Welcome to the second video on causal attribution lecture. In this video, I'd like to start by focusing on the topic of biases, you know, of people when we make causal attribution explaining other people's behavior. The first and the most robust bias we have, well, according to research, is VAE. Fundamental, very basic, right? Attribution error.
It refers to a bias in which we give too much weight to dispositional factors of the actor. And we tend to discount the possible situational factors in causing the behavior. Alright, so these tend to happen when we try to explain, you know, other people's behavior versus our own. So when we explain our own behavior, we do it differently, okay, as you will see later.
But then when we observe someone does something, and how do we know if FAE occurs? It is when you really blame the person's characteristics. rather than the situation surrounding that person. Okay.
An example, a student falls asleep in my class. You are such a lazy student. That's F-A-E. Okay. And I fail to recognize the possible external factors like, perhaps, you know, unfortunately, the parents of the students are going through, you know, tough times.
They're getting divorced. And so she... he's having the problem in the household right now okay or you know he is having difficulty financially he has to work part-time as well and has a little hours a little number of hours to get sleep okay so i overlook the situation of factors okay now if you would follow me i would like to invite you to imagine you holding a session like a small meeting and one friend shows up late.
What's that quick thinking that comes to your mind? What it would be? I'm interested.
Is it positive or negative about the person who's late? Right? Usually it's negative meaning you tend to think, ah, for negative behavior is because of you. Because of you, yourself, and that's once again dispositional attribution, internal attribution to the actor whose action is showing up late.
You're such a lazy person. You don't pay attention. You don't care about this meeting. It's unlikely that when the person shows up late and you go, oh, I know the traffic's really bad, right? Right?
It takes... More, it was a more cognitive effort for us to really generate a possible reason outside the person. I mean, it would be, what it would be, the people coming out in the streets and then, you know, for a demonstration. So the traffic is really bad or, you know, an accident and you helped out.
Well, it takes a lot of cognitive resources to really think about a possible situational factors. What's easier is that, uh, you're such a lazy person, okay? Another name for F-A-E is Correspondent Inference, right? And because it focuses on the person as the cause of the behavior. And in collectivistic cultures, we take into account, you know, the factors from the situation.
We take into account forces from the circumstances as well. Okay, so FAE tends to occur less in collectivistic cultures, but I'm not saying it doesn't apply to us at all. Okay, if you're interested in looking into these cultural influences, please go ahead and apply that to your individual paper.
You could do that. Why? Why we're so fast?
at pointing at the person as the cause of behavior and tend to disregard the forces of the situation surrounding him. Okay, why? First, try to understand why FAE occurs.
Researchers point to the desire of ours to understand and predict the actor's behavior in the future. Okay, a student shows up late to class. I want to know if it's you who's lazy or not, because then I can use these. perception of this student being a lazy person to predict the person's behavior in the future. If I make an explanation out of this behavior as, oh it's because an accident that delayed you during your trip to class, then I would know nothing about you as a person and I would then not know who you are, what kind of person you are, and I have nothing.
to rely on in predicting your future's behavior. So F-A-E reflects our hunger to understand people as persons. Also, it has to do with what you see, literally. Because we're talking about perceptual salience, what's clear in our view, in what we see. by our eyes what is the focus of attention is thought to be the cause of the behavior okay and the notion of our nature in perceiving um objects and people and the notion of figure and ground applies i i assume that you um have heard about it before from your genocide class and we'll we'll get to focus and i'll give you some ingenious, like one ingenious study in the past that demonstrates perceptual salience as a cause of FAE.
And you simply do not, the third one, you simply do not have information about the situation, meaning you don't know it was there was an accident, you don't know the traffic's really bad, or you don't know that it rains in the person's, you know, neighborhood. that it's so bad he got caught in the rain okay you you simply do not aware of possible situational reasons okay and the last one is you're so busy cognitively meaning you're you're thinking about something else you're using your head using using your your your cognition to to process something else okay research found that We're more likely to show, to fall prey for FAE bias when we are busy thinking of something else at the same time of making causal attribution or we are being distracted. When we talked about being busy and being distracted, we're talking about two tasks going on at the same time. We are doing two things at the same time.
You're studying and then somebody does something. FAE tends to happen, you look at the person, you're such a clumsy person, you fall off the stair. It tends to happen when you are studying, when you're busy doing something else, the second task at the same time.
And here is Shelley Taylor and Susan Fitts'classic study. Back then, a long time ago, it means it is classic. In this study, it's easy.
