Understanding the Causes of Others’ Behavior

Introduction

In day-to-day life, the accurate knowledge of the current moods or feelings of other persons will be highly beneficial for the smooth functioning of an individual. Human beings usually use various methods to understand the lasting traits or characters of every individual with whom they interact. They also show interest in knowing the causes of other person behaviors. The interest people show in such an understanding stems from the basic desire of human beings to understand the cause-and –effect relationships I the social world (Pittman, 1993). In other words, people not only want to know how others have behaved, but they want to understand why they have behaved so. Because knowing about others’ behavior will help people predict how other persons will behave in the future. This awareness about other persons’ behavior will enable an individual to have effective and appropriate interactions with others. The process through which an individual collects information about others is termed attribution. In fact, everyone makes some effort to understand the causes relating to other person’s behavior and, at times, his/her behavior as well. It is also normally found in society that everyone continuously makes it his/her business to explain other person’s behavior. Social Psychologists try to explain how everyone explains the reasons for others’ behavior. Further, they also analyze and discuss why things happen as they do, especially when experiencing something negative or unexpected from others, etc. (Bohner & et al., 1988; Weines,1985). Studies on attribution have been carried out for many years in Social Psychology. Hence, many theories and explanations are available on the topic of attribution. They are presented below.

Definitions on Attribution

Since lot of research has been carried out on attribution, the literature carries different types of definition on attribution. A more clear definition is stated by Baron in 2007 is, “the process through which an individual seeks to identify the causes of others behavior and so gain knowledge of their stable traits and dispositions. Attribution is referred as an individual’s efforts to understand the causes behind others behavior on some occasions. The theories of attribution analyses how people explain other persons behavior.

Theories of Attribution

The meaning and definition of attribution is such a complex one different persons have come out with various kinds of theories to elaborate attribution. People tend to attribute someone’s behavior or the outcome of an event either to internal factors or to external factors. The internal factor means dispositional factors such as the particular person’s biological or psychological causes. On the contrary the external factor means situational factors such as, environment and other persons are the causes.

Dispositional Attribution

Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits. For example, the motivation, the intelligence and the effort of the individual are considered as dispositional factors.

Situational Attribution

Attributing behavior to the environment. For example, good whether, parental support, god friends and effective teacher are considered as situational factors The following interesting example will clearly explain the dispositional and situational factors people use in understanding the causes of other’s behavior. A teacher may wonder a child’s underachievement is due to lack of motivation and ability (a dispositional attribution) or to physical and social circumstances (a situational attribution).

Jones and Davis (1965) theory of correspondence interference

This theory tries to explain the specific traits or dispositions that remain fairly stable over time in an individual, which are the causes for that person’s behavior in day-to-day life situations. The authors emphasis that by observing others behavior directly for a quite some time people come to a conclusion for the reasons other’s behavior. This idea may seem to be a very easy one but it is not so. The reason is that every individual come out with complex of behavioral patterns every time. A person may act in a particular manner not because of his or her own preferences but may also be due to external pressure. For example, if a child is crying, it doesn’t mean that it needs sweet but it may be due to his mother might have gone to next room leaving her alone. The child may behave calm and quite in general the crying behavior may be rare occurrence. Situations like this are quite common in a family. If one doesn’t know the child’s normal behavior he/she may misleading the attribute the reasons.
Jones and Davis have explained that using certain specific types of information people normally attribute or otherwise understand or explain the causes of others behavior. Both of them have found out that the following three specific types of information’s people use in understanding other’s behavior.
· Noncommon effects: This is a specific factor, which leads to a particular behavior from an individual, which cannot be found in any other persons.
· Low Social desirability: This is the behavior expressed by the individual in a particular situation is a peculiar one which other individual in the same situation will not express such behavior.
According to the theory proposed by Jones and Davis it is evident that others behavior reflects there normal, stable traits. That is, people arrive correspondent inferences regarding other’s behavior when that person’s behavior is freely chosen, comes out distinctive noncommon effect and is in fact low in social desirability.

Kelly’s (1972) Theory of Casual Attribution

This theory attempts to explain why people behave in a particular manner and what are the major reasons for their behavior. Everyone wants to know why other persons have behaved in a particular way? Unless a person is able to understand the causes behind others behavior he/she may not be able to manage the social world appropriately. To understand others behavior, generally, persons think either the other person behaves mainly from his/her internal causes such as traits motives and intentions or from external causes such as physical world society norms etc. At times, people may also think both causes in combination might have contributed for a particular behavior.
Kelly explains people use three major sources of information in order to understand the causes of others behavior. They are:
· Consensus: The extent to which other persons react to some stimulus or even in the same manner as the person we are considering
· Consistency: The extent to which an individual responds, to a given stimulus or situation in the same way on different occasions.
· Distinctiveness: The extent to which an individual responds in the same manner to different stimuli or events.
These three factors – consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness – influence whether to attribute someone’s behavior to internal or external causes. For example, If Mary and many others criticize Steve (with consistency) and if Mary is not critical of other’s (high distinctiveness) then to make an external attribution (it’s something about Steve). If Mary alone (low consensus) criticize Steve, and if she criticizes lots of other people, too (low distinctiveness) then to drawn to an internal attribution (it’s something about Mary).

