Dispositional Factors Social Influence

6 Key excerpts on "Dispositional Factors Social Influence"

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  Essentials of Psychology

  • John P. Houston, Helen Bee, David C. Rimm(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  As you can see in Figure 1, they found that the subjects gave both dispositional and situational reasons for Some basic intrapersonal processes that affect social interactions 463 FIGURE 1 Attnbutions of external and internal causes for our own and others' behavior. (From Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Maracek, 1973, adapted from Tab. 2, fr 159.) c > c 8 ï £ 3 C 8> (0 <5 1 5 4 3 2 1 ', './'-'''-! ' ' >, cï'l'-,' ' Self 1 IBlflï llliiliil»:! I liipiei itPiiiiii External reasons Internal reasons Best friend their friend's choice of a girlfriend, but they gave more than twice as many situational as dispositional reasons for their own choice. We can see this same effect being applied in real-life situations. If we believe that other people are responsible for their own actions, then their mishaps and victimizations somehow must be their own fault, as well. We might therefore expect to find such things as rape victims being blamed for the rapes, which is exactly what Jones and Aronson (1973), among oth-ers, have found. But if the same misfortunes happen to ourselves, we do not assume we are at fault. (Lucy and Linus show both sides of this bias in Figure 2.) Where does this difference in attribution come from? Apparently, the bias comes about because observers and actors literally have different points of view. When you are doing something, you don't see your body language or any other cues about yourself. What you see is the rest of the world impinging on you. But when you watch someone else, you focus on their body cues and what they are saying. So the explanations of be-havior that you seize on are probably the ones you can see. If that's the right explanation, then giving people a chance to look at themselves should make them attribute fewer situational or more dispositional causes to themselves. This is just what several researchers have found. Storms' now classic study (1973) shows the effect particularly clearly.

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  Positive Social Behavior and Morality

  Social and Personal Influences

  • Ervin Staub(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Personality, the Situation, and the Determination of Prosocial Behavior How are social behavior in general and prosocial behavior in particular determined? Psychologists have long believed that a person's personality in combination with the surrounding conditions determine that person's behavior. However, an adequate conceptual model of how the two combine is still lacking. One purpose of this chapter is to attempt to provide such a model. Two basic concepts that psychologists traditionally used in designating individual differences are the concepts of trait and motive. Trait refers to distinguishable and relatively enduring ways in which individuals differ. Traits are descriptive; a person might be more or less helpful, more or less aggressive. These characteristics are inferred from behavior. Motive refers to a goal or end state that is valued by a person. Certain conditions in the environment (external or internal) of the person may activate a motive. A motivated state might be inferred from a heightened level of arousal or activation and/or from behavior that is goal-directed. Each of these two concepts implies consistency, similarity in behavior over time and across situations. The assumption of consistency has been one of the cornerstone assumptions in traditional theorizing about personality. How can we talk about individual differences or hope to predict behavior if we cannot point to stable, enduring characteristics of people? However, even the most avid promoter of trait theory and an ideo-graphic approach to personality, Gordon Allport (1961), clearly recognized the limitations on consistency in behavior. He believed that several im-39 chapter 2 40 2. Personality, the Situation, and the Determination of Prosocial Behavior portant sources of inconsistency exist. Personality traits may contradict one another; the environment constantly changes, activating one trait, then another; usually several traits act together.

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  Handbook of Personality Psychology

  • Robert Hogan, John Johnson, Stephen Briggs(Authors)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Often self-imposed, maladap-tive dispositional attributions are converted to situational attributions when appro-priate. These remedies resemble superficially typical therapeutic attempts to change internal qualities of individuals. But actually these remedies are directed primarily at changing the behavior of individuals in problematic situations. Ultimately, most social psychological remedies try to alter the nature of human interaction in situa-tions. Both personaUty and social psychologists have produced literally hundreds of Path B studies over the years. This most popular of bottom-up paths demonstrates how personality makes a significant difference at the situational level. Much of the work of this genre following World War II was conducted in the small group research tradition, the most important of which came from Freed Bales and his colleagues. In time, this work led to the most developed, data-based model that exists of the complex interaction of personality and task group structure (Bales, 1970). This interactive model encompasses linkages of both Paths B and E of Figure 1 by combining group roles with personality traits in a three-dimensional value space. On the basis of personality measures alone, for example, the model generates predictions concerning likely coalitions and behavior in the task-oriented group. Other early work showed how a single disruptive person (a schoolroom devi-ant, an alcoholic, a mental patient) could radically alter the operation of a family or classroom (Gnagey, 1960; Jackson, 1956; Yarrow, Clausen, & Robbins, 1955). More recently, following the cognitive revolution, such individual factors as causal attributions are shown to affect situational perception and interaction.

