Social psychologists are interested not only in what people do in social situations, but also in what is going on in their heads while they are doing it. Those who study social cognition examine how people's perceptions of themselves and others affect their relationships and also how the social environment influences their perceptions, beliefs, and values. Current approaches draw on evolutionary theory, neuroimaging studies, surveys, and experiments to identify universal themes in how human beings perceive and feel about one another. In this section, we will consider two important topics in social cognition: attributions and attitudes.

A detective's job is to find out who did the dirty deed, but most of us also want to know why people do bad things. Was it because of a terrible childhood, a mental illness, possession by a demon, or what? According to attribution theory, the explanations we make of our behavior and the behavior of others generally fall into two categories. When we make a situational attribution, we are identifying the cause of an action as something in the situation or environment: “Joe stole the money because his family is starving.” When we make a dispositional attribution, we are identifying the cause of an action as something in the person: “Joe stole the money because he is a born thief.”

When people are trying to explain someone else's behavior, they tend to overestimate personality traits and underestimate the influence of the situation (Forgas, 1998; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In terms of attribution theory, they tend to ignore situational attributions in favor of dispositional ones. This tendency has been called the fundamental attribution error (Jones, 1990).

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Were the hundreds of people who obeyed Milgram's experimenters sadistic by nature? Were the student guards in the prison study cruel and the prisoners cowardly by temperament? Were the individuals who pocketed the money from a mailbox on a dirty street “born thieves”? Those who think so are committing the fundamental attribution error. The impulse to explain other people's behavior in terms of their personalities is so strong that we do it even when we know that the other person was required to behave in a certain way (Yzerbyt et al., 2001).

The fundamental attribution error is especially prevalent in Western nations, where middle-class people tend to believe that individuals are responsible for their own actions and dislike the idea that the situation has much influence over them. Therefore, they prefer to explain behavior in terms of people's traits (Na & Kitayama, 2011). They think that they would have refused the experimenter's cruel orders and they would have treated fellow-students-temporarily-called-prisoners fairly. In contrast, in countries such as India, where everyone is embedded in caste and family networks, and in Japan, China, Korea, and Hong Kong, where people are more group oriented than in the West, people are more likely to be aware of situational constraints on behavior, including their own behavior (Balcetis, Dunning, & Miller, 2008; Choi et al., 2003). Thus, if someone is behaving oddly, makes a mistake, or commits an ethical lapse, a person from India or China, unlike a Westerner, is more likely to make a situational attribution of the person's behavior (“He's under pressure”) than a dispositional one (“He's incompetent”).

A primary reason for the fundamental attribution error is that people rely on different sources of information to judge their own behavior and that of others. We know what we ourselves are thinking and feeling, but we can't always know the same of others. Thus, we assess our own actions by introspecting about our feelings and intentions, but when we observe the actions of others, we have only their behavior to guide our interpretations (Pronin, 2008; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). This basic asymmetry in social perception is further widened by self-serving biases, habits of thinking that make us feel good about ourselves, even (perhaps especially) when we shouldn't. Here are three types of self-serving biases that are especially relevant to the attributions that people often make:

1. The bias to choose the most flattering and forgiving attributions of our own lapses. When it comes to explaining their own behavior, people tend to choose attributions that are favorable to them, taking credit for their good actions (a dispositional attribution) but letting the situation account for their failures, embarrassing mistakes, or harmful actions (Mezulis et al., 2004). For instance, most North Americans, when angry, will say, “I am furious for good reason; this situation is intolerable.” They are less likely to say, “I am furious because I am an ill-tempered grinch.” On the other hand, if they do something admirable, such as donating to charity, they are likely to attribute their motives to a personal disposition (“I'm so generous”) instead of the situation (“That guy on the phone pressured me into it”).

2. The bias that we are better, smarter, and kinder than others. This one has been called the “self-enhancement” bias or the “better-than-average” effect. It describes the tendency of most people to think they are much better than their peers on many valued dimensions: more virtuous, honorable, and moral; more competent; more compassionate and generous (Balcetis, Dunning, & Miller, 2008; Brown, 2012; Dunning et al., 2003; Loughnan et al., 2011). They overestimate their willingness to do the right thing in a moral dilemma, give to a charity, cooperate with a stranger in trouble, and so on. But when they are actually in a situation that calls for generosity, compassion, or ethical action, most people fail to live up to their own inflated self-image because the demands of the situation have a stronger influence than good intentions. This bias even occurs among people who literally strive to be “holier than thou” and “humbler than thee” for religious reasons (Rowatt et al., 2002). In two studies conducted at fundamentalist Christian colleges, the greater the students' intrinsic religiosity and fundamentalism, the greater was their tendency to rate themselves as being more adherent to biblical commandments than other people—and more humble than other people, too!

3. The bias to believe that the world is fair. According to the just-world hypothesis, attributions are also affected by the need to believe that justice usually prevails, that good people are rewarded and bad guys punished (Lerner, 1980). When this belief is thrown into doubt—especially when bad things happen to “good people” who are just like us—we are motivated to restore it (Aguiar et al., 2008; Hafer & Rubel, 2015). Unfortunately, one common way of restoring the belief in a just world is to call upon a dispositional attribution called blaming the victim: Maybe that person wasn't so good after all; he or she must have done something to deserve what happened or to provoke it. Blaming the victim is virtually universal when people are ordered to harm others or find themselves entrapped into harming others (Bandura, 1999). In the Milgram study, some “teachers” made comments such as “[The learner] was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked” (Milgram, 1974).

