Chapter 16

Attribution: The process of attribution is basically a theory to help us understand what causes our behavior in different situations. We want to know why people act the way we do. We want to observe others and in doing that we think we are in control of our own behaviors and situations. The fundamental attribution error is when someone thinks they know something just by observing it and when they actually see or know about the something they normally are wrong with what they thought. It is an error almost everyone makes because we like to judge people, a lot.

Stereotypes: Stereotypes are a belief about a group of people, we normally aren't accurate with our thinking because not all people fit in the stereotype we put them in. For example if we say all fat people are jolly, there could be a fat person that is definitely NOT jolly ( I think we all know this one.) The reason i picked fat people is because that's what I wrote on my assignment, so don't get mad please. My example was basically my next topic, illusory correlations and how they are related to stereotypes. We often want to correlate people with groups which in reality we can't. Like my example said we not say all fat people are fat because there is always an exception.