Attributing Motives, Intentions, Traits, and Essential Worth and Value onto Others

Attribution 

We infer (attribute) other people’s intentions and worth from their behavior and physical appearance and project character traits and qualities, such as abilities, success, status, and popularity, onto them based on perceived habits. 

We classify others when we initially meet them, according to several markers of perceived social status.

We have immediate unconscious responses during new encounters: 

• Are they friends or threats? 
  
• Do they belong to my group or are they outsiders? 
  
• Are they members of a "lower" class or social ranking?

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Appearance

Social psychology research confirms the self-evident assumption that we also project personality traits onto others based on how we aesthetically react to their appearance. If we like the way a person looks, we automatically attribute positive qualities and moral worth to them. We more easily form immediate biases against those we find unattractive. 

Berscheid and colleagues discovered that better-looking people are commonly assumed to be better in a variety of ways: more honest, intelligent, and successful. This attribution often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because authorities have been shown to treat better-looking people with more attention, encouragement, and support.

As pioneering social psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) explained: “We’re constantly told we shouldn’t judge others. Attribution theory says we can’t help it; we’re inundated with sensory data, some of it contradictory. Faced with this information overload, we make personality judgments in order to explain otherwise confusing behavior.”

Fundamental Attribution Fallacy

Blaming people’s misfortunes on their supposed-personal qualities (internal traits), rather than their circumstances. Right wing pundit Sean Hannity described the stranded Katrina victims as too stupid to have evacuated in time (See “blaming the victim”).

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Actor-Observer Difference

As an offshoot of the Fundamental Attribution Error, we tend to explain or excuse our own behavior as being due to external circumstances beyond our control, and overemphasize internal traits in explaining the behavior of others. 

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• We tend to create artificial dichotomies and hierarchies to more easily categorize diverse data.

• Attribution and bias errors are often at work behind many cases of seemingly-hypocritical behavior.

• The Bias Blind Spot is also often at work in attribution errors, when we recognize the biases held by others, but are blind to our own biases.
  

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Major debates are in process between situational and dispositional approaches and policies that address health, economy, welfare, education, law and justice issues.

Those who favor the situational approach can cite decades of findings that show how our behavior is influenced by many factors outside of our "rational" control—as well as programs proven to have significant beneficial outcomes reflected in improved social indicators.