The researchers hired two actors, actor A versus actor B. These actors were ordered to just talk to each other, having conversation. And then if you were a participant in this classic study, you will be placed in either number one, observer A. oh no no just number one number two number three um or sit in a place of number four or five or six okay so there there are six people observing um the conversation between these two actors the question is easy you can see that the iv the independent variable is the location or the position of the observer right okay observer number one two three four five six okay and six possible locations and the dv It was measured pretty easily by some question asking.
So from sitting and observing the two actors, who do you think led the conversation, was the leader of the conversation, who set the tone of the conversation, who perhaps talked more or was more dominant during the conversation? So your answer would be either actor A or actor B, right? yeah just because of two persons okay so can you see um whom do you think would would be the cause of the behavior okay who you think would be you know the one who causes everything during this conversation the one who you know brought up the one who determined sort of direction of the conversation. If you sit in number one, your answer would be...
Can you imagine what observer one is seeing in his eye? A lot of actor A, right? But then just, you know, the shoulder of actor B.
What number two is seeing though is equally proportion of... actor A and actor B. What actor 3 is, I mean what observer 3 is seeing is the entire actor B and just you know part of the arm and arm of actor A.
Okay so the hypothesis is that whoever that's clear in your in your your your view your eyes will tend to be seen as a cause of the behavior tend to be seen as dominant in this conversation. Look at the bar graph, what do you think? It turns out exactly as they expected.
So to check your understanding, observer number four would say who led the conversation. Number five would say two of them are equally dominant. Number six would say is actor A. Of course we are discussing FAE, the fundamental attribution error, right?
But then why, oh, Ajahn, you're showing what looks like a model, like a theory right now? Yes. Why?
Because this contemporary theory is called contemporary model of attribution process. This is a dual model in specific. proposes that during the first step of making attribution, we tend to rely on something effortless process of thinking or automatic thinking. And when we rely on automatic thinking, we tend to go for dispositional attribution.
Oh, and that's F.A.E. All right, remember my Example before that somebody showed up late to your meeting, you tend to think about the person as a person that causes it. It is more of automatic. So when we take automatic process into the picture, we kind of get a fuller picture of thinking processes that apply to making causal attribution.
When the behavior occurs, we observe the behavior, the actor is acting something. The first step in the blue box right here is that we have the fast automatic response, the top-down process that comes to mind. Saying it's he, himself, or it's her, herself.
That is the cause of the behavior, the personality, the characteristic, the dispositions. But then the deliberative kind of thinking, the effortful thinking process can occur later in the orange box. Can occur later.
That's when you think what are some possible situational factors that might have caused the actor to do this. We call it deliberate attributional inference. Automatic. happens first according to this dual process model and then the deliberative thinking happens later in the orange box.
Okay, do you agree with this one? I kind of like it better than saying the covariation model because I'm not that logical, but this one takes into account the automatic process, the effortless one, which parallels to what we already know in terms of impression formation or when we make sense. about other people when we perceive other people in general right that we have these two dual processes okay working simultaneously and then we can override the automatic one okay and that's once again the nature is the same as um within our social cognition okay thinking about other people in general as well we have the autopilot but we can override the system as well.
An example would be behavior occurs is that young man pushes past you to get to the airline ticket counter that just opened up. Oh no, you did not just do that. Then you just judged him immediately to be rude and inconsiderate.
Oh, ill manner. Oh my goodness but then you perhaps overhear him saying that he's going to see his mother's for the last time because she's dying all right now you can adjust from your internal causal attribution to external causal attribution is the situation that is urgent is emergency that's why he just he did that Okay, so can you see the automatic first step? Can you see the more deliberative second step? Can you see now that we can adjust our causal attribution when we get more information? How likely, now I'm asking you, how likely that the third orange box will occur?
How likely did you overhear a possible situational fact? to someone's behavior. How likely that I would really sit and talk with a student who showed up late if he or she encounters any traffic or any accident along the way? That's why correcting the initial FAE is cognitively demanding.
You need time, you need cognitive effort. And that's when we don't have those resources, such as when we are tired, we used up all those resources, right? When we're distracted, we are using cognitive resources on some of the tasks.
We may not perform the second process. The second process may not occur, meaning we may end up with just the FAE and it's just like that. Thinking that the person is a good or a bad person, him or herself, after observing him or her doing something.
So FAE is automatic, sounds like. But just like other automatic processes, we can override it. But you're going to need cognitive resources.
This is just to show you some research, brilliant research that people are doing out there. This is from cognitive neuroscience. And our focus in the program is behavioral neuroscience.
