Question

Sue's husband forgot their anniversary. sue views her husband's behavior as something he did because his boss assigned him a big project at work and she does not think he'll do something like this in the future. sue is making what kind of attribution? 1. distress-maintaining attribution 2. relationship-enhancing attribution 3. observe-biased attribution 4. insecure attribution

Answer 1

2. Relationship-enhancing.

Distress-maintaining is an attribution that places more responsibility on people for their negative behaviours and less on their positive behaviours. (Ex. Sue’s husband must have forgotten because he doesn’t care about her.) So not this one.

Relationship-enhancing is the opposite. More responsibility for positive and less for negative. (Ex. Sue’s husband is late to their dinner and it must have been the traffic, not his time-management skills.) This is correct.

Observe-biased (aka fundamental attribution error or actor observer bias) is the tendency to judge other people’s behaviour by their personality and your own behaviour by external factors. (Ex. That man honked the horn three times because he’s an angry person but I kicked my desk because my reports were accidentally shredded.) Not this one.

I don’t quite know what insecure attribution is but I believe it is feeling more insecure about yourself when you attribute something to you instead of to external factors. Don’t trust me completely on this one, but I don’t think this is correct.