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  Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing

  Insights and Applications

  • Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In another attempt to define conditions under which we make internal or dispositional attributes to behavior we perceive as intentional, Edward Jones and Keith Davis proposed the correspondent inference theory. This theory refers to assuming that people’s behaviors match or correspond with their motives, dispositions, or personality, e.g., correspondence between behaving in a friendly way and being a friendly person (Jones & Davis, 1965). The inferences people will make are based on the following factors:

  ■ Personal choice: if a behavior is considered voluntary and freely chosen, it is believed to be due to internal (dispositional) factors.

  ■ Accidental vs. intentional behavior: behavior that is intentional is likely to be attributed to the person’s personality, and behavior which is accidental is likely to be attributed to situational/external causes. If perceived environmental forces are strong, people are not likely to make dispositional attributions, e.g., if a student always comes late to class, as the class is on the other side of campus, teacher is less likely to make a dispositional attribution.

  ■ Normativeness: the greater the degree to which an action conforms to social norms, the less information it yields about the intentions and dispositions of actors. Actions which violate norms are more likely to be attributed to dispositions than to environmental forces, e.g., teachers behaving in a standard way do not tell us anything about how they really are. However, if a teacher behaves unusually harsh to his/her students, then it may be more expressive of their personal attributes.

  ■ Hedonic relevance

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  The Science of Social Influence

  Advances and Future Progress

  • Anthony R. Pratkanis(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  I end my brief history of social influence research with the publication of Cialdini’s book, as many of the chapters in this book pick up on the themes and approaches popularized in his volume. Major milestones in social influence research are set out in Table 1.1. WHAT IS AN EXPLANATION OF INFLUENCE? One of the most important findings to come out of research on social influence is that situations are more powerful in controlling our behavior than we normally think (Ross & Nisbett, 1991). To account for this state of affairs, Lee Ross (1977) coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for the tendency to over- emphasize dispositional explanations for behaviors observed in others while underemphasizing the role and power of situational influences. Knowledge of the fundamental attribution error and the power of the situation has led social influence researchers to appreciate two important dictums of research, which in turn results in important applied benefits. First, social influence researchers tend to be wary of explanations that rely heavily on dispositional causes such as “people conform because they are gullible” or “the person obeyed because just the necessary mental thoughts were primed (suggested).” This class of explanation is at least doubly wrongheaded because it (a) is a classic example of the fundamental attribution error that often fails to elucidate the true underlying causes of behavior (see for example, Pratkanis’ (2006) description of the failure to find a “gullibility” or “persuasibility” factor to explain influence) and (b) merely names the thing to be explained without explain- ing it. The use of such explanation is what Gilbert Ryle and B. F. Skinner term a homunculus (Latin for “the little man”) that supposedly resides inside each person to act in just the way needed to explain the behavior of the person.

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  Psychology

  • Douglas Bernstein, , , (Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Schemas, however, can create self-fulfilling prophecies , leading us to act in Summary 621 Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 622 Social Psychology ways that bring out behavior in others that is consistent with our expectations of them. Attribution is the process of explaining the causes of people’s behavior, including our own. Observers tend to attribute be-havior to causes that are either internal or external to the actor. Attributions are also affected by biases that systematically distort our view of behavior. The most common attributional biases are the fundamental attribution error (and its cousin, the ultimate attribution error), the actor-observer effect , and the self-serving bias . Personal and cultural factors can affect the extent to which people exhibit these biases. Attitudes Do attitudes always determine behavior? An attitude is the tendency to respond positively or negatively to a particular object. Attitudes affect a wide range of behaviors. Most social psychologists see attitudes as composed of three components: cognitive components (beliefs), affective components (feelings), and behavioral components (actions). Attitudes can be learned through modeling as well as through classical or operant conditioning. They are also subject to the mere-exposure effect: all else being equal, people develop greater liking for a new object the more often they are exposed to it.

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