2021/10/22 week06 Attributional Tendencies
Attributional Tendencies.
I found the ideas of attributional tendencies to be really interesting. They made a lot of sense once I became aware of them. I think it was information I was subconsciously aware of but hadn't quite put it together by myself before.
Attributional tendencies is the idea of what we acknowledge or blame for our success and failures. Do we take credit for what goes well and say it was all due to our individual efforts, then when things go wrong do we look for any scapegoat that we can and mention every excuse we can think of, in an attempt to make people think we are not failures? Or is the opposite true, do we share in our achievements and take the blame individually?
To me taking credit for your success always made sense, its your effort, so claim it, but give credit to team mates and such, if appropriate. I never understood the concept of not taking responsibility for your failures though, you messed up..... so what! Most times it is not the end of the world and you can try again. And if it was something major, accepting responsibility and trying to fix it still says a lot about who you are, more than the failure ever will.
I will share a link at the end of my post that explores different factors of attributional tendencies more, it makes for interesting reading and the article says it far better than I can.
What I do want to mention is the basics. These are; "Attributions are inferences that people draw about the cause of events, others’ behavior, and their own behavior."
"Researchers classify attributions along two dimensions: internal vs. external and stable vs. unstable.
The concept of internal and external is easy to understand. Do we accept responsibility for what happened or do we seek an outside source to attribute our current situation to. Where things got really interesting is with the stable and unstable. These two factors add an extra element to our thinking. A stable concept would be something that is constant and unchanging. This situation happened because of things that we always do in our everyday life. Unstable comes from the idea of unique situations, you might have created the problem for yourself still, but it was due to actions that are normally out of character for you, or influences out of your control.
resources:
Attribution Processes | Explaining Behavior (wordpress.com)
Social Psychology: Attribution | SparkNotes
Amazing post, I share your experience, I also have always thought that my successes were mind, but also my failures.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing.
Aranza
Hi Donovan, your post is well explained. I agree with you, it is not the end of the world if we fail, we can try again, we cannot judge people for their failures, it is not a positive activity. But as someone said, humans always make value judgments.
ReplyDeleteHi Donovan, I like your Blog and how you talk about things in such a personal way. Sometimes we just want to find out whose fault it is when things don't go the way we'd like.
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