Misattribution Research Paper

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Misattribution and Sexual Harassment
Misattribution is defined as mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source. “Thus, a man may greatly overestimate the sexual significance of a woman’s smile.” ( Levesque & others, 2006; Nelson & LeBoeuf, 2002). A woman’s smile or friendliness could contribute to a man feeling like she wants him. Is this the reason why eight times more women said they were sexually harassed than the three percent of men that said they had sexually harassed women? (Laumann & others, 1994) The large gap between the two is the result of both sides misattributing behavior.
There may be a lot more men that have sexually harassed a woman then the ones that admitted it. Not necessarily because they are lying but they could …show more content…
I can give a prime example for this. A woman got into a fight with another woman. They both were under the influence of drugs. The woman pulled a knife out and tried to cut the first woman. The woman being attacked took the knife and stabbed the other woman to death. As a result, in my hometown, she is seen as a murderer. She served 12 years in prison. Eight years after her release, her identical twin sister is found dead. She was stabbed to death and shoved into a closet in her apartment. The woman was thought to be the one who killed her sister by the entire town, even after the …show more content…
I will give an example relating to my own life. I had a teacher who was quirky beyond belief and disorganized. A lot of us students would give each other looks and talk about her when she wasn’t looking. For one, she didn’t seem to have a set lesson plan for the semester (which a lot of people assumed to be her first). She would ask us on the day an assignment was due if she had given us homework that we needed to turn in that day. Then, halfway through the semester, she realizes that she should have been using a different book. We therefore had bought 3 books for the class that we didn’t even use that much. She didn’t require that we buy the new book. Instead, she told us we could read the pages from it she had scanned and put on the school website. When I went to look at these pages, I found I had to print some out because she had scanned them upside down. I was irritated to say the least. I started complaining about her while her back was turned in class as well as to other friends outside of class even going so far as to call her names. A few classes later, we started a discussion on depression which she admitted to suffering from. She made the comment that while someone could tell you “Oh, just stop being depressed!” the person they are talking to simply cannot do so. She also, without giving too much information on the subject mentioned in passing that she and her mother were not
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