Creating a Healthier Sense of Attribution

"At the heart of attribution theory is the question of control, or what factors contribute to outcomes: internal factors within our control (often referred to as dispositional) and external factors (also called situational or contextual) that are outside our control. Generally speaking, we often succumb to "fundamental attribution error," which is a tendency to overemphasize the role of internal factors while minimizing the impact of situational ones. A striking example of this comes from Piff's Monopoly study. In the study, one participant gets significant advantages over another in a game of Monopoly based on a coin flip (twice as much money to start, twice as much money when they pass Go, and the ability to roll two dice vs. their opponents one). Despite this advantage, the winnerwho is always the person who won the coin flipconcludes that their win is the result of factors within their control, like purchasing Park Place, not the contextual coin flip. You can imagine how this plays out in real life..."

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