Here is a section about the attribution error from a Social Psychology
textbook. Please point out where the author does what you say and
produces a false classification. And what about the experiments, do
they constitute any sort of evidence?
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
The Fundamental Attribution Error. The term fundamental attribution
error refers to a general human tendency to overestimate the
importance of personality or dispositional factors relative to
situational or environmental influences when describing and explaining
the causes of social behavior. We have already seen one example of
this tendency—correspondent inference. That is, when explaining why
Sam took a specific political position or performed a specific
behavior, we tend to use personality characteristics (he believes
strongly in the issue; he is lazy) as opposed to situational factors
(he was assigned that position; he was very tired that day). This may
lead us to believe that there is more consistency of motive and
behavior in the world than actually exists.
Another example of the fundamental attribution error is provided by an
experiment conducted by Gunter Bierbrauer. In this experiment,
subjects witnessed a reenactment of a person's performance in Stanley
Milgram's famous experiment on obedience to authority (described in
Chapter 2). Recall that in this experiment, Milgram constructed a
situation that elicited high rates of obedi-ence;vin this case, the
behavior involved administering severe electric shocks to a "learner."
Like most subjects in the original Milgram experiment, the person in
Bierbrauer's reenactment showed a high level of obedience,
administering the maximum level of electric shock. After showing the
reenactment, Bierbrauer then asked his subjects to estimate how many
of Milgram's subjects in general would be obedient in this situation.
The results showed that subjects consistently underestimated the
actual degree of obedience. Specifically, Bierbrauer's subjects
estimated that only 10 to 20 percent of the people in this setting
would give the maximum shock of 450 volts. In actuality, as you will
recall, Milgram found that 65 percent of the subjects administered
this level of shock. In other words, Bierbrauer's subjects assumed
that this person was an aberration—that his behavior reflected
distinguishing personal dispositions (i.e., that he was particularly
aggressive or obedient). They failed to attribute his behavior to the
power of the situation to produce this behavior in most people.
As observers, we frequently lose sight of the fact that each
individual plays many social roles and that we might be observing only
one of them. Thus, the importance of social roles can be easily
overlooked in explaining a person's behavior. For example, I know a
psychology professor whom I will call Dr. Mensch. The students adore
Dr. Mensch. When they describe him on teacher evaluations and
informally, they use words such as warm, caring, concerned about
students, approachable, charismatic, brilliant, and friendly. However,
Dr. Mensch's professional colleagues have a different image of him,
especially those who have given professional talks when he was in the
audience. Like the students, they see him as brilliant, but they also
describe Dr. Mensch as intense, critical, tough, argumentative, and
relentless.
Who has the right impression—the students or the professional
colleagues? Is he really a tough critical person who is simply putting
on an act in order to appear to be warm and caring in front of his
students? Or is he really a warm and caring individual who pretends to
be tough when confronting other psychologists? These are the wrong
questions. The fact is that my friend is capable of a wide range of
behaviors. Some social roles tend to pull behavior from one part of
the spectrum; other social roles tend to pull behavior from a
different part of the spectrum. The students see Dr. Mensch in only
one role—that of teacher. He is a very good teacher, and the job of a
good teacher is to get the best out of the student; this usually
requires warm and caring behavior. The students have accurately
described my friend's behavior within this role. On the other hand,
the role of a useful professional colleague sometimes requires
adversarial behavior. In order to discover the truth, a good
professional often will strongly press an argument to see how far it
will go. This frequently results in sharp, intense, and relentless
criticism. Thus, Dr. Mensch's professional colleagues also accurately
describe the behavior that they see. However, both students and
professional colleagues make a fundamental attribution error when they
assume that the behavior they observe is due entirely to some
personality characteristic; rather, it is based largely on the way Dr.
Mensch perceives the requirements of his social role. This is not to
say that personality is irrelevant. Not everyone is capable of the
wide array of behaviors manifested by Dr. Mensch. But to assume that
he is either tough or warm is to ignore the power of the social role.
A clever experiment by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz
illustrates how the impact of social roles can be underestimated in
explaining behavior. They set up a "quiz show" format in which they
randomly assigned subjects to one of two roles: (1) a questioner,
whose task it was to prepare difficult questions for (2) a contestant,
whose task it was to answer them. An observer watched this simulated
quiz show and then estimated the questioner's and the contestant's
general knowledge. Try to put yourself in the role of the observer.
What do you see? Well, unless you are very careful, you will see one
very smart, knowledgeable person and one rather stupid person.
But please take a closer look. Notice how these two roles constrain
the behavior of the participants. The questioner is likely to come up
with some fairly difficult questions based on esoteric knowledge: "In
what baseball park did Babe Ruth hit his second to last home run?"
"What is the capital city of Lithuania?" and "What is the date of
Thomas Jefferson's death?" By simply asking these questions, the
questioner looks smart. On the other hand, the contestant is faced
with answering these difficult questions and is likely to miss a few.
This makes him or her look a little stupid. And this is exactly what
Ross and his colleagues found. The observers felt, that the
questioners were far more knowledgeable than the contestants. However,
since everyone was randomly assigned to their roles, it is extremely
unlikely that all of the questioners were actually more knowledgeable
than all of the contestants. What is most interesting is that the
observers knew that the participants had been randomly assigned to
these roles. Yet they failed to consider the impact of these social
roles in making their judgments about the quiz show participants and
fell into the trap of attributing what they saw to personal
dispositions.
If the fundamental attribution error were limited to judgments about
college professors and quiz show participants, it probably would not
be much of a cause for concern. However, its implications are far-
reaching. Consider a common reaction of most Americans to a person
using food stamps at a supermarket: "She is lazy; if she just tried
harder, she could get a job." Or consider this characterization of a
convicted burglar: "He is a terrible human being; what type of villain
could commit such acts?" Both descriptions could conceivably be
accurate, but what is more likely is that they represent the
fundamental attribution error in action. Although this is not the
place for a full discussion of the situational determinants of poverty
and crime, there can be many factors other than personal
characteristics that can explain why a person is poor or commits a
crime. These include lack of job opportunities, illiteracy, economic
recession, the lack of positive role models in one's neighborhood, and
growing up in a dysfunctional family.
I do not mean to imply that a criminal should not be held accountable
for his or her actions. Criminals are responsible for what they do and
should be held accountable. But by focusing on personal rather than
situational factors, we will advocate different policies for dealing
with social problems such as poverty and crime. For example, the
attribution "this criminal is a fiend" will result in a policy of
spending more money on bigger and stronger prisons and doling out
longer prison sentences. Perceiving the causes of crime as due largely
to unemployment, poor role models, and illiteracy will result in
policies such as increased spending for better schools and better
teachers and tax credits to businesses that invest in poverty-stricken
areas. Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that dispositional
factors such as laziness, clumsiness, or vicious-ness do not exist.
They do. I am merely pointing out that most of us, most of the time,
are too prone to invoke a dispositional attribution when the cause of
the behavior may well be situational. At the very least, our knowledge
of the fundamental attribution error should alert us to the
possibility that our dispositional attributions may not always be
correct and that we should take seriously the motto of the novelist
Samuel Butler: "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
