At a party, a normally reserved colleague is laughing loudly and dominating conversation. Every other guest seems equally energized and boisterous. According to Kelley's covariation model, which attribution pattern does this evidence support?
AInternal attribution — the behavior reveals your colleague's true extraverted personality
BInternal attribution — high consistency with who they are makes a dispositional explanation most likely
CExternal attribution — high consensus (everyone acts this way) and high distinctiveness (your colleague normally does not) point to the situation
DNo attribution can be made — Kelley's model requires knowing your colleague's behavior across many situations
Kelley's covariation model combines consensus (do others respond the same way?), distinctiveness (does this person respond this way only to this stimulus?), and consistency (does this person always respond this way to this stimulus?). High consensus (everyone is loud at this party) plus high distinctiveness (your colleague is not normally like this) together point to an external/situational attribution — the party atmosphere is causing the behavior, not your colleague's personality. A dispositional attribution would require low consensus and low distinctiveness.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
You trip on a curb and fall. A moment later, a stranger trips on the same curb. What does the actor-observer asymmetry predict about each person's causal attribution?
ABoth you and the stranger will attribute their own fall to the curb and the other's fall to clumsiness
BYou will attribute your fall situationally (to the curb); you will attribute the stranger's fall dispositionally (to their clumsiness)
CYou will attribute your fall dispositionally (admitting clumsiness); you will attribute the stranger's fall situationally
DBoth falls will be attributed situationally — the physical evidence of the curb overrides the asymmetry
The actor-observer asymmetry predicts that actors explain their own behavior by reference to situational factors (you felt the uneven curb beneath you) while observers explain others' behavior by reference to dispositions (you see the stranger trip and infer clumsiness). Observers lack access to the situational forces the actor is responding to, so they over-weight the person's characteristics. The irony: the stranger makes the same situational attribution about their own fall — while you make the same dispositional attribution about them.
Question 3 True / False
Attributing a student's exam failure to low ability rather than insufficient effort tends to undermine future motivation more, because ability is perceived as a stable cause while effort is perceived as unstable.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Weiner's model shows that the stability dimension has direct motivational consequences, independent of locus (internal vs. external). Ability is typically perceived as internal and stable — if failure reflects a fixed trait, you expect future failures and may become helpless. Effort is internal but unstable — if failure reflects insufficient effort, you believe trying harder can change the outcome and are more likely to persist. This is why attribution-based educational interventions focus on shifting students toward unstable causal explanations.
Question 4 True / False
Attributions are typically deliberate, conscious inferences that people make mainly when an event is unexpected or personally important.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
While unexpected events can trigger more deliberate attributional processing, attributions frequently occur automatically and without conscious awareness. When you observe behavior, you immediately form a causal explanation — the process is fast, effortless, and often runs in parallel with basic perception. The misconception that attributions are always deliberate underestimates how thoroughly automatic social cognition is. Even routine, expected behaviors generate implicit causal inferences.
Question 5 Short Answer
Explain why the actor-observer asymmetry occurs — what informational difference between actors and observers produces systematically different causal attributions for the same behavior?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Actors have direct access to their own situational experience: they feel the constraint, pressure, or context they are responding to, so the situation is salient and explanatorily compelling. Observers lack this situational information — they can only see the person's behavior, which is visually prominent. Without knowing what the actor was responding to, observers default to the person's stable characteristics (personality, disposition) to explain the behavior. The asymmetry is fundamentally an information asymmetry: actors explain by situation because the situation is what they know; observers explain by disposition because the person is what they see.
This also explains why the asymmetry can be reduced experimentally. When observers are given the same situational information that actors have (e.g., told about the pressures or constraints the actor faced), their attributions shift toward situational explanations. The asymmetry is not caused by motivated reasoning or self-serving bias — it reflects a genuine difference in the information available to each perspective.