Attributions, the fundamental attribution error, self-serving and confirmation biases, stereotypes and stereotype priming (QCE Psychology Unit 4)

What this dot point is asking

Unit 4 Topic 3 (Attitudes) in the 2025 syllabus includes four dot points on how we explain and judge other people, all examinable in the external assessment:

1. describe attributions and how they explain behaviour, with reference to situational and dispositional attributions and the fundamental attribution error;
2. describe self-serving and confirmation biases;
3. describe stereotypes and identify their advantages and disadvantages;
4. interpret data about stereotype priming and behaviour from a modification of experiment 2 in Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996), which is also the topic's suggested investigation.

The tri-component model of attitudes, implicit and explicit attitudes and cognitive dissonance are on our attitudes page; social identity theory and the formation of prejudice are on our social identity and prejudice page.

The answer

Attributions

An attribution is an explanation we give for the cause of a behaviour, our own or someone else's. Attributions matter because they shape how we feel about and respond to people.

• A dispositional (internal) attribution explains behaviour by something about the person: their personality, ability, effort or intentions. "She failed because she is lazy."
• A situational (external) attribution explains behaviour by something in the circumstances: the task, other people, luck or the environment. "She failed because the test covered material that was never taught."

The fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the tendency, when explaining other people's behaviour, to overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational causes. When someone is rude to us, we tend to assume they are a rude person, not that they are having a terrible day.

Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz (1977) demonstrated it with a quizmaster study. Participants were randomly assigned to be questioners, who wrote difficult general-knowledge questions from their own areas of expertise, or contestants, who tried to answer them. Contestants often failed. Afterwards, contestants and observers rated the questioners as more knowledgeable than the contestants, even though everyone knew the roles were randomly assigned and that the questioner role gave a huge advantage. They attributed the performance to ability (disposition) rather than to the situation. The syllabus notes that attributions influence how we interpret others' behaviour and how we respond to them.

Self-serving bias and confirmation bias

• Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute our own successes to internal causes (ability, effort) and our own failures to external causes (bad luck, an unfair test). It protects self-esteem but can stop us learning from mistakes.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, notice, interpret and remember information that confirms what we already believe, and to overlook or discount information that contradicts it. It helps keep stereotypes and prejudices in place, because confirming examples are noticed and exceptions are dismissed.

Biases can have beneficial, harmful or unintended consequences: self-serving bias can protect motivation, while confirmation bias can lead to poor decisions and unfair judgements of others.

Stereotypes

A stereotype is a widely held, oversimplified belief about the characteristics of members of a group, applied to individuals because of their group membership. In the tri-component model, a stereotype is mainly the cognitive (belief) component of an attitude towards a group.

Stereotype priming: Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996), experiment 2

Priming is when exposure to one stimulus activates related concepts in memory, influencing later responses without awareness. Bargh, Chen and Burrows asked whether activating a stereotype could automatically change behaviour.

• Method. Participants completed a scrambled-sentence task. For one group, the sentences included words associated with the stereotype of elderly people (such as "grey" and "Florida"; words about slowness were deliberately left out). For the control group, the words were neutral. When participants left, the time they took to walk down the corridor was secretly measured.
• Results. Participants primed with the elderly stereotype walked more slowly, by roughly a second, than the control group.
• Conclusion. Activating a stereotype can automatically produce behaviour consistent with it, without the person being aware of the influence.

This study also illustrates the syllabus's point that findings need to be reproducible. Later attempts to replicate it with automated timing (for example, Doyen and colleagues in 2012) did not find the effect unless the experimenters expected it, raising the possibility that experimenter expectations influenced the original timing. When you interpret data from a modified version, look for the trend, quantify the difference, draw a conclusion and consider limitations such as blind timing, sample size and individual differences in walking speed.