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Amanda Failure Psychology

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Last semester Amanda failed all her first year courses. It is human nature to try attribute a cause to this failure and anyone who knows amanda would assume the knew the reason. This essay will discuss responses on hearing Amanda had failed. Whereas these conclusions may be very biased, Social Psychology has built models of social judgements such as attribution and attitude theory which will be used to gain a fuller view of the situation. The essay will then briefly critiquing these tools. Attributions are inferences we draw about the causes of our or other’s behaviour (Weiten, 2014) and in this case Amanda’s behaviour which lead to her failing the semester. Within attributions we can explore qualitites like external-internal attributions, …show more content…

The fundamental attribution error is a common mistake for an observer to make (Weiten, 2014). As he or she is not involved in the task it is difficult to judge the pressure placed by external influences and therefore assumes that failure was caused by the actor’s internal qualities. This is closely linked to defence attribution which explains that the fundamental attribution error is made to help persuade oneself that the same failure or traumatic event would not happen to you (Weiten, 2014). A student who planned to take the same subjects next year may favour internal attributes in Amanda’s case such as her lack of intelligence rather than admit the test was hard, and that they too could …show more content…

Attributing a positive accomplishment to internal factors of the actor, fosters positive attitudes towards the actor in the observers mind and attributiong a failure or an undesirable consequence being attributed internally can lead to negative attitudes (Kelley & Michela, 1980) or as Jones and Harris state, attributions help the observer gain information about the actor (1967). If they are false they can have serious social implications. Attribution theory also has some problems. Some critiques include that the self-report method used is unreliable (Kelley & Michela, 1980) and that attributions do not happen in isolation but are constantly being shaped by the consequences of previous attempts at attribution and therefor cannot be studied as they currently are. Kelly and Michela also point out the irony of the researchers attempt to attribute how people attribute. When so little is known about this phenomenon how can these reports be trusted (Kelley & Michela,

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