So in the last lecture, we talked about the self and different psychological phenomena building around the self that everybody notices us, we're terrific or at least above average, and what we do make sense. What I want to do here is very briefly give a core finding of attribution theory, which is a theory that explores how we make sense of ourselves and others. So, attribution theory explores causes of people's behavior. In everyday life, we try to explain why certain events and behaviors occur. An early researcher named Heider proposed that we naturally attribute others' actions to personality characteristics. This is sometimes known as a person bias, and it's a bias because it's not always accurate. We tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough weight to situational variables. This is sometimes known also as the fundamental attribution error, and there are a lot of examples of this. One study which is kind of fun is, you put people in a situation, two people. One where they get to ask hard questions that they make up, another one has to answer the hard questions. So, if you play this plainly, it's easy for somebody to make hard questions that another person can't answer. So, you do that, one person asks the hard question, another one doesn't answer. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Then we ask a third person, who's smarter. Even if the decision of who to ask the questions or answer the questions was determined through a toss of a coin, people think that the question asker was smarter, after all they asked all the hard questions and the other person didn't know the answers to them. Ignoring the fact that this is entirely the product of circumstances. In general, a lot of everyday life works this way. So, people tend to overestimate the intelligence of professors. They do so because when they listen to professor talk and they see him in class or they see her at a seminar or at a conference, they hear the professor talking in great detail about what he or she knows the most about and they assume, wow, that's really smart. The person really seems to be smart. Missing the fact that of course, professors tend to teach and talk about the very small area that they know about. It's the circumstances of being asked to teach an area that makes them look smart, that makes them say smart things, not any natural psychological giftedness. The most extreme demonstration of the fundamental attribution error or the person bias is in a fascinating tendency we have to see actors as if they're the characters they play. So, a Robert Young was a pitchman for Sanka coffee, and even though his main expertise was, he played a doctor on television. Now, when someone's playing a doctor on television and doing doctor things and saving lives and giving doctor advice, the rational conclusion is they're doing so because this is the situation. During that they're an actor and these are their lines. But the mind doesn't work that way. When we see somebody do something, our natural tendency for an attribution is to attribute it to the person themselves. So, we credit Robert Young with the accomplishments of Marcus Welby M D. For this reason, for instance, people tend to think Sylvester Stallone is a tough macho guy because he plays in movies where he's a tough macho guy even though he spent Vietnam in Switzerland, I think teaching at a girls school if I remember right. My very favorite example is that of the actor, Leonard Nimoy who was an extremely interesting actor. Played many roles, led a rich life, was forever identified with his main character, the emotionless Vulcan Spock on Star Trek so much so that he published a book called, I Am Not Spock, differentiating himself from the character. But our person bias is so strong that eventually even he gave up and ultimately published another book saying, to hell with it, I Am Spock.
