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Bernard Weiner (born 1935) is an American social psychologist known for developing a form of attribution theory which seeks to explain the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. His contributions include linking attribution theory, the psychology of motivation, and emotion.
Weiner received his undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago in 1955 and an MBA, majoring in Industrial Relations, from the same university in 1957. Following two years of service in the U.S. Army, Weiner enrolled in a PhD program in personality at the University of Michigan, where he was mentored by John Atkinson, one of the leading personality and motivational psychologists of that era. Weiner completed his PhD in 1963, and spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota before joining the psychology faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1965, where he remained active into the early 2000s. [1]
Weiner has published 15 books and many articles on the psychology of motivation and emotion, and has been a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1965.
He is the father of Mark Weiner, a professor of law at Rutgers School of Law–Newark.
Professor Weiner's primary research interests are Social Cognition, Helping, Prosocial Behaviour, Judgment and Decision Making, Motivation, Goal Setting, Causal Attribution, Law and Public Policy, Interpersonal Processes and Emotion, Mood, Affect. [2] Weiner got interested in the field of attribution after studying achievement motivation. He used TAT to identify differences in people's achievement needs and then turned to the study of individual issues people face when they think of their own successes and failures. He further conducted research into the cognitive processes that have motivational influence. [3]
Attribution theory seeks to explain the causes of an event or behavior. A three stages process, they are observations, determination of behavior, and attributing to causes. There are two types of attributions, namely external and internal. External attribution relates causality to outside agents, whereas, internal attribution assigns the person himself for any behavior. In a 1996 interview, Weiner elaborated how attribution contributes to "high ability, high achievement, and giftedness", stating that "other-perception and self-perception form a unity, together, which influence task persistence and, therefore, actual ability." [3]
According to Weiner, everyone has similar psychodynamics in the classroom and students tend to seek explanation for personal failure.
Weiner raised the question on what is considered sin and what is sickness. The example he gave surrounded obesity: obesity due to overeating is a sin; obesity because of a thyroid problem is a sickness. Bernard hoped that these type of scenarios would help him come up with a general theory of social conduct. [3]
In social psychology, fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality and underattribute them to the situation or context. Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.
Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy, and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.
Locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives. The concept was developed by Julian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since become an aspect of personality psychology. A person's "locus" is conceptualized as internal or external.
Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem. It was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas, according to whom self-handicaps are obstacles created, or claimed, by the individual in anticipation of failing performance.
Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception. It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.
Explanatory style is a psychological attribute that indicates how people explain to themselves why they experience a particular event, either positive or negative.
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.
Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. In psychology, "affect" refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term "affect" is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.
Richard Eugene Nisbett is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.
Stanley Schachter was an American social psychologist best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal and the explanation one attaches to this arousal. Schachter also studied and published many works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Schachter as the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Heider first introduced the concept of perceived 'locus of causality' to define the perception of one's environment. For instance, an experience may be perceived as being caused by factors outside the person's control (external) or it may be perceived as the person's own doing (internal). These initial perceptions are called attributions. Psychologists use these attributions to better understand an individual's motivation and competence. The theory is of particular interest to employers who use it to increase worker motivation, goal orientation, and productivity.
Magda Blondiau Arnold was a Canadian psychologist who was the first contemporary theorist to develop appraisal theory of emotions, which moved away from "feeling" theories and "behaviorist" theories toward the cognitive approach. She also created a new method of scoring the Thematic Apperception Test called Story Sequence Analysis.
Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be mastery or performance oriented, based on whether one's goal is to develop one's ability or to demonstrate one's ability, respectively. A mastery orientation is also sometimes referred to as a learning orientation.
Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, "as experienced, recalled, anticipated or imagined at first hand". Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. In contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. Therefore, the development of social emotions is tightly linked with the development of social cognition, the ability to imagine other people's mental states, which generally develops in adolescence. Studies have found that children as young as 2 to 3 years of age can express emotions resembling guilt and remorse. However, while five-year-old children are able to imagine situations in which basic emotions would be felt, the ability to describe situations in which social emotions might be experienced does not appear until seven years of age.
Praise as a form of social interaction expresses recognition, reassurance or admiration.
Jutta Heckhausen is Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine. She specializes in life-span developmental psychology, motivation, individual agency and social context. She expanded her education at the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, Stanford University and at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, University Bielefeld, Germany. At the Department of Psychological Science at University of California, Irvine, she teaches in the areas of life-span development and motivational psychology.
Attributions for poverty is a theory concerned with what people believe about the causes of poverty. These beliefs are defined in terms of attribution theory, which is a social psychological perspective on how people make causal explanations about events in the world. In forming attributions, people rely on the information that is available to them in the moment, and their heuristics, or mental shortcuts. When considering the causes of poverty, people form attributions using the same tools: the information they have and mental shortcuts that are based on their experiences. Consistent with the literature on heuristics, people often rely on shortcuts to make sense of the causes of their own behavior and that of others, which often results in biased attributions. This information leads to perceptions about the causes of poverty, and in turn, ideas about how to eradicate poverty.
Yaacov Trope is a social psychologist who studies cognitive, motivational, and social factors that enable perspective taking, and effects of emotions and desires on social judgment and decision making. He is a Professor of Psychology at New York University.