Commonsense Attribution

Commonsense psychology often explains behavior logically. But Kelly also found that people often discount a contributing cause of behavior if other plausible causes are already known.

Errors in Attribution

The attribution researchers have found a common problem with our attributions, When explaining someone’s behavior, to often underestimate the impact of the situation and overestimate the extent to which it reflects the individual’s traits and attitudes.

Fundamental Attribution Error

(observers underestimating the situations) The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others behavior. This type of error is also called as correspondence bias, because often people see the behavior as corresponding to a disposition only.
The fundamental attribution error in everyday life;
· His own behavior people often explain in terms of the situation. For example, X was angry because everything was going angry.
· When inferring individual’s behavior typically people use the verbs that describe his or her own actions and reactions.
· In real life, these with social power usually initiate and control conversations, which often leads underlines to overestimate their knowledge and intelligence. For example, Medical Doctors are often presumed to be experts on all sorts of questions related to medicine.
· To illustrate the fundamental attribution error most of the people need look no further than their own experiences.
· Attributions of responsibility are of the heart of many judicial decisions (Fincham & Jaspais, 1980)

Perspective and situational awareness on Attributional Errors

An actor observer difference: attribution theorists point out that to observe others from a different perspective than to observe ourselves (Jones & Nisbett., 1971., Lones 1976)
· When to act the environment commands our attention: When to watch another person act, that person occupies the center of our attention and the environment becomes relatively invisible.
· The camera perspective bias in some experiments, people have viewed a videotape of a suspect confessing during a police interview (Lassiter & others., 1986). The camera perspective influenced people’s guilt judgments even when the judge instructed them not to allow it to (Lessiter, et. al., 2002).

Self – Awareness

Circumstances can also shift our perspectives on ourselves. Seeing ourselves on television redirects our attention to ourselves, seeing ourselves in a mirror, hearing our tape – recorded voices, having our pictures taken to focus the attention inward, making us self – conscious instead of situation – conscious. A self – conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself. If makes people more sensitive to there own attitudes and dispositions.

Cultural differences

Cultures also influence the attribution error (Ickes, 1980., Watson, 1982). A western worldwide predisposes people to assume that people, not situations, cause events internal explanations are more socially approved (Jettison & Green, 1981) The fundamental attribution error occurs all cultures studied (Krull & others, 1999). Some languages promote external attributions in collectivist cultures; people less often perceive others in terms of personal dispositions (Lee & others, 1996). Psychology students explain behavior less simplistically than similarly intelligent natural science students (Fletcher & others, 1986). So remembering this overriding aim – developing our capacity for critical thinking.

Impression Formation and Management

The old saying, “ first impression is the best impression” has an effective meaning even in today’s social world. When one meets a person first time whatever the person says, behaves or even the silent language has an influencing effect on the way he or she behaves with that person. The first impression the person makes shapes the entire future interaction with that person. Social Psychologists have come out with interesting research findings to explain the role of impression formation on human social behavior. They’re of the opinion that cognitive processes plays an important role in the process of impression formation. The impression formation and management becomes an important topic of study in social psychology.

Impression Formation

It is a process through which an individual forms impressions about others. Every individual organizes information about another person to form an overall impression of that person. Impression formation focused on the way in which people pay particular attention to certain unusually important traits – known as central traits – to help them to form an overall impression of others.

Asch’s Experiment

Solomon Asch (1976) has presented an interesting note regarding forming first impressions. He says that, “we look at that person and immediately certain impression of his character forms in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient tell us a story about a highly complex matter ……”. According to him everyone collects pieces of information and forms a full picture of others. During the time of Asch research gestalt psychologist came with a idea of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. That is gestalt psychologist suggest that people interpret and understand the world only in terms of its relationships to other part of the world. Taking the lead from the gestalt psychologist Asch states that people do not form impressions simply by adding together all of the characters or traits they observe in other persons but they perceive this characters and traits in relation to one another. People understand other person as integrated dynamic whole rather than single characters or traits. To explain this idea, Asch has conducted a novel technique. He simply gave individuals list of characters or traits supposedly possessed by an unknown person and asked them to indicate their impression of that person. For example, he gave the following to lists of characters to the subjects:
Intelligent- Skillful – Industrious- Warm- Determined- Practical- Cautious
Intelligent- Skillful – Industrious- Cold- Determined- Practical- Cautious
The differences between the above two lines are the words warm and cold. Other characters remaining same, anyone will feel that any subject in this experiment will give same type of assessment regarding these two sentences. But, on the contrary, subjects who read the list containing the word warm indicated that the stranger is a generous, happy, good nurtured, sociable, and popular. The subjects who have read the list containing the word cold rated the stranger as just opposite. Asch concluded his research stating that certain traits normally called as central traits strongly shaped overall impressions of the stranger and colored the other adjectives in the list as well. Hence, Asch has summarized forming impression of others involves more than simply adding together individual characters or traits. He further, states that information received tends to be weighted more heavily than information received later. This idea is known as primacy effect.

