AP Psychology · Lesson 1 of 10 · Unit 4

Attribution theory, locus of control and person perception

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How we explain people’s actions and evaluate ourselves shapes everything from workplace dynamics to mental health. On the AP Psychology exam, these concepts appear constantly in Section I scenario questions and are useful psychological concepts to apply in the reasoning parts of Section II’s Evidence-Based Question (EBQ).

By the end you’ll be able to

Distinguish dispositional from situational attributions and explain optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles.
Explain the actor/observer bias, the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias and how they affect behavior and mental processes.
Explain how an internal or external locus of control applies to behavior and mental processes.
Explain how the mere exposure effect increases liking and how a self-fulfilling prophecy elicits behavior that confirms beliefs.

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Core ideas (continued)
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What the exam asks

Section I (Multiple Choice): You will read short vignettes about everyday behaviors (a student failing a test, a driver cutting someone off) and identify which attribution, bias, or comparison process is occurring. You may also interpret data tables showing cross-cultural differences in attribution or correlations between explanatory styles and health outcomes.
Section II (Free Response): In the EBQ, concepts like self-fulfilling prophecy, internal/external locus of control, and relative deprivation are prime tools for Parts B(ii) and C(ii), where you must apply psychological concepts not named in the sources to connect your evidence to your claim.

Core ideas

Attributions and explanatory styles

Attribution theory examines how we explain the causes of behavior—both our own and others’.

Dispositional (internal) attribution: Crediting a person’s enduring traits, personality, abilities, or attitudes (e.g., “Maya volunteered because she is generous”).
Situational (external) attribution: Crediting environmental factors, social pressure, or luck outside the person’s control (e.g., “Maya volunteered because her school requires service hours”).

Explanatory style is a person’s habitual way of explaining positive or negative life events across three dimensions: internal vs. external (who caused it?), stable vs. unstable (will it last?), and global vs. specific (does it affect everything or just this situation?).

Explanatory Style	Reaction to Negative Events (e.g., failing a math quiz)	Reaction to Positive Events (e.g., acing a math quiz)
Pessimistic	Internal, stable, global: “I’m terrible at school (internal), I’ll never get this (stable), and I’ll fail all my classes (global).”	External, unstable, specific: “The teacher made this one quiz easy.”
Optimistic	External, unstable, specific: “That single chapter was tricky (specific), and I didn’t sleep well last night (unstable/external).”	Internal, stable, global: “I’m smart and hardworking, so I do well in school.”

Attribution biases

Our explanations are systematically skewed by who we are judging and whether the outcome is good or bad:

Bias	Who is being judged?	How the bias works	Cultural variation
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)	Others	Overestimating dispositional factors and underestimating situational factors when watching someone else’s behavior.	Stronger in individualistic cultures; collectivistic cultures are more attuned to situational context.
Actor/observer bias	Self vs. Others	Explaining our own behavior using situational factors (we know our context), while explaining others’ identical behavior using dispositional factors.	Also less pronounced in collectivistic cultures.
Self-serving bias	Self (success vs. failure)	Taking dispositional credit for our successes (“I earned that A”) while blaming situational factors for our failures (“The exam was unfair”).	More common in individualistic cultures; self-effacing bias (crediting situation/others for success) is more common in East Asian collectivistic cultures.