We understand behavior from the neuroscience approach. So they simply just put people in every more eye. in this study right and then observe what's going on in their brain when they commit fundamental attribution error they found that if i'm not wrong it says here the the medial prefrontal cortex right that that is activated okay so we understand more and then here we go the medial prefrontal cortex, the one in the front. Another bias when we make inference, when we make causal attribution of other people, it's called after observer bias, meaning when we explain the behavior as an actor is different from when we explain the behavior as an observer okay are you following me now we are talking about two roles actor you do it yourself versus observer you watched another person doing it okay so the observer part is easy because we have covered it via fae when you observe you're watching somebody does something It's likely that you would think you do that because of you is that kind of person.
The internal cause of behavior, the FAE comes up very fast, automatic. But then we compare and contrast the exact same behavior. But then if you are the actor yourself, you explain it differently. So this bias has to do with.
the role you acting or you just observing okay so um someone failed you fail because you you're bad but i was pushed what happened if you are the actor okay you you don't apply if ae to yourself okay you don't think it's because of you you think it's the situation of factors if if you um are an actor okay observer bias hence refers to the tendency for us to make FAE for others people behavior meaning you care about personal attribution and you disregard the situational attributions but for ourself we tend to apply situational explanations to us okay and one important reason is perceptual salience okay when you look at the picture down here that i put for you the observers her focus is on the actor seeing the actor shooting the basketball okay this is what you see in your eye so the actor is moving doing this and doing that when the situation is invisible meaning you cannot see anything surrounding him but he according to figure and ground notion, is acting, moving, putting the ball in the hoop, right? Like he, of course, will be judged as the cause of the behavior, hence personal attributions for you observing another person. But when you do the task yourself, this is what you will see, a ball falling into the hoop.
Okay, so you don't see yourself. That's why you don't see yourself as the cause of behavior. You only see the ball and people cheering, okay, clapping for you and you see the other teammates. You don't see yourself because you look out to the other things surrounding you. That's why we tend to grab those things surrounding us as the cause of the behavior and tend not to think of ourselves.
as the cause of behavior when we do something as an actor. Why? Once again, the difference in the perspective, that's the second point. And the first point is different information.
This is something that we know versus we do not know. Actors, when you do something, you tend to know whether you're doing this in the past. whether you failed a test in the past before, okay, then you know this is not me. The test was so difficult this time that I failed it. But in the past, I tend to do a good job, you know, in class.
But then the observer, if you observe someone failing a test, you do not know. You simply lack of previous behaviors of this person, whether he used to failed a class before or not where he got an A all the time just except this one time. You just simply lack of information.
Then we have the third kind of bias in making causal attribution is called self-serving bias. The name implies that the bias is there to serve our self. this one applies in a situation where there's the success and failure involved okay so when you There's something right when you win, when you got an A, when you succeed, you tend to go for me as a cause. You mean I'm so good, right?
Versus when you fail, when you didn't get it, when you got a bad grade, you tend to go for something not you. I didn't do it. It's just the weather. The exam was too difficult. The janguk isn't fair.
To students, she didn't test what she said that she would test that. The exam room was noisy. I couldn't concentrate. In Thai, we call these รำไม่ดีทดปีทดกลอง.
Meaning, yeah, you messed up yourself, but then you called on everything else as the cause of the behavior. The positive side is that, of course, then you will feel confident, you will feel like, oh, I did so well on this one. And then you may like the test more, you may engage in the same test again in the future. And of course, the feeling as well, you will feel proud of yourself.
Imagine that you want something, you did something well, but then you said oh it's because of my mom oh it's because of the adhan well well come on right then you would not feel proud of yourself the self-esteem would not get there skyrocketed right would not get high-end okay and if you if you fail and you blame yourself that would be the other side of the story it would be pretty depressing right yeah he left me i was bad because i'm a bad person that's really bad that's um internal and what stable as well because we're talking um personalities and characteristics those tend to be you know long-lasting qualities changeable but tend to endure oh that would be bad okay that's why this bias exists to serve yourself to make you feel good and then to to make you avoid feeling bad when you've done something wrong. Another example, organizational behavior. If I'm not wrong, the abbreviation of this journal title is J-O-B, job. That's nice, right?
That goes really well with the kind of journal I'm dealing with. working behavior that's what organizational behavior is so this is you understanding external internal and relational the invented a different category attributions for abusive supervision okay so abusive supervision your boss is treating you badly abuse you You have to look at the definition, what includes and what's not an under abusive term. And then how you explain why my boss is doing this to me is pretty important. So they found that the internal and external attributions are Related to aggressive and citizenship behavior through employees'perception of interaction justice. Somebody or something else, you know, coming in the picture.
All right. So this, in short, how an employee explains the boss's reason for doing, you know, treating him abusively has to do with how he reacts. to the boss as well as to the company overall as well. So this is in an applied setting that I want to show you how cost of attribution is vital in a work setting. For this one it's more of an achievement setting clearly said that.
