by cultural and socialization factors. Perhaps judgments of internal attribution based on observed behavior are unfair or inaccurate much of the time, but the alternative is to launch an investigation into any behavior we see and need to make a decision about. It might be unrealistic to expect such endeavors for everyday life. In some cases it might not only be unrealistic, but impractical or even dangerous to try to determine the environmental cause for behavior. If I come across a person wildly waving a sword around in the park, I’m going to assume the worst and steer clear of them. Even if their behavior can be attributed to a situational factor such as defending against a swarm of bees (as impractical as that would be), approaching for further investigation doesn’t seem any safer than making a judgment based on internal attributions to the swordsman.

References

Aronson, E., Wilson, T.D., and Akert, R.M. (2010). Social Psychology (7th ed.). Englewood, Cliffs, NJ: Prentice. ISBN-13: 9780138144784.

Brumbaugh, A.M. & Rosa, J.A. (2009). Perceived discrimination, cashier metaperceptions, embarrassment, and confidence as influencers of coupon use: An ethnoracial- socioeconomic analysis. Journal of Retailing, 85(3), 347-362. Doi:10.1016/j.jretai.2009.04.008. Retrieved March 31, 2012 from ProQuest http://library.gcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.library.gcu.edu:2 048/docview/228620801?accountid=7374

Changing Minds. (2012). Fundamental Attribution Error. Retrieved April 3, 2012, from

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/fundamental_attribution_error.htm