It is good for our self-esteem to feel that we are kinder, more competent, and more moral than other people, and to believe that we are not influenced by external circumstances (except when they excuse our mistakes). But these flattering delusions can distort communication, impede the resolution of conflicts, and lead to serious misunderstandings.

Of course, sometimes dispositional attributions do explain a person's behavior. The point to remember is that the attributions you make can have huge consequences. For example, happy couples usually attribute their partners' occasional thoughtless lapses to something in the situation (“Poor guy is under a lot of stress”) and their partners' loving actions to a stable, internal disposition (“He has the sweetest nature”). But unhappy couples do just the reverse. They attribute lapses to their partners' personalities (“He is totally selfish”) and good behavior to the situation (“Yeah, he gave me a present, but only because his mother told him to”) (Karney & Bradbury, 2000). You can see why the attributions you make about your partner, your parents, and your friends will affect how you get along with them—and how long you will put up with their failings.

Reviewing the Attribution Process

People hold attitudes about all sorts of things—politics, food, children, movies, sports heroes, you name it. An attitude is a belief about people, groups, ideas, or activities. Some attitudes are explicit: We are aware of them, they shape our conscious decisions and actions, and they can be measured on self-report questionnaires. Others are implicit: We are unaware of them, they may influence our behavior in ways we do not recognize, and they are measured in indirect ways (Stanley, Phelps, & Banaji, 2008).

Let's now see how the social-psychological factors discussed thus far might help explain the disturbing phenomenon of suicide bombers. In many countries, young men and women have wired themselves with explosives and blown up soldiers, civilians, and children, sacrificing their own lives in the process. Although people on two sides of a war dispute the definition of terrorism—one side's “terrorist” is the other side's “freedom fighter”—most social scientists define terrorism as politically motivated violence specifically designed to instill feelings of terror and helplessness in a population (Moghaddam, 2005; Roberts, 2015). Are these perpetrators mentally ill? Have they been “brainwashed”?

“Brainwashing” implies that a person has had a sudden change of mind without being aware of what is happening; it sounds mysterious and strange. On the contrary, the methods used to create a terrorist suicide bomber are neither mysterious nor unusual (Bloom, 2005; Moghaddam, 2005). Some people may be more emotionally vulnerable than others to these methods, but most of the people who become terrorists are not easily distinguishable from the general population. Indeed, most of them had no psychopathology and were often quite educated and affluent (Krueger, 2007; Sageman, 2008; Silke, 2003). Rather than defining themselves as terrorists, they saw themselves as committing “self-sacrificing violence for the greater good”; and far from being seen as crazy loners, most suicide bombers are celebrated by their families and communities for their “martyrdom.” This social support enhances their commitment to the cause (Bloom, 2005; Ginges & Atran, 2011). The methods of indoctrination that lead to that commitment include these elements:

• The person is subjected to entrapment. Just as ordinary people do not become torturers overnight, they do not become terrorists overnight either; the process proceeds step by step. At first, the new recruit to the cause agrees only to do small things, but gradually the demands increase to spend more time, spend more money, make more sacrifices. Like other revolutionaries, people who become suicide bombers are idealistic and angry about injustices, real and perceived. But some ultimately take extreme measures because, over time, they have become entrapped in closed groups led by strong or charismatic leaders (Moghaddam, 2005).

• The person's problems, personal and political, are explained by one simple attribution, repeatedly emphasized: “It's all the fault of those bad people; we have to eliminate them.”

• The person is offered a new identity and is promised salvation. The recruit is told that he or she is part of the chosen, the elite, or the saved. In 1095, Pope Urban II launched a holy war against Muslims, assuring his forces that killing a Muslim was an act of Christian penance. Anyone killed in battle, the pope promised, would bypass thousands of years of torture in purgatory and go directly to heaven. This is what young Muslim terrorists are promised today for killing Western “infidels.”

• The person's access to disconfirming (dissonant) information is severely controlled. As soon as a person is a committed believer, the leader limits the person's choices, denigrates critical thinking, and suppresses private doubts. Recruits may be physically isolated from the outside world and thus from antidotes to the leader's ideas. They are separated from their families, are indoctrinated and trained for 18 months or more, and eventually become emotionally bonded to the group and the leader (Atran, 2010).

These methods are similar to those that have been used to entice Americans into religious and other sects (Ofshe & Watters, 1994; Singer, 2003). In the 1970s, cult leader Jim Jones told the more than 900 members of his “People's Temple” that the time had come to die, and they dutifully lined up to drink a Kool-Aid-like drink mixed with cyanide; parents gave it first to their infants and children. (The legacy of that massacre is the term “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which refers to a person or group's unquestioning belief in an ideology that could lead to their death.) In the 1990s, David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidian cult near Waco, Texas, led his followers to a fiery death in a shootout with the FBI. In these groups, as in the case of terrorist cells, most recruits started out as ordinary people, but after being subjected to the techniques we have described, they ended up doing things that they previously would have found unimaginable. Social psychologists can explain the extremes of persuasion found in terrorism, “brainwashing,” and cult activity. Fortunately, they can also explain the mechanisms at work during more mundane examples of persuasion. Watch the video Persuasion to learn more about attitude change tactics.