Dispositional Attribution Analysis

Attribution is designating an outcome to one or more external or internal factors. There are two main errors in attribution: Fundamental attribution errors (FAE) and self-serving bias (SSB).

Fundamental Attribution Errors are when people overestimate the role of dispositional factors in an individual's behavior culminating in illogical conclusions. In FAEs, people observe and make conclusions straight away, assuming that it is a dispositional factor. Dispositional factors have to do with personal/internal and generally unchanging characteristics, which are specific to a person. These are features such as, the personality, traits, feelings, moods and abilities of a person.
Sometimes, people will consider but ignore situational factors because

Greenberg et al. speculate that humans employ SSB in order to preserve / boost their own self-esteem. If success it attributed to our internal factors, it boosts our self-esteem and we see ourselves as more superior than we were before. This is further influenced by the attribution of failures to external factors that are out of our control, so then we can protect our self-esteem. This illustrates that the SSB is a mechanism for self-protection. The SSB usually happens more often in individualist cultures, which is why it is commonly associated with western

They were told to teach two children – Pupil A and Pupil B – how to multiply numbers by 10 and 20; this was taught in two phases. After teaching the students each phase, worksheets were given to the teachers to hand out to the students to assess the students learning progress. However, the worksheets were made in a way that Pupil A did very well on both sheet and gave all correct answers, whereas Pupil B did poorly on both sheets, where they did poorly on the first one and improved slightly on the second one later; The teachers were completely unaware of this. When the teachers were asked about Pupil B’s performance, they seemed to attribute Pupil B’s improved performance to their abilities as a teacher but the failure to the pupil’s lack of ability. So when attributing students’ learning progress, teachers showed SSB for the purpose of enhancing the image of their ability to teach. Due to the fact that this was a lab experiment, this study lacked ecological validity. The participants were psychology students, not teachers and it didn’t really show a representative sample; it was an artificial environment, so how accurate can it