1) Attribution is the act of regarding an occurrence to be caused by internal or external factors. External factors are things like “social situations or physical environment” (Dobkin & Pace, 2006, p. 80) while internal factors constitute of “personality, characteristics and individual beliefs” (Dobkin & Pace, 2006, p. 80). There are times when we, as human beings, are unable to stop ourselves from interpreting our attributions in a biased manner towards ourselves or against our peers. According to Dobkin and Pace (2006), this confines us into “narrow ways of understanding and responding to others” (p. 82), which is bad for effective communication. This biasedness is otherwise known as attribution errors, of which there are four types – Fundamental…show more content… Self-serving bias is our tendency to attribute positive occurrences to internal factors, while attributing our negative situations to external factors. This can be seen from 1:05 – 1:33 of the video, where the Chinese student apologizes and explains to the Caucasian student that her mother was in the hospital. The Chinese student then thought to herself “See, I wasn’t being rude.”. In actual fact, the Chinese student was being rude. She should have excused herself to prevent the Caucasian from continuing the conversation, but she did not do that and instead went on to use her mother being in the hospital, an external factor, as an excuse to tell herself that she “wasn’t being…show more content… Glazing over is when the listener’s mind is drifting off while actually still listening to the speaker. This occurs when the mind processes faster than the speaker talking (Floyd, 2014, p. 139). In 1:07 – 1:14 of Video A, the Caucasian student asked the Chinese student “Did you see the sky totally orange yesterday?”, to which the Chinese student replied that she had seen it that morning. The Chinese girl was able to give almost a correct answer, which showed that she was indeed paying slightly more attention than the earlier conversation in 0:30 – 0:48. This means that the Chinese student was actually listening and taking in the question asked, but she could not pay full attention because her mind was still with the thought of her mother being in the hospital. Floyd (2014) states that in such instances, the listener can come across as “inattentive or dismissive” (p. 139) to the speaker, which is what the Caucasian student feels in the
