Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 226

• Self versus others: attributions about ourselves are usually different from our
attributions about others behaving in exactly the same way. We give ourselves
credit for success based on our internal capabilities, but blame the environment
or others for our failures. On the other hand, when making attributions about
others, we are more likely to attribute their success to their environment, and
their failures to their personal deficiencies. Even university presidents do this
(Birnbaum 1988 , p. 215), attributing their own successes to hard work and their
failures to outside events.
• If something bad occurs to someone else, we will seek explanations that attri-
bute cause to a circumstance that creates the most distance from our own cir-
cumstances. The explanation is simple: we like to distance ourselves from the
thought that the same thing could happen to us.
Attribution theory is an important area of research in social psychology. Jones
et al. ( 1972 ) noted the tendency of people to attribute their actions to external
situational causes, whilst external observers attributed the same actions to causes
that were internal to the person carrying out the actions (the actor). They called
this tendency the actor-observer divergence. The term fundamental attribution
error was later introduced to describe how observers underestimate the impact of
situational forces and overestimate the importance of internal dispositional factors
(Ross et al. 1977 ).
One of the fundamental errors in design is for the designer to attribute their own
feelings, needs, knowledge, goals, and so on, to users. In other words, for the
designers to believe that other people, including their potential users, are exactly
like them, and behave in exactly the same way. Good designers differentiate what
they want, need, and can do from what their users want, need, and can do. From
the user's perspective, the technology may not always behave as expected. In these
situations, systems need to be designed to be transparent, to be effectively de-
bugged, and thus to help the users make the appropriate attributions: is this an
issue with the system or the device or did I do something wrong? Error messages
should not be worded ambiguously, but should allow the user to attribute causes
appropriately and learn from the error.
Related to the notion of attribution is the concept of cognitivedissonance.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two or more beliefs that are in
conflict at one time as in when people do not get what they want. People will
rationalize their choice by devaluing the one that is not chosen or that becomes
unavailable. It is similar to the moral in Aesop's fable about the fox and the sour
grapes. The fox reasoned that the grapes that he could not reach were sour, and
hence not worth getting. People sometimes adopt a similar line of reasoning when
they do not get the rewards they were expecting (such as a promotion to a new
post) by convincing themselves that they are currently in the best position.
Similarly, when people do things for little reward, when they explain why they did
that activity, it can increase their perceived value of it. This explains why it can be
better to give small rewards where the impact can last longer.