8.3 Attitudes, Attributions, and Biases

Ideas, values, beliefs, and perception—all have a complex role in determining a person’s attitude. Values are ideals, guiding principles in one’s life, or overarching goals people strive to obtain (Maio & Olson, 1998). Beliefs are cognitions about the world—subjective probabilities that an object has a particular attribute or that an action will lead to a specific outcome (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Beliefs can be patently and unequivocally false. For example, surveys show that a third of U.S. adults think that vaccines cause autism, despite the preponderance of scientific research to the contrary (Dixon et al., 2015). It was found that beliefs like these are tenaciously held and highly resistant to change. Another important factor that affects attitude is symbolic interactionism, these are rife with powerful symbols and charged with affect which can lead to a selective perception.

Three primary constructs that influence attitude include:

• Family: Family plays a significant role in the primary stage of attitudes held by individuals. Initially, a person develops certain attitudes from their parents, brothers, sisters, and elders in the family. There is a high degree of relationship between parents and children in terms of their attitudes.
• Society and Culture: Societies play a vital role in forming an individual’s attitudes. The culture, tradition, language, etc., influence people’s attitudes. Society, tradition, and culture teach individuals what is and what is not acceptable.
• Economic: A person’s attitude also depends on their socioeconomic status (SES), such as their position, salary, status, work environment, type of work, etc.

For example, if a child has had little contact with people from a particular country and has been told that “people from that country are bad people,” the child has already formed a schema of people from that specific country, thus affecting his attitude toward people from that country or others who may look like they are from that country. The child may develop a negative attitude toward every person from that particular country or those with similar characteristics.

Attributions and Biases

Individuals are motivated to assign causes to their actions and behaviors. External attribution, also called situational attribution, refers to interpreting someone’s behavior as being caused by the situation that the individual is in. For example, if one’s car tire is punctured, it may be attributed to a hole in the road; by making attributions to the poor condition of the highway, one can make sense of the event without any discomfort that it may, in reality, have been the result of their poor driving.

Internal attribution, or dispositional attribution, refers to assigning the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic, like ability and motivation, rather than to outside forces. This concept overlaps with the locus of control, in which individuals feel personally responsible for everything that happens to them.

Dispositional attribution is the tendency to attribute people’s behaviors to their dispositions, such as their personality, character, and ability. For example, when a normally pleasant waiter is rude to a customer, the customer may assume they have a bad temper. The customer, just by looking at the attitude the waiter gives them, instantly decides that the waiter is a bad person. The customer oversimplifies the situation by not considering all the unfortunate events that might have happened to the waiter, which made them rude in that moment. Therefore, the customer made a dispositional attribution by attributing the waiter’s behavior directly to their personality rather than considering situational factors that might have caused the “rudeness.”

Biases

Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief.

Cultural bias is when someone assumes a person’s behavior is based on their cultural practices and beliefs. People in individualist cultures, generally Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon European societies, value individuals, personal goals, and independence. People in collectivist cultures see individuals as members of groups such as families, tribes, work units, and nations, and tend to value conformity and interdependence. In other words, working together and being involved as a group is more common in certain cultures that view each person as a part of the community. This cultural trait is common in Asia, traditional Native American societies, and Africa. Research shows that individualist or collectivist culture affects how people make attributions.

People from individualist cultures are more inclined to make the fundamental attribution error than people from collectivist cultures. Individualist cultures tend to attribute a person’s behavior to their internal factors, whereas collectivist cultures tend to attribute a person’s behavior to their external factors.

Research suggests that individualist cultures engage in self-serving bias more than collectivist cultures, i.e., individualist cultures tend to attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors. In contrast, collectivist cultures engage in the opposite of self-serving bias, i.e., self-effacing bias, which is attributing success to external factors and blaming failure on internal factors (the individual).

Actor/observer bias explains that people’s attribution can differ depending on their role as actor or observer. For example, when a person scores a low grade on a test, they find situational factors to justify the adverse event, such as saying that the teacher asked a question they never covered in class. However, if another person scores poorly on a test, the person will attribute the results to internal factors such as laziness and inattentiveness in classes.

Attribution theory – Attribution error and culture | Individuals and Society | MCAT | Khan Academy (YouTube)

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