Most importantly, social perception is shaped by an individual’s current motivations, emotions, and cognitive load capacity. Cognitive load is the complete amount of mental effort utilized in the working memory. All of this combined determines how people attribute certain traits and how those traits are interpreted.

Social perception is a subfield of social psychology that studies the ways in which we form and modify impressions of others.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.

The actor-observer bias refers to a tendency to attribute one’s own actions to external causes, while attributing other people’s behaviors to internal causes. When something negative happens to another person, people will often blame the individual for their personal choices, behaviors and actions.

Example 1: Suppose a student fails her examination. Her parents assume that she did not pay enough attention in her studies. This is a dispositional attribution. Example 2: John slips and drops beer on Rachel’s new carpet.

Dispositional Attribution Dispositional attribution assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person, rather than to outside forces. When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits.

Attribution is a three stage process: (1) behavior is observed, (2) behavior is determined to be deliberate, and (3) behavior is attributed to internal or external causes. Achievement can be attributed to (1) effort, (2) ability, (3) level of task difficulty, or (4) luck.

In psychology, self-determination is an important concept that refers to each person’s ability to make choices and manage their own life. This ability plays an important role in psychological health and well-being. Self-determination allows people to feel that they have control over their choices and lives.

Competence motivation theory is a conceptual framework designed to explain individuals’ motivation to participate, persist, and work hard in any particular achievement context. The central thesis of the theory is that individuals are attracted to participation in activities at which they feel competent or capable.

Researchers place greater importance on effecting motivation than on what has caused it. It is also difficult for researchers to study this theory because an individual’s perceptions of an event are challenging to measure.

For example, when a driver cuts someone off, the person who has been cut off is often more likely to attribute blame to the reckless driver’s inherent personality traits (e.g., “That driver is rude and incompetent”) rather than situational circumstances (e.g., “That driver may have been late to work and was not paying …

In this article, we provide evidence of a cultural (mis)attribution bias: the tendency to see minorities as members of a group whose development is shaped primarily by social-level cultural processes, and to perceive Whites as autonomous and independent actors whose development is instead largely influenced by …

Attention bias is the tendency to prioritize the processing of certain types of stimuli over others. At any given moment, an individual’s senses can perceive countless stimuli in the immediate surroundings.

4 Steps to overcoming Attribution Bias

1. Realization. The first step towards reducing and overcoming attribution bias to recognize that these are cognitive biases and are present in each individual in varying degrees.
2. Start Challenging your stories.
3. Try to verify your story.
4. Avoid blaming others (externalizing the blame)

Performance bias refers to the conduct of a trial inadvertently introducing differences between randomized groups other than the intervention(s) being evaluated. Such departures from intended study design may compromise study aims by undermining capacity to make valid inferences about intervention effects.