Topic 2 DQ 2

Human beings often speculate as to the causes of others’ behavior. Explain how cognitive and motivational factors can cause people to be biased when making attributions. What are some of the social and individual consequences of the types of attributions they make?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION 

Explain how cognitive and motivational factors can cause people to be biased when making attributions

Introduction

Whiteboard: Information quality is the design and delivery of information that meets the customer’s needs and expectations.  The objective of information quality is to provide all stakeholders with information that is relevant, useful, accurate, complete, timely, easy to access and understandable.

Section: Information quality in general can be defined as high-quality information for use in decision making processes.

Section: The organization can help develop information quality by providing tools and tools necessary for managing the flow of information from external sources.

Section: Tools such as requirements capture are used to ascertain what data is required from external sources. Requirements capture helps ensure that data coming into a system will be accurate and complete (and thus suitable for use in decision making).

Takeaway: Managing the flow of data through an organization can improve the quality of decisions made with that data.  Qualitative research can help provide input on what data is missing or incomplete or incorrect/inaccurate so requirements capture efforts can be focused on filling in those gaps before using external systems to collect and share valuable business data.

People will often make attributions that serve their self-interests, including their self-image.

People will often make attributions that serve their self-interests, including their self-image.

This is one of the reasons why people are biased in their attributions. The fundamental attribution error occurs when individuals make judgments about the behavior and motives of others based on those same characteristics rather than considering the situation itself. For example: if a person who does not speak English very well is asked about his or her feelings about another person (a friend), he or she may say things like “He’s mad at me.” However, if asked what caused him or her to be so upset with this friend, this individual would likely tell an entirely different story—that perhaps it was because he had failed at something important (e.g., failed an exam).

Three cognitive biases (fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, and actor-observer bias) help us understand these self-serving motives.

• Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to explain behavior based on internal characteristics, rather than external factors.

• Self-serving bias: The tendency to view our own actions as good or beneficial and perceive others’ behaviors as bad or harmful.

• Actor-observer bias: An unconscious distortion in how we see ourselves in relation to others; it is also known as the “in-group/out-group” effect where people tend to favor those who are like themselves over those who aren’t.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain our own behavior in terms of the situation but to explain other people’s behavior in dispositional terms.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain our own behavior in terms of the situation but to explain other people’s behavior in dispositional terms. For example, if you make a mistake at work, you might say “I’m stupid,” but if someone else makes a similar mistake at work, they’re often told that they just need more experience or training. The person who has been given this particular feedback may feel like their incompetence has been attributed to something internal (like their personality) rather than external factors like their lack of experience or knowledge about how things work at that company.

This can create problems for both parties involved: the employee who feels inadequate for not understanding certain concepts or tasks may not be able to perform well in future situations where these same concepts come up again; meanwhile, employers may end up hiring people who aren’t qualified enough because they don’t understand why some employees aren’t performing as well on other tasks within their company.”

The self-serving bias occurs when we attribute our successes to internal causes and our failures to external causes.

You may be familiar with the “self-serving bias” in which we tend to attribute our successes to internal causes and our failures to external ones. This is an important concept for understanding attribution bias, because it explains why both groups of people are more likely than not to give themselves credit for good things (e.g., “I did well on that test”) and blame themselves for bad things (e.g., “I failed the math test”).

The reason this happens has nothing at all to do with being selfish or ungenerous—it’s just that when you’re experiencing success yourself, it’s easy for your brain to convince itself that those feelings came from within instead of outside influences like luck or timing; whereas when something goes wrong in your life, looking at the situation objectively makes it harder for us mentally align ourselves with our own perspectives on events rather than those of others around us who might have different viewpoints about what happened or how things might have turned out differently had certain circumstances been different (say if one person hadn’t been there).

Actor-observer biases occur when we evaluate ourselves as having acted for a reason, but evaluate others as simply behaving in a particular way.

Actor-observer bias is the tendency to attribute our own behavior to external causes, but other people’s behavior to internal causes. This can occur when we are making attributions about ourselves or others.

For instance, if you witness a group of people passing by your office building and notice that one person is wearing a red shirt, it may be easy for you to assume that everyone else was wearing red shirts as well. In reality though, only one person was wearing a red shirt—the other nine people were all wearing blue ones!

In this example we did not observe any external factors affecting their choice in color; however because we identified them with being part of our own “group” (we were all dressed identically), it seems reasonable that our individual experience affected how they made their decision on what color shirt would look best on them (e.g., if someone else had said “I like blue,” then perhaps I would have gone with doing so too).

These biases all boil down to people trying to protect their own egos and often making mistakes in the process

The first thing to understand is that these biases are not always bad. In fact, they’re a natural part of the human condition and can be useful in some ways. For example, if you’re in a group of people who are all wearing yellow shirts and someone insults your shirt (the color yellow), then it’s likely that you’ll think something along the lines of “I’m really dressed up today.”

But bias can also cause problems for us when we try to make attributions about other people—for example, how trustworthy someone is based on his or her appearance or personality traits. In this case, there might be an unconscious desire to protect ourselves from potential threats by ascribing negative characteristics to others because they seem threatening to our self-image. The problem here is that our judgment becomes inaccurate as we try harder than usual not only because we want them off our minds but also because these judgments may have been influenced by personal experience or stereotypes about race/ethnicity/gender/age etcetera

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