for example you lend money to someone whom you know to bad at paying back because you feel sorry for him, and you know you only do it because you are a sucker for sore causes. In a study by Storms 1973, he videotaped people having a discussion. Later on, he showed the participants the videotape either from their own perspective or from the other persons perspective. He found that people made more situational attributions when they viewed the tape from their own perspective (as usual), but when viewed from the other persons perspective, they made more dispositional attributions. Perhaps this knowledge could be used to train people to be better able to see their own behavior in the same way as other people do.Possible explanations for the actor-observer effect are that we have more information about our own behavior, and so we are less likely to use dispositional explanations when describing our own behavior. Nevertheless, even when we get to know other people better we are likely to use situational attributions to explain their behavior. (Although from now on, I hope I will.)In conclusion, these different theories all help us to understand human behavior a bit better, but none of these theories are a panacea to understanding all of human behavior. More research is required in order to develop more and more theories which might help us to understand it (human behavior) even better. ...
