Situational and dispositional factors

Describe the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior.

Attribution is defined as how people interpret and explain casual relationships in the social world. We want to know how and why things happen the way they do. Dispositional attributions refers to our attitudes, beliefs and personality (internal), while situational attributions refers to rewards and punishments, social setting and pressures (external). Personality is individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving and it's composed of a variety of traits. The trait theory states that we don't behave the same in every similar situation, but we have the tendency to behave a certain way (Epstein, 1983). These are the things that comes from within. Often people unconsciously makes judgments about behaviors depending on who is performing it. We are more likely to explain others behavior by dispositional factors rather than by the situation they are in when it happens. 

Discuss two errors of attribution.

Self-serving bias
People always want to feel good about them selves and they take credit for everything they can. When a person is successful in an area they feel like they themselves are responsible for their success. For example when we pass a test it was because of hard work, concentration, and intelligence.  But, when we fail, it's because the teacher gave us a test with things he never taught us, he didn't give us enough time, or he just doesn't like us and that's why he gave us a bad grade. That's because we want to protect our ego. So when something goes wrong we try to blame it on someone or something that's not us. We simply think that internal factors are responsible for our success and external factors are responsible for failure. 

Spotlight effect error
People have a tendency to overestimate the extend to which others are paying attention to them. We think that we are the center of the universe and that everybody will notice our every move. We think that people will notice everything we do, both good and bad, but in fact they are way to busy focusing on themselves. A perfect example is the Barry Manilow T-Shirt experiment. The participants, who were university students, had to wear a T-Shirt with a picture of Barry Manilow for a full day. The students thought that 50% of the other students on campus would notice and judge them, but in fact less than 20% noticed it at all.