Psychologically Sound & Social

The  actor-observer effect   is that when we act, we attribute our own actions to the situation we are in, whereas when we observe others, we believe their actions reflect on who they are as people (Heider, 1958; Nisbett et al.,1973) The actor-observer effect is one of many attributional biases (Nisbett et al.,1973). As introduced in Heider (1958) we explain behavior with either situation attribution or personal attribution.     Situational attributions view actions as a result of forces outside of the individual actor (Heider, 1958). For example, someone could be in a bad mood because they were hungry, got cut off in traffic, or were worried for a loved one in the hospital. Personal attributions view actions as a result of the actor’s mental characteristics (Heider, 1958). Someone might take the last slice of pizza without asking first because they are selfish. If they stopped to help someone with a flat tire, they must be a kind person.    I experience t...

  The   availability heuristic   is the tendency to guess how often something happens based on how easily we can think of times it has happened before (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). In Tversky and Kahneman’s (1973) study, participants were asked whether there were more words that start with “r” or words with “r” as the third letter. It is much easier to come up with words that start with “r” (race, rabbit, red) than words that have “r” as the third letter (tired, corn, war). Since participants could think of words that start with “r” most easily, they used the availability heuristic to infer that more words start with “r” than have “r” in the third position (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). However, there are actually more words with “r” as the third letter (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).     The  vividness effect  states that people tend to trust vivid, anecdotal evidence over empirical evidence (Nisbett & Ross, 1980).    One summer, for ...

  The Overjustification effect explains the loss of motivation to do an activity we enjoy after being given a reward for it (Lepper et al., 1973). Deci and Ryan (1985) describe intrinsic motivation is the desire to perform a task for the enjoyment it gives us, and extrinsic motivation is the desire to perform a task as a means of obtaining something outside of ourselves, such as money, or status. When we are rewarded for performing a task we already enjoy, that intrinsic motivation is replaced with extrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Lepper et al., 1973). If we receive a reward that we didn’t expect, it won’t affect our intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Lepper et al., 1973). In Lepper et al.’s (1973) experiment, children were given markers to draw with. Lepper and his colleagues created three groups: kids who would be notified that they would get an award for using the markers, kids who would not be notified about an award and later receive one, and kids who...