About: Dispositional attribution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 201 publications have been published within this topic receiving 22258 citations.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the shortcomings of intuitive psychologists and the sources of bias in their attempts at understanding, predicting, and controlling the events that unfold around them, and explored the logical or rational schemata employed by intuitive psychologists.
Abstract: Publisher Summary Attribution theory is concerned with the attempts of ordinary people to understand the causes and implications of the events they witness. It deals with the “naive psychology” of the “man in the street” as he interprets his own behaviors and the actions of others. For man—in the perspective of attribution theory—is an intuitive psychologist who seeks to explain behavior and draw inferences about actors and their environments. To better understand the perceptions and actions of this intuitive scientist, his methods must be explored. The sources of oversight, error, or bias in his assumptions and procedures may have serious consequences, both for the lay psychologist himself and for the society that he builds and perpetuates. These shortcomings, explored from the vantage point of contemporary attribution theory, are the focus of the chapter. The logical or rational schemata employed by intuitive psychologists and the sources of bias in their attempts at understanding, predicting, and controlling the events that unfold around them are considered. Attributional biases in the psychology of prediction, perseverance of social inferences and social theories, and the intuitive psychologist's illusions and insights are described.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the naive explanation of human actions, theory of correspondent inferences, personal involvement and correspondence, and the recent research concerning phenomenal causality and the attribution of intentions.
Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter describes the naive explanation of human actions, theory of correspondent inferences, personal involvement and correspondence, and the recent research concerning phenomenal causality and the attribution of intentions. The cognitive task of establishing sufficient reason for an action involves processing the available information about, or making assumptions about, the links between stable individual dispositions and observed action. The dispositional attributes are inferred from the effects of action, but not every effect is equally salient in the inference process. The perceiver's fundamental task is to interpret or infer the causal antecedents of action. When a person's actions have certain consequences, it is important for the perceiver to determine whether the person was capable of producing these consequences in response to his intentions. Where an actor fails to produce certain effects that might have been anticipated by the perceiver, there may be ambiguity as to whether the actor did not want to produce the effects, or wanted but was not able to. The attribution of intentions is that actions are informative to the extent that they have emerged out of a context of choice and reflect a selection of one among plural alternatives. However, the distinctiveness of the effects achieved and the extent to which they do not represent stereotypic cultural values, determine the likelihood that information about the actor can be extracted from an action. To say that an inference is correspondent, then, is to say that a disposition is being rather directly reflected in behavior, and that this disposition is unusual in its strength or intensity. In-role behavior is supported by too many reasons to be informative about the actor. However, out-of-role behavior is more informative because the effects of such actions are distinctive and not to be dismissed as culturally desirable.
TL;DR: In this paper, three experiments were conducted within the framework of correspondent inference theory, where the subjects were instructed to estimate the "true" attitude of a target person after having either read or listened to a speech by him expressing opinions on a controversial topic.
TL;DR: In this article, a schema is defined as a set of implicational links between dispositional levels and categories of relevant behaviors, and three general schemata are discussed: the partially restrictive schema, the hierarchically restrictive schema and the fully restrictive schema.
Abstract: Previous research on dispositional attribution has failed to take into account how the inference process may be affected by variations in schematic representation of dispositional attributes. A schema is denned here as a set of implicational links between dispositional levels and categories of relevant behaviors. Three general schemata are discussed—the partially restrictive schema, the hierarchically restrictive schema, and the fully restrictive schema—each having different implications for the rules of inference employed in making attributions based on observed behaviors. Relevant research on utilization of information regarding consensus, situational context, and actor's past behavior is reviewed in this framework.