I've been studying like in in at school like in an academic when when you wanna achieve something when you got wanna Get your degree. Attribution-based treatment interventions. Wow, you really help people.
This is from Advances in Motivation and Achievement. So this has to do with the researchers applying attributional retraining. Wow.
It says here a motivation-enhancing treatment that will fix the shame. the pattern of how you make attribution of your own success and failure. Meaning if you understand causal attribution and then you can help people who tend to blame themselves when something goes wrong. It's because of me, I did bad, I was not good enough, so and such. Of course, depressing thought linking you to depression.
And we can invent treatment and intervention to help this kind of people by helping them through, for example, their rewriting, helping them identify the negative thoughts that the folks tend to assume for themselves, right? And making things depressing. You see, you think positively, all right?
And you should not be thinking this. You don't know what caused it and why you put yourself, you know? as a culprit.
Okay, so it will help you to identify the pattern of negative thinking, blaming yourself in the area of trying to, you know, achieve something like in academic. In short, learning about attribution can help us creating some intervention to help people fixing their attributional style. So then they adopt a style that would lead to a healthier and a greater well-being in life. The last one I have is one from clinical neurophysiology.
Mouthful, right? So a journal relied on neurophysiology. all right so to help treating people and then this one they use fMRI to look at neural correlates of causal attribution of negative events right then then they are trying to help depressed patients okay well can you see now that causal attribution understand it fixing it is pretty important especially in a particular group of folks like the depressed people okay or those with a tendency but then help them before they get there let's turn to um the last phenomenon i'd like to discuss under um attribution lecture which is self-fulfilling prophecy we call it in short sfp okay there's a profit like a prediction meaning you don't know for sure but you think that will happen in the future but then that expectation becomes real it becomes true it is fulfilled by yourself yep let's see so that it's just that the the definition is as simple as the term it's okay or not so it has to do with the perceivers the perceiver holding an expectations about the target person meaning you think that someone is like this is like that someone is shy and not talkative and dishonest blah blah blah someone is like that okay and then you go on and treat the person according to your set of beliefs okay and via your treatment the behavior that you act toward the person you make your expectation come true in the person okay and that's the the term expectations meaning you don't know for sure but it becomes true later by um how you treat the person okay so this is like a summary for you from what I've just said.
Person A believes, starts with beliefs, starts with expectations, and then it moves on to being translated to a behavior, like how person A treats person B, okay? And then person B will may begin acting in line with person A's initial beliefs, which make person A go, see? I already know.
I knew it. I already knew you that kind of person. I give you an example. All right, you come to class.
First meeting, you don't know much about your classmate yet, but you've heard about this particular classmate that she is pretty critical. She talks about people all the time and pretty judgy like that. Okay, we don't pretty much like. judgy people because we feel like he or she judges us all the time whether we what we're doing it's good or bad okay so you're thinking of a small gathering at home to get to know your friends and to talk about a dance in school but then you think this person judgy person you would not you would not invite her to to the party the the gathering because he or she is nice okay and then that happens you have your gathering and then the person knows later oh you had a nice gathering and you didn't invite him or her of course the person will start to treat you you know um negatively unfriendly why because the way you treated the person first.
Can you see what's going on like the dynamic here? Please go ahead and watch the video link, all right, that first demonstrates the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy. It's classic and it will be tested, it could be asked in the exam.
Okay, the phenomenon of self-fulfilling property was first demonstrated by Rosenthal and Jacobson's study back then in 68. Okay, this is the researchers went to an elementary school. They distributed a measure of IQ. Ask students to measure their IQ.
You're smart, not smart, such and such. And then the manipulation was the... expectations of teachers okay they told teachers that in your class you know from the test result this person and also that kid and that kid and that kid like about 10% or 15% of students in the same class you know randomly picked actually it's not even true those kids they were bloomers meaning you At the end of the semester, they will be more, they will be smarter, they will be more intelligent than their other classmates. These are great students you have in your class.
That kid and that kid and that kid, like say seven kids, okay, in your 20 student classroom. These will, these are bloomers. Pretty, pretty smart kids. Talented.
but they will show later. Once again, those kids were randomly picked. Okay, and then the researcher went away and at the end of school year, they came back again and gave the same test to all the kids and looked at the real score of the kids compared to the pre-test at the beginning of the semester to see the improvement of the IQ.
okay once again the teacher during the semester weren't told anything right only at the beginning of the semester they were told that the kid number one and kid number two and kid number three and kid jason back there these are late bloomers versus the other kids are average they are again in the same classroom okay So what happened throughout the semester when the researchers weren't there? What happened? How do we get to have this? These results, okay. So this is the comparison between the bloomers, okay, in the red bars versus the average student in blue bars.