Central Traits

A set of major characteristics that makes up the core of a person’s personality it considered in forming impressions of others. In one classic study, students were told that they were about to hear a guest lectures (Kelley, 1950). One group of students was told the lecturer was “a rather warmer person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined”, while the second group was told that he was “rather cold person, critical, practical, and determined”. The simple substitution of “cold” for “warm” was responsible for drastic differences in the way of the students in each group perceived the lecturer even though he gave the same talk in the same style in each condition. Students who had been told he was “warm” rated him considerably more positively than students who had been told he was “cold”. The findings from this experiment led to additional research on impression formation that focused on central traits. According to this work, the presence of a central trait alters the meaning of other traits. (Asch, 1946; Widmyer & hoy, 1988). The schemas to employ are susceptible to a variety of factors that affects the accuracy of our judgments (Kenny,1991; Bernieri et al, 1994). For ex; our mood affects how to perceive others. People who are happy from more favorable impressions and make positive judgments those people who are in a bad mood (Forgas & Berner, 1987; Esber, 1981) Even when schemas are not entirely accurate, they serve an important function. They allow us to develop expectations about how others will behave, permitting us to plan our interactions with others more easily and serving to simplify the complex world.

Impression Management

Self – presentation refers to one wanting to present a desired impact both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves). To work at managing the impressions to create, to excuse, justify, or apologize as necessary to shore up our self – esteem and verify our self – images (schlenker & weigold, 1992). People, in general, use lot of techniques, either directly or indirectly, to manage their impression to others. The reason is that the early impressions decide whether a social interaction is positive or negative. Favorably impressing other person will create a cordial relationship between two individuals. Hence, people spent lot of time on this issue.

The Fine Art of Looking Good

Presenting oneself good or positive gains important advantage in many situations. There are number of techniques people use to manage their impressions. Mainly two major categories get the attention of the social psychologists.
· Self- Enhancement: Efforts to boost ones own image
· Other- Enhancement: Efforts to make the other person feel good in his presence.
Self- Enhancement: It includes efforts made by a person his own appearance. This can be achieved through changing the dress style, grooming personal appearance for this people use things such as cosmetics, hairstyles, use of perfume or cologne. Further judiciously using the nonverbal cues or their mannerism people try to achieve self- enhancement. Research carried out by Forsythe, Drake and Cox (1985) showed that women who dress in a professional manner where often evaluated for management positions than women who dress in a more tradinally famine manner. People even take risks in the self-enhancement process. The findings of the study Sharp and Getz (1996) found that some people who drink alcohol as a technique to impress others.
Other-Enhancement: In order to impress others people at times use flattering as a technique that is agreeing every views of the other person, showing high interest doing small favors to them, asking their advice and feedback. In total using verbal and non- verbal methods to create they like the other person (Wayne and Ferris, 1990).
A systematic research on this topic showed that if these techniques are used with skill and care all the techniques can bring favorable help to the person who uses them.

Minimizing The Impact of Attribution Errors

Attribution at times generates errors in perception. The net result will be very costly. Hence, it is better to avoid attribution are minimize the errors in attribution. Social Psychologists come out with three methods to minimize the attribution errors they are:
· The Correspondence Bias otherwise termed the fundamental attribution error. There is a strong tendency to attribute other’s behavior to internal causes even though strong external factors might have contributed to such behavior. To reduce this type of errors social psychologist have suggested that try to put yourself in the shoes of the person whose behavior you are explain. This is nothing but trying to see the world through the other person’s eyes.
· The actor-observer effect People have strong tendency to attribute their own behavior to external cause but of others to internal causes. This will lead to false generation about other. To minimize this type of error individuals should raise questions in their mind why would they have acted in that way. Asking such a question will bring out the internal causes for their own behavior.
· The self-serving bias this is nothing but attributing positive outcome to internal causes such as the persons own abilities or efforts. On the contrary negative happenings to external factors such as luck or chance. To minimize these type of error person’s must be simply be aware that all the good happenings are not his/her own contribution all the times at the same time negative happenings may also be caused by his/her own actions.

About The Author

Dr. Leah

Dr. Leah Howard, Positive Psychology
Dr. Howard is a researcher and advocate for positive psychology, focusing on human strengths, happiness, and well-being. Her writings explore how people can cultivate a positive mindset, improve resilience, and develop emotional intelligence to live fulfilling lives.

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