As we can see from the examples in the text, we can analyze the fact that attribution plays a big part in social interaction and personal perception. We can evaluate that the two examples of college students meeting their advisors is a scene where situations and dispositions can be altered with some simple explanation. Example one showed negative situational attribution, dispositional attribution and self-schema. But the similarity about both examples where the fact that they both displayed fundamental attribution errors where there is over-attribution to dispositional factors and the under-attribution to situational factors.
Negative situational attribution was demonstrated when Jessica made an appointment with Dr. Smith but since she was running late, she was only able to do last-minute checkups. As well as Jessica displayed negative dispositional attribution by thinking Dr. Smith “cared too little for her students to allow enough time to meet every student for the time they needed”. Dr. Smith showed a self-schemas view of himself, where self-schemas are structures that organize one’s thoughts, quality, and expectations regarding the self, by making a point about “she was a good advisor and prided herself on that fact. However, as we can see from the example two, we can identify that both shares common factors but they were opposite in many ways. When Jonathan knew about the fact that his advisor was running late, he tried his best to hide it because he knew that Dr. Jones was a caring advisor.
The similarity between the two examples, we can see that both the advisors displayed a person schemas. Dr. Smith mentioned that “This student appeared both rude and incompetent” about Jessica and Dr. Jones mentioned that “Jonathan had good grades, given his maturity” when remembering about Jonathan in the situation. We can clearly see that both of the examples have actor-observer differences. In the examples one, Jessica’s observation on Dr. Smith’s actions on caring less about her students, gave her negative dispositional attribution, disappointment and anger. While on the another side, Dr. Smith also had negative situational attribution because it was not his fault of having many students making appointments and Jessica rarely coming to see him in the office during the semester.
While the example one showed negative actor-observer differences, the example two had more demonstrative and less negative experience. Dr. Jones started out her communication by “she was genuinely sorry, but far more students were showing up than usual that day and she couldn’t turn others away. She said she takes pride in being a good adviser and hoped he could come back soon to discuss his long-term plans” to Jonathan. As opposed to the example one, Dr. Smith and Jessica’s situation, Dr. Jones and Jonathan had better communication with each other. Since Dr. Smith and Jessica lacked in communication, Jessica had negative distribution attribution. Jessica made a fundamental attribution error when she did not care about Dr. Smith’s situation where she had a lot of appointments with different students during the end of the year. Finally, these two examples showed fundamental attribution errors, person schema, the cognitive structure about specific people or specific people or specific types of people, over attributing to dispositional factors and under attributing to situational factors contrasting actor-observer differences. But in the example one, they showed more negative situational attribution, dispositional attributional and self-schema. However, example two showed more positive interaction between the advisor and student because of their communication. Therefore, we need to learn that assumptions will be made all the time, so we need to talk things out to prevent negative attributions.