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Describe the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behaviour (8)Fritz Heider suggested that we are like naive scientists when we make judgements about the causes of behaviour. He says we that we explain behaviour in terms internal factors relating to the individual’s personality (dispositional) or external aspects of the social situation or circumstances (situational). Imagine if someone spills a drink; we could make a dispositional attribution, “they are clumsy” or a situational attribution “they were jogged”. Although Heider and Kelley (1967) would have us believe that dispositional and situational factors are equally important when making inferences about behaviour, it would appear that dispositional factors play a more important role in our thinking and this has been called the fundamental attribution error (Ross et al, 1977).Jones and Davis suggested that have a tendency to make ‘correspondent inferences’ whereby we assume that observed behaviour corresponds to unobservable causes of behaviour related to a person’s enduring personality (dispositional), i.e. if we see someone behave in an aggressive way we assume they are an aggressive person. They also say that we are likely to do this unless we do not believe that the actor is capable of creating the observed outcomes or that they did not have the knowledge of what the outcomes of their behaviour would be and therefore lacked intention. For example if a two year old hit some-one in the face with a toy and hurt them we may not infer that they have an aggressive personality because they were probably unaware that their actions would injure the person and cause them pain. In this case a situational attribution may be more likely: “the child’s mother should have taken the toy off him”. Situational factors will be presented as causes if the observer believes the actor has no choice but to behave in a certain way. If the actor behaves in an unconventional manner, a dispositional attributions is more likely, e.g. if a person laughs loudly at a funeral, we might infer that they are rude or disrespectful, just because someone is reserved and polite at a funeral we are less likely to infer that this is due to their reserved and polite disposition as the behaviour simply fits with social norms.Jones et al (1961) demonstrated the way in which norms interact with correspondent inferences in an experiment where Pps saw a mock interview for a job as a submariner. They were told that this job requiring an extroverted personality and that the applicants knew this. When they saw someone acting in an introverted manner they were more confident when making dispositional attributions about the person, as there was only one reason to present this profile, they actually were an introvert. If the person came across as an extrovert, Pps were less confident in their attributions as there were two possible reasons for this behaviour, they were actually an extrovert or they simply wanted the job. Where there are multiple possible causes, we are less confident about the attributions made.Finally, Jones and Davis also state that in order to identify dispositional factors as causes of behaviour we must have some knowledge of how the person’s typical behaviour in order to know whether they are behaving ‘out of character’. For example if a normally placid teacher shouts at his students, colleagues may infer that some situation has arisen which has caused this change in behaviour, however, people who do not know him may still attribute his behaviour to an underlying short-tempered disposition even without no baseline data for comparison. Kelley’s covariation theory sheds further light on the role of dispositional and situational factors in explaining behaviour. He says that when B follows A, we need to know how often B follows A and whether B ever happens without A. This means we need experience in order to make confident attributions. He says that we use three types of information when explaining behaviour; consensus (how many other people behave in this way?), distinctiveness (how often does the actor behave in this way?), consistency (in this specific situation, how common is this behaviour?). Kelley says dispositional factors are far more likely to be used to explain behaviour when consensus and distinctiveness are low and situational factors will be cited when consistency and consensus are high. McArthur (1972) showed that Pps made attributions in line with predictions when given 16 descriptions of behaviour, however it was found that the different types of information were given differing weight when making attributions; distinctiveness was most important in making dispositional attributions and consistency when making situational attributions. Consensus information which should deter us from making erroneous dispositional attributions was often ignored altogether! This was demonstrated by Nisbett and Borgida (1975) whose participants often made dispositional attributions about a participant in a psychology experiment who tolerated high electric shocks despite being told that 16/34 behaved in the same way (fairly high consensus). This said, research in collectivist cultures such as Korea has shown that some participants are far better at making use of consensus data than others and were much more likely to cite situational factors as causes of behaviour, (Cha and Nam, 1985).Finally, research also shows that dispositional factors tend to be over-emphasised when making sense of the behaviour of others. When we are explaining our own behaviour we are far more likely to take situational information into account. Jones and Nisbett (1971) have called this the actor-observer effect. ................
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