(a) Humans strive to assign causes to actions of self and others and fall into traps of biases and errors. Critically discuss…

(a) Attribution and its biases People assign causes to make the social world predictable. Heider's naive psychology treated them as intuitive scientists. Jones and Davis's correspondent inference theory says observers infer a disposition from freely chosen, intended, non-common effects. Kelley's covariation model says causes are judged from consensus, distinctiveness and consistency.

Actual attribution departs from these rational models:

• Fundamental attribution error: over-weighting dispositions and under-weighting situations when explaining others.
• Actor–observer bias: we explain our own actions by the situation and others' by traits.
• Self-serving bias: success is attributed internally and failure externally, to protect self-esteem.
• Related errors include the false-consensus effect and the just-world belief.

Critical evaluation: these biases are not universal or fixed. Miller (1984) found that Hindu Indian adults gave more situational and contextual explanations than Americans, reflecting socialisation in a collectivist culture. Gilbert showed that attribution is two-stage: automatic dispositional inference first, then effortful situational correction that fails under cognitive load. Discursive psychologists argue that attributions are social acts of justification and not private calculations. Even so, the heuristics are fast and mostly useful, but they distort judgement of others, as in stereotyping and blaming victims.

(b) Cognitive and motivational determinants of belief in ESP Belief persists despite repeated failure of replication in controlled studies.

Cognitive determinants:

• Availability and confirmation bias: vivid coincidences (a dream that comes true) are remembered and misses are forgotten.
• Illusory correlation and misjudging probability: people underestimate how often coincidences occur by chance.
• Misattribution of intuition and hindsight: feelings and guesses are reinterpreted as paranormal after the event.
• Dissonance reduction: failures are explained away by ad hoc reasons such as a sceptical atmosphere.
• Low analytic thinking and poor understanding of randomness are linked to greater belief.

Motivational determinants:

• Need for control and predictability in uncertain situations.
• Terror management: belief in non-physical existence eases fear of death.
• Self-esteem and a sense of being special or intuitive.
• Social and cultural support, such as family, community and media endorsement.

(c) Behaviourist versus nativist views of language development

• Behaviourist (Skinner, 1957): language is verbal behaviour learned through imitation, operant conditioning and selective reinforcement. Bandura added observational learning. Strength: explains the role of input and vocabulary learning. Weakness: it cannot explain generativity (novel sentences) or over-regularisation such as "goed" and "feets", and parents rarely correct grammar.
• Nativist (Chomsky, 1959): children are born with an innate language faculty (Language Acquisition Device, Universal Grammar). Evidence: the poverty of the stimulus, uniform stages across languages, and Lenneberg's critical period (Genie's failure to acquire full grammar after isolation). Weakness: it underplays social interaction, and the evidence for a specific UG is contested.

Comparison: the first stresses environment and learning, and the second stresses biology and maturation. Interactionist views (Piaget's cognitive readiness, Vygotsky and Bruner's social support) integrate both, treating language as a biological capacity that needs social input.