Chapter 16 Blog

The process of attribution is the theory that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition. Stereotypes are a generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people. Illusory correlations are related to stereotyping because illusory correlation is the expectation of a relationship of any kind to exist when it doesn't and sterotyping is the belief about a group of people. So they are related to each other because they both are making opinions about people that are not true or making opinions about anything that isn't true.