Dave Cornell (PhD)

A dispositional attribution occurs when an individual’s behavior is attributed to factors internal to themselves. Examples of dispositional factors include one’s personality, talent, or perseverance. Those are all internal and enduring characteristics of the person. The opposite is situational attribution, which refers to attributing outcomes to situational or environmental factors rather than personal factors. Distributional […]

Situational attribution refers to when an individual’s behavior is attributed to factors in the environment. These factors may include the environment (see: environmental factors), other people’s behaviors, umpire bias, and so on. One of the first psychologists to study attributions was Fritz Heider in his seminal work in 1958, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Situational

Explicit memory is a type of long-term memory that deals with facts and experiences. It is juxtaposed to implicit memory, which happens without conscious effort. The names of famous people in history or science, or the dates they did something notable, are the kinds of information that we keep in explicit memory. This type of

Reciprocal determinism is a model of human behavior. The model states that there are three factors that influence how people act: person factors, environment factors, and behavior factors. The term “reciprocal” means that each factor affects the others, and vice versa. So, factor A effects factor B, and in return, factor B also affects factor

Self-esteem is a combination of the thoughts and feelings a person has about themselves. What they think about their personality and abilities, and whether those thoughts are positive or negative. Self-esteem is usually described as high or low, but there is a lot of room in between those two ends. A person that likes their