My Favourite Takeaway From A Course In Psychology
— and why everyone should know about it too.
I’m gonna start this off by saying that I’m a psychology major about to start my second year of college — and that’s it. I am by no means an expert, but my experience with this one lesson was powerful enough for me to need to write about it.
The two kinds of attribution
My class and I were learning about social psychology and the different elements of attitudes. On the topic of attribution, which is defined by Fiske and Taylor as “how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events [by examining] what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment,” we were taught that there are two kinds.
Dispositional attribution is assigning the cause of the behaviour to internal characteristics of people. An example is a person being late to a meeting and one member of the group blaming it on the person’s laziness and bad time management.
Situational attribution, on the other hand, is assigning the cause of the behaviour to external factors. Using the same example, while the other person blames it on internal characteristics, another person using situational attribution would think that maybe there was a traffic jam or a family emergency they had to deal with.
Why knowing the difference is important
Personally, knowing the two kinds of attribution has changed the way I interact with people. It’s given me a new lens to see the world with and has allowed me an easier time of understanding why things happen the way they do.
To give an example of how this has impacted my life, first we should take a look at my context with my friends and family. I like giving advice to people, and people like asking advice from me. It’s my way of helping the people I care about, and since I’m planning to become a practicing psychologist it helps me hone my listening skills as well.
Given that, it’s been a lot easier to assess situations and give the best possible advice I could give knowing the basics of attribution that I learned about. Whenever someone comes to me with a problem, I can usually play devil’s advocate with situational attribution because they’ll likely be overusing dispositional attribution – something called the fundamental attribution error. Some people find it easier to use dispositional attribution when they’ve been wronged because it puts the blame solely on the person who wronged them; knowing this helps me give them a new, necessary perspective that they had been missing. Majority of the time, this makes all the difference.
How situational attribution can be useful
I like looking at things through the lens of situational attribution rather than dispositional. This is because personally, I’d rather see the bigger picture of situations, gather all the perspectives, and then use all of those to come to my conclusion.
It’s not easy, but doing so has made me a much more understanding person. I used to be pretty impatient with people in general, but attempting to consider all the external factors has made me more patient when dealing with people and their problems.
It also keeps me healthily unbothered. I’ve actually written an article about managing the things that bother me and why it’s changed my life for the better, and this is mainly because I’ve been using situational attribution to discern whether certain things should bother me or if they’re not worth the time.
Except sometimes, things are exactly how they seem
However great this new life lesson is, everything comes with a downside.
One major one is that sometimes I can’t accept that things are exactly the way they seem. I tend to overuse situational attribution and while it can be a good thing, assigning causes to the people themselves is sometimes exactly what we need to do to hold them accountable for their actions.
We can’t always be looking at external factors; sometimes we have to teach people responsibility.
A danger of overusing situational attribution is that people can take advantage of it. It’s great to constantly try to see the good in people, sure, but we have to admit that sometimes those people are the same people that will use our openness to get away with doing what they want.
These people are the reason we have dispositional attribution; sometimes what you see is exactly what it actually is.
Striking a balance when using the two kinds of attribution is the best way to gain more – if not all – the perspectives of a situation. It’s just a matter of knowing which one to use in each situation and while it isn’t always easy, it always pays off in the end.
