How You Explain Other People's Behavior.

[Posty]

Before we start, can you answer to this ??

1. How often do you think about your behaviors? Do you often criticize your behaviors?
2. Do you usually analyze other people's behavior? Do you ever tell them or just keep it to yourself?
3. Were you well-behaved as a child? Did your parents tell you off if you did something bad?
4. How do media affect people's behavior? Is it a positive or a negative effect?
5. Do you care about what people think about you? Why? Why not?
6. Have you ever made any changes in your behavior?
7. What's the one behavior you wish you could change in yourself?
8. How do you behave when you see someone you don't like?
9. How do you behave at a party when they serve a food you don't like?
10. How do you behave when you love someone? Do you express it in words?

 

When you see other people in the world, there are several predictions you often make about them.  You often want to predict what they will do (like whether someone standing at a crosswalk is about to head out into the street in front of your car).  You also want to predict why they do what they do.  For example, that person might be walking into traffic, because they are in a hurry or because they are generally impulsive.

The pioneering work of the Harold Kelley (link is external) suggested that people are trying to figure out the causes of other people’s behavior.  In some situations, there is nothing to figure out.  When people engage in behaviors that everyone does, then we can just appeal to a social norm to explain behavior.  For example, there is no need to explain why a particular person stands facing the door of an elevator.

When someone engages in a behavior that is not typical, though, then there is something to be explained.  If you see a man yelling at the cashier at a store, then that is an unexpected behavior that you want to explain.  You might think there is something specific about the situation that caused the behavior.  Perhaps the cashier made a costly mistake that angered the customer.  Another explanation is that the customer had a goal he was trying to accomplish like to be aggressive in order to get a refund that was different than store policy.  A third possibility is that the person has a trait that led to the behavior.  This man just might be mean.

How do people determine which of these explanations to give?

A lot of work on the fundamental attribution error suggests that people explain their own behavior based on situations, but other people’s behavior based on some characteristic of that person.  Still, though, that doesn’t determine whether that characteristic is a goal (like trying to get a refund) or a trait (like being mean). 

A paper in the February 2018 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (link is external) by Irmak Okten and Gordon Moskowitz examined this question.

They argue that when people have an atypical behavior they want to explain, there are two dimensions they take into account in figuring out what kind of explanation to give.  They are focused on whether the person does the behavior all the time or just once (consistency) and whether they do it only in particular circumstances or everywhere (distinctiveness).

They argue that behaviors that are highly consistent (they are done all the time) and not particularly distinctive (they are done in all situations) lead people to explain the behavior with a trait.  Behaviors that are either not that consistent (they are not done that often) or are quite distinctive (they are done only in specific situations) lead people to explain the behavior with a goal, because goals are often specific to particular contexts. 

[Andrada]

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