All The Pieces Matter

Most people tend to be completely oblivious to the impact that a situation can have on the way a person behaves. For example, a person may seem to be very timid and quite when you first meet him/her, but is only acting that way because they are stressed for an exam coming up, or maybe because they are feeling ill. On any other day this person wouldn't stop talking, and actually could be pretty annoying. The fact is, we tend to make personal attributions about a person's behavior first, and we sometimes fail to even consider the situational attributions that could have occurred. This error of not considering the situational attributions is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). We usually draw inferences on other peoples' personalities immediately (Uleman,1987), and if we are not preoccupied, and cognitively busy in any other way, we take the situation into account (Gilbert et al, 1989). Since noticing the effects of a situation on behavior is the only step that takes cognitive effort, we can easily leave it out. Another interesting and important point about this error, is how pervasive it is in Western cultures, as opposed to non-Western cultures. For example, a cross cultural study shows that Indians tend to attribute behavior to the context in which they occurred, as opposed to Americans that attributed the behavior to the dispositions of the individual (Miller, 1984)

Living in two very culturally different countries has definitely shed light on the fundamental attribution error. I was born in the United States, and lived here for most of my life, so I am subject to committing the fundamental attribution error, but in India (where I moved  to when I was 12), as discussed earlier, people tend to take the situation into account. For example, certain teachers would be complete assholes every now and then, and I would assume that they just had a short temper, or maybe even bi-polar disorder. Whenever I would talk about it to my friends, they would attribute it to the situation rather than the teacher themselves, saying that perhaps they were having a bad day, or any number of external factors that could have contributed to their behavior. I didn't realize this at the time, but making the fundamental attribution error could be quite detrimental in the way I see others.

Word Count: 394

References


Gilbert, D. T. (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process. 
          S J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.),Unintended Thought: Limits of Awareness, Intention and Control.     
          New York: Guilford Press.

Miller, J.G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality 
          and Social Psychology, 46, 981-978.


Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-
          perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-
          301.
Uleman, J.S (1987). Consciousness and control :The case of spontaneous trait inferences. Personality and 
          Social Psychology Bulletin, 13(3), 337-354. doi: 10.1177/0146728133004

What if...?

What if things had happened differently? Nobody will ever know, but thinking these kinds of thoughts, and playing out past situations that have not occurred is known as counterfactual thinking (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Counterfactual thinking can be both a positive and negative thing, as if you imagine the situation ending worse than what actually happened, then you would probably feel a sort of relief. However, if you imagine the situation could have ended up better, you would probably feel disappointed or depressed. According to past research, many people's main regret centers include education, career and romance, due to opportunities that we did not capitalize on (Roese & Summerville, 2005).

To give a clear example of counterfactual thinking in effect, another study found that students are more likely to feel regret, when they change a test answer from right to wrong, rather than failing to fix a mistake (Kruger, et al, 2005). Counterfactual thinking can manifest itself in ways that not many people would expect. Medvec et al (1995) conducted a study where the participants ranked the happiness of Olympic gold medal, silver medal, and bronze medal winners (by examining the video of them collecting their medals). It turns out that the bronze medal winners seemed to be much happier than the silver medal winners. This is because the silver medal winners kept wondering what would have happened if they had trained harder.

I'm not sure how often other (normal) people counterfactually think, but I definitely tend to do this a lot. One of the more memorable time that I have done this, is probably when I got into a pretty big argument with one of my friends a while back. Taking account that I was much younger (around 14 years old), and definitely a lot stupider, I still feel that I could have handled the situation a lot better. At the time I definitely thought back on the situation wondering what I could have done in order to prevent the situation. I recall the negative symptoms of this kind of counterfactual thinking, as I felt regret for at least a month after that.

Word Count: 352

References

Kahneman, D., & Miller, D.T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological 
          Review, 93, 136-153

Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., & Miller, D.T. (2005). Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy. Journal of 
        Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 725-735
Medvec, V.H., Madey, S.F., & Gilovich, T. (1995). When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and
         satisfaction among Olympic medalists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 603-610.

Roese, N.J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most....and why. Personality and Social
         Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1273-1285

Respect Yourself

Today's presentation called "Healthy Relationships" was quite insightful, and in my opinion a much better presentation than the last (Get Sexy, Get Consent). The presentation, as the title suggests, is about having a healthy relationship with someone. One of the main points that stuck out to me was having respect for yourself, for one main reason. That is, respecting yourself makes disrespect seem a lot more obvious, and you shouldn't stand for that shit. Especially when it's coming from someone that is supposed to respect you, and without that respect, the relationship is most likely not going to end well. Also, another point that was made, was that people have the ability to be both polite and assertive. Though being assertive (at least in my mind) is usually not tied with being polite. This doesn't have to be the case, as in the example that the speaker brought up, if you don't want to do something in particular that your significant other wants to do, you can politely and assertively communicate that you don't want to join. Overall, I would say there were some important and interesting points that were made by the speaker in this presentation, and I am happy to say that I learned something from it.

word count: 209

Not My Place to Disagree

I've been in plenty of situations where I've tried to get people to like me for whatever reasons. They could have been my boss, teacher, or even just some random person that I just met. Well, I guess most people have, so I'm not that special, but what most people don't realize (except for my social psychology class) is that this is a Self Presentation Strategy (Schlenker, 2003), more specifically it is known as ingratiation (Jones, 1964). Ingratiation, in short, is a strategy that people use, to get others to like them. It is usually used by people on the lower part of the pyramid to people higher up, such as an employee to a boss. Ingratiation can be split into two categories, namely conformity and flattery. Conformity is agreeing with point of view, whether your actually believe it or not, but can also be non-verbal, such as nodding your head. Other non-verbal conformity can include dressing like someone, or matching someone else's behavior to make yourself look better. The next is flattery, which occurs when you compliment another person. Most people love compliments, but when you take it too far they tend to realize that you're full of shit.

Now I would like to think that I don't conform to views that I completely disagree with, but that's just not true. Over last summer vacation, I was staying at my friends' house in California. It was a lot of fun seeing my friends after way too long, and I'm grateful that they gave me a place to stay for 3 whole months. That being said, my friends' parents were very very religious. Obviously I have nothing against people that are religious, but since I am pretty much on the opposite side of the spectrum, I had some completely different views. Since this was the case, every time certain topics or discussions were brought up, I just sat there and nodded my head, not even coming close to speaking my mind on the matter. Never once did I expect I would blindly nod to views I had a completely opposite opinion on, and this probably won't be the last.

References

Schlenker, B.R. (2003). Self-presentation. In M.R. Leary & J.P. Tangney (Eds). Handbook of self and identity (pp. 492-518).

Jones, E.E. (1964). Ingratiation: A social psychological analysis.