Hva er egentlig forskjellen på the fundimental attrubution error og correspondence bias? Går det ikke egentlig ut på det samme, at man tolker det mennesker gjør som et resultat av deres indre disposisjoner? Ønsker å få klargjort forskjellen!

These two biases are very similar, and they do both refer to a general tendency for observers to associate behaviors with the dispositions of people who perform those behaviors. The differences is that the fundamental attribution error deals with judgments of causality and correspondence bias deals with inferred traits.

Consider the example of a student who gets an excellent grade on an exam. This behavior can lead to at least two types of judgment. The first type is sometimes referred to as a trait inference, and it refers to the attributes people conclude the actor (the student) has based on the behavior (exam performance) that they see. The fact that people tend to make excessively strong trait inferences often based on little data or ambiguous data is what we call correspondence bias. In this example, an observer might conclude that the student is very smart even if that conclusion isn’t justified.

The second type of judgment is sometimes referred to as a causal attribution, which addresses the question “what caused the student to do so well?”. There are a number of possible explanations of this event, including situational ones like easy exam questions, having studied exactly the right material just before the exam, a generous grading committee, etc. But behavioural observers tend to place excessive weight on dispositional explanations; in particular, they might be inclined to conclude that this student’s high intelligence caused his successful exam performance despite the presence of other, potentially better explanations. This would be an example of the fundamental attribution error. In principle, the fundamental attribution error is one step beyond correspondence bias – it isn’t sufficient to merely believe that the student is smart, you also have to believe that the smartness was the cause of the student’s exam performance.

Kanskje en liste med de forskjellige attribusjons feilene og litt mer om dem hadde gjort seg.

Here is a short list of attributional biases:

(1) Fundamental attribution error/correspondence bias – See answer to question 1 above.

(2) The actor/observer effect (also called the actor/observer difference) – This refers to the fact that people tend to explain their own behavior differently than the behavior of others. In particular, people tend to see their own behavior as caused by situational factors but others’ behavior as caused by dispositional factors.

There are a number of explanations for this bias, the main ones being (a) “perceptual salience”, which essentially says that when you perform a behavior you are focused outward on the situation but people observing you are attending at you. The argument is that we tend to attribute causality to the things we are attending to. (b) The available information argument claims that important differences in information between actors and observers create this bias. Simply put, you have a lot more background information about your own behaviors than the average person does, and a lot of this background information leads to situational attributions. For example, if you fell asleep during one of my lectures, you might explain that by the fact that your baby was crying all night (situational explanation), but because I don’t have access to that information I might conclude that you are disinterested (dispositional explanation).

(3) Self-serving attributions – we tend to make attributions that help us feel good about ourselves and our attributes. This generally means that we attribute our successes to dispositional factors but our failures to situational factors. Thus, if you get a job you might think it is because you are talented but if you don’t get a job you might think it is because the hiring process was unfair.

There are several explanations for self-serving attributions. The first is motivational – we are simply driven to think about the world in ways that bolster our own self-image. The second is self-presentational – maybe we explain things in self-serving ways to make ourselves look good to others. The self-serving bias can also be explained by thinking about intentions. In most cases, your successes reflect achieving things that you intended to do. Why did that happen? Because you did it deliberately (dispositional explanation). On the other hand, failures tend to be unintended. Why did that happen? Well, you tried to do something different/successful, but something outside you prevented that from happening (situational explanation).

Forskjellen / forholdet mellom den fundamentale attribusjonsfeilen og actor/observer difference, spotlight-effekten og correspondence bias. Jeg skjønner hva det går ut på, men jeg ser ikke helt forskjellen mellom disse begrepene / hvordan de forholder seg til hverandre. Går ikke alt egentlig ut på det samme? (--> forholdet person-situasjon)

Most of these are defined in the previous answers, except for the spotlight effect, which refers to people's tendency to overestimate the extent to which their behavior and appearance are noticed and evaluated by others. I’d say that the spotlight effect isn’t very closely related to the other biases at all, as it really isn’t an attributional bias.

