Opinion: America’s Biases Marginalize Youth, Drive Them to Homelessness
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(Part 2 of 7) | Read Part 1 here
Social psychology has found that someone may decide someone else's behavior has one of two causes: dispositional or situational. Dispositional attribution assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person — personality traits including attitudes, values and belief — rather than to outside forces. Situational attribution assigns cause of behavior to some situation or event outside a person's control rather than to some internal characteristic. Take, for example, those times when we feel compelled to explain a remark or conduct that offended someone. We tend to explain that our comment or act was influenced by something that happened earlier that day or what somebody else had said to deflect it from being seen as a flawed personality trait.
But this is where the two attribution causes can be difficult to assign.