We have three categories of the kids, you know, in a good amount who gained 10 points on the IQ test. And then we have a smaller group gaining 20 points. That's a lot.
And then smaller of course and then it's unusual to gain 30 points in IQ score. What we can see here, sure enough, the late bloomers who got picked randomly, meaning they weren't actually smarter than the other kids in the class. right they were randomly picked their names were picked out of a hat but then how how that become reality at the end of the semester via the iq scores showing that they become smarter than the other classmates in the class indeed what happened how can expectations of the teachers are translated into reality in the students eventually.
Of course, this is the demonstration of self-fulfilling prophecy. What the trainer, right, in this case teacher, did to the kid throughout the semester was pretty important in explaining the effects of some kids becoming smarter because the the late bloomer kids, they were supported by different ways of how the teacher treated them. The teacher created a positive climate of smiling, treating them positively, being friendly and supportive to this kid, giving good quality feedback, good feedback. It's specific and constructive and supportive. to them when you know they submitted to work all right these late bloomer kids they were given more work to do and more challenging why because the teachers i don't say mistakenly thought they were smart of course then you would know the answer to these you know advanced materials they were given advanced material to work with because you expecting so high of them, right?
And then they were called on more in class. And even though you gave wrong answer, you were given greater time and you were given, you know, more guidance to get you to the right answer. Wow. So this is what happened.
This is how the teachers treat that late bloomers differently from average kids. purely based on teachers'expectations on the kids. Okay, once again, making them performing better than average kids and becoming smarter at the end of the semester. Now, the teacher with the profit fulfill it by themselves. And this is the overall picture of what happened.
I would like you to please identify step one, what happened? Step two, what happened? Step three, what happened?
Okay, this is a loop of self-fulfilling prophecy. And importantly, please see how the behavior of the target then later confirms the expectation of the perceiver. the initial expectation okay leading to the saying like i knew it i always know you liked it right well what you may not know is that you as a perceiver created these in the target's um behavior of course there's a lot of question about self-fulfilling property okay Let's think about it.
I may not have answers for you and I don't feel like I should have many answers for you. Many questions, this is how we think about questions. It's just cool to have many questions because, well, through many ways, we will find our answer. And I just want you to be curious and asking questions and feel like you're hungry for knowing more and you feel like you don't have enough yet about what we learned today, okay?
How likely that we would realize that my... husband is lazy around the house because I treated him that way. I think he's lazy, not helping us with chores. So I do all the chores myself. And then I look at him again.
He's playing the game. He's playing game. See, he's so lazy.
He's playing game all day. Of course, because I'm not asking him to do anything. because I think he would not want to do it because that's the way I treat him.
Okay, how likely that I would realize that it is because of me? Why or why not? Okay, what if my husband feels the negative view I have, negative view I have toward him and try to show me that he's a responsible person helping around the house. Will I change? Will the dynamic, will the loop of self-fulfilling property be broken?
How would the motivation to understand the target correctly, accurately, how would it play a role? Rather than simply thinking, perhaps you like this, but now you disregard that. expectation and try to understand the real you know person in front of you okay just think about that all right at the end I just would like you to think about all the people surrounding you right that you think you you're not happy with him or her right could be friends could be any people you know that you're interacting with okay the notion of self-fulfilling property the understanding of this phenomenon would perhaps you know lead us to think of us as the cause of other people's behavior right because i treat my husband that way now he's showing lazy behavior around the house okay that means if i you know go back and change that set of negative expectations that i have toward him then i would break this cycle of pygmalion effect that's another name of self-fulfilling prophecy it has a very good greek story behind it and find out if if i change my expectation then the relationship between us, this sore relationship between us may change.
Wow! Meaning you can change the world, you can change this particular problematic person by changing you first, changing how you initially view the person. Okay? And that has to do with negative interaction well let's try that i mean i don't know i just want to to invite you to try that and see if it works okay and another another question i can think of is that we were talking the the negative um self-fulfilling property can they can well and then we talked about earlier on The other kind, the teacher and late bloomers, remember that?
The positive kind of self-fulfilling property. We are talking also the negative kind, like in many examples that I talked about in this lecture. Okay, the positive kind and negative kind, are they the same, happening the same way?
Okay, then what happened in each kind? You can look at that and think about you know application settings. Of course you can see now that it is pretty important in the trainer trainee. relationship like teacher students are there any other settings that self fulfilling prophecy is vital okay keep asking questions and try to find the answer goodbye