As noted in response to question 1 above, the fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias are very similar except that the fundamental attribution error is about judgments of causality rather than about trait inferences.

The actor/observer effect is also very closely related to the fundamental attribution error. Both refer to judgments of causality, and in fact half of the actor/observer effect is identical to the fundamental attribution error – people tend to see the behavior of others as dispositionally caused. The important point of the actor/observer effect is that this tendency reverses when we look at our own behavior, such that we tend to see that as situationally caused.

But that isn’t quite the whole story, as I should also include the self-serving bias (SSB) here. You should notice that at times the self-serving bias and the actor/observer effect (AOE) contradict each other. When we perform badly, both SSB and AOE predict that we will explain that performance situationally. However, when we perform well, AOE still predicts a situational explanation whereas SSB predicts a dispositional one (i.e., explaining our success dispositionally allows us to feel better about ourselves). This can be a bit complicated to sort out, but think of them as two influences operating simultaneously and that sometimes they work against each other. Generally, the AOE indicates that people tend to explain their own behaviors situationally. In the case of failures, SSB adds to this and makes us very strongly inclined toward situational explanations. In the case of successes, SSB works against this and we might explain our behaviors just as dispositionally (perhaps even more so) as we tend to explain the behaviors of others.

Forholdet mellom skjema og stereotypier, fordommer, heuristikker, diskriminering og attribusjon. Igjen: jeg skjønner begrepene hver for seg, men det hadde vært veldig bra å få trekt opp noen linjer, fellestrekk og forskjeller for om mulig å få en slags oversikt over helheten og hvordan alt virker sammen. (Et ambisiøst prosjekt, ja, men likevel..)

Let’s start with stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination because they are all very closely related. They all refer to elements of our “attitudes” toward members of certain social groups. Such a group could for example be Swedes, Hindus, women, or university professors, and the basic principles are the same. Stereotypes refer to the beliefs we have about the characteristics of group members purely on the basis of their group membership. They ignore individual characteristics of a particular group member and “simplify” judgments by basically assuming all group members are the same. “Swedes are socially reserved” might be an example of a stereotype. Prejudice refers to a negative affective reaction to group members purely on the basis of their group membership. “I dislike Swedes” would be an example of prejudice in this context. As you might imagine, stereotypes and prejudice are related in the sense that we tend to believe that groups we dislike have negative characteristics as well. Discrimination refers to negative behavior toward group members, again for no reason other than their group membership. Sticking with our example, discrimination toward Swedes could manifest in a variety of ways, for example from boycotting Swedish products to cursing at Swedes whenever you meet them. And of course discrimination is connected to stereotypes and prejudice, because we do bad things to people we dislike and to people we hold negative beliefs about.

Schemas refer generally to any cognitive structures we have to help us represent our knowledge more efficiently. We can have schemas about events (e.g., what is the usual procedure for eating dinner at a restaurant), social roles (e.g., what does a secretary do?), ourselves (e.g., what am I like?), or pretty much anything else. Stereotypes could be viewed as a type of schema that we use to store information about particular groups of people.

Perhaps the most general of the terms you ask about is ”heuristic” Several specific types of heuristic are described in the pensum, but the general term simply refers to any mental shortcut people use to make more efficient judgments. In that sense, a stereotype can be viewed as a type of heuristic – rather than carefully evaluating every group member based on her own attributes, one might take a mental “shortcut” and just assume she is just like every member of her group. This is much more efficient than carefully evaluating each person, but of course it also often leads to incorrect judgments. Using a schema can also be viewed as a heuristic in the sense that we are applying our general knowledge about a class of objects rather than carefully evaluating specific elements of that class.

The last term you mention is attributions, which aren’t directly related to any of the other terms. Nevertheless, there are connections. For example, we might use schematic knowledge of a situation (e.g., that situation makes everyone nervous) as a basis for evaluating the causes of a behavior in that situation (e.g., Frank seems nervous, why could that be?). We could also have pre-existing stereotypes about a person we are making attributions about, and those stereotypes might influence our attributions through various belief confirmation processes. You can also see some of the attributional biases discussed earlier as resulting from heuristic processes of a sort. Some might even go so far as to suggest that we have a basic schema that says behaviors imply dispositions, and correspondence bias is simply the result of overapplying that schema.

Et par ord om forholdet mellom sosial kognisjon og sosial persepsjon.

I think first of all the writers in this area do not make a clear distinction between the two concepts. Social cognition is somewhat broader than social perception. Social cognition is usually indicating the whole area that deals with "how we make sense of our social environment". Social perception might be considered as somewhat more narrow, referring to how we perceive other persons and other groups, including processes like impression formation, stereotyping, and attribution. Social cognition includes all of this too, but in addition includes related areas, such as, for instance, social memory (how is information about other people and groups stored), the self, social comparison, emotions and cognition, self-regulation processes, and attitudes. In other words, social cognition encompasses the area of cognitive psychology, but confined to how we process information about other people.

"I would like to know more about what people define as authority or experts in the matter of obedience. I would think that what people see as experts or authority depends on how they define them self. Milgrams experiments on this matter is quite extreme because it requires negative behavior in an extreme authority situation. Are there any experiments on how and why we accept leadership more generaly and can personality trait play a matter?"

First of all, about Milgram's work, he conducted an extensive program of experiments, which investigated many different variables that might influence the obedience responses. For instance, the dramatic results (compliance with the request to give potentially deadly shocks) virtually disappear when another confederate playing a role as subject ("teacher") refuses to comply. Among other things, he also used non-authority individuals (e.g., "students") who told the subjects to shock. These variations also made the compliance with the schock request drop substantially, suggesting that indeed authority is part of the process of creating the obedience effects. He also replicated the main experiment at some unprestigious school, rather than at his prestigious university. It also reduced the obiedience effects. You may call this too an authority effect. In this case authority was based on the location. In sum what Milgram did was actually a fine example of good science: he focused at a phenomenon, and tried to understand that phenomenon by studying in under a large number of different conditions. By observing under which conditions the effect was stronger or weaker this provided much knowledge about the phenomenon itself.

Authorities may fall in two categories: those who have authority in specific situations (e.g., an airliner captain, a scientists who is competent in a specific area, a famous musician). These individuals get their authority from their expertise, talent or fortune. Sometimes authority perceptions can be more general. For instance someone who wears a uniform usually is seen as having authority. This is usually directly connected to power and/or the fact that other people's fate may depend on these individuals. The two categories may be blended, as in the case of the airliner captain. Especially the general category of authority is very powerful.

As for your question about leadership, there is a large literature on what good leadership might be, leadership style, and why some leaders are more effective than others (and this is big business!). But to my knowledge there is very little about leadership acceptance (in order to be sure, I checked the PsychLit data base). Some studies look at the role of leadership acceptance in the decision to quit a job, but that is beside your question. There may be some structural aspects that would make us accept leadership, e.g., formal leaders, who have the position and the authority by way of their actual job position, and informal leaders, who are accepted as such by way of expertise and/or social standing in the group. In terms of personality, I don't think I have come across any generalized principles, except that "charismatic" leaders (who usually have extreme loyalty from followers) often are people with a vision that they manage to translate into action, mobilize a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, have high work capacity and show genuine interest in their followers' well-being.

As for personality and accepting authority, there is an old literature into what has been called the "authoritarian personality", which was developed in the 1950s by Adorno. Based on the experiences during the nazi regime, they tried to understand what made people embrace an authoritarian movement like the nazis. They argued that especially the way a child is treated and raised, and socialization in general, might provide the foundation for a personality marked by a commitment to authority. A scale was also developed to measure authorianism (the "F scale"). Research on the authoritarian personality has received quite a lot of critism over the years, in particular concerning its methodology. Nowadays the concept seems to be incorporated in more modern personality theories, such as the Big Five (which contains one dimension, Opennes, or Autonomy, which seems somewhat related to the construct of the authoritarian personality).

You posed an interesting question though, and my advise would be that if you get the opportunity to do that you might take this as the starting